Monitoring Virtualized Environments

Bridging the Virtual Gap

Virtualization extends the borders of the corporate network beyond the enterprise, creating new requirements for testing, assessment, optimization and security. But accessing the data needed for monitoring and debugging presents network engineers and managers with unique challenges.

While existing network monitoring tools may not extend to virtual environments, emerging solutions delivering integrated views of virtual and physical environments often prove cost-prohibitive. In the meantime, the lack of a holistic view makes debugging problems difficult.

Analytical tools requiring virtual data include:

• Application Performance Monitors
• VoIP Monitors
• Intrusion Detection Systems
• Protocol Analyzers
• Forensic Recorders

White paper download: The Virtual Blind Spot (725.55 KB)

Ixia Anue NTO: Visibility Into Physical and Virtual Environments

Ixia's network visibility solutions filter the data sent for analysis, reducing the load on monitoring tools while providing each tool with the exact data it needs from both physical and VMware environments. The Ixia Anue Net Tool Optimizer® (NTO) suite of network monitoring switches leverages recent improvements in VMware to increase network monitoring, including the ability to send a copy of encrypted virtual traffic to the physical world and decrypt the traffic for analysis. With this new feature, monitoring tools gain visibility into both the physical and virtual network traffic.

IT professionals previously limited by a lack of visibility into VMware environments can now monitor virtual network traffic using NTO's vSphere Distributed Switch port mirroring capability. Net Tool Optimizer solutions aggregate, filter, and de-duplicate data, and traffic can be load-balanced across multiple tools to extend existing 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps monitoring tools to higher-speed 10 Gbps and 40Gbps networks.

Download the Virtualization Solutions Brief (1.26 MB)

Ixia's products include:

5293 Anue Net Tool Optimizer - Carrier grade, NEBS-compliant 40GE network monitoring switch featuring high density availability. Up to 16 40GE ports or 64 10GE ports. 5288 Anue Net Tool Optimizer - High-density solution for large, complex data centers providing up to 64 10G ports and scaling to monitor 1G, 10G, and 40G links. 5273 Anue Net Tool Optimizer - Carrier class, NEBS-compliant solution for high-availability service provider networks. 5236 Anue Net Tool Optimizer - Enterprise class, high-performance solution delivering 10G visibility for network monitoring tools in all parts of a fiber network. Up to 24 SFP/SFP+ Ethernet ports. 5204 Anue Net Tool Optimizer - Cost-effective, entry-level solution for smaller enterprises: ideal for copper networks, network access layers, providing large numbers of 1G monitoring tools with access to network traffic.