SNMP-based monitoring of heterogeneous virtual infrastructure in clouds

With the rapid growth of cloud computing, a great number of servers are deployed in a data center to provide virtual machines to a variety of users. Several virtualization techniques have been developed in the recent years. Platforms for virtual machines, e.g. VMware, Xen, KVM, and VirtualBox, may adopt different virtualization techniques for particular purposes. This leads to a heterogeneous virtual infrastructure in clouds. For effective management of a heterogeneous virtual infrastructure, there is a demand for a standardized interface for the monitoring of a lot of virtual machines in the data center. This paper will propose the use of SNMP in VM monitoring. The proposed monitoring scheme makes use of two standard MIBs, MIB-II and Host Resources MIB, to provide essential information for VM configuration and performance monitoring. In addition, an enterprise MIB is developed on AgentX to provide detailed VM instance information. A web-based management system is also implemented to demonstrate the superiority of SNMP in monitoring heterogeneous virtual machines.