A SNMP-Based Virtual Machines Management Interface

This paper presents Virtual-Machines-MIB, a MIB (Management Information Base) directed to virtual machines management through SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). Virtual-Machines-MIB aims to define a standard interface of virtual machines management, allowing the management of several virtual machines monitors, like Xen, KVM and VMWare, with a common SNMP management tool. Different from previous virtual machines management MIBs, which allows the manager to perform only monitoring operations, Virtual-Machines-MIB allows to perform control operations, like create, delete, restart, turn on, pause and shut down virtual machines. It is also possible to use the proposed solution to change a virtual machine´s name, amount of RAM, virtual CPU´s and virtual storage drives. Practical results are presented using ordinary SNMP management tools performing KVM and Xen management. To do this, SNMP agents which support Virtual-Machines-MIB were developed and installed on KVM and Xen hosts. These SNMP agents are based on NET-SNMP public domain´s agent, that was extended to support Virtual-Machines-MIB using libvirt API.