Architecture & Solution Components
The core of the Uila virtual infrastructure architecture is a big data store and analytics engine that is designed from ground up to scale-out to accommodate large data center deployments with thousands of servers, to scale-in to record data in high resolution, maintain historical data while maintaining real time responsiveness. Built-in redundancy offers high availability, mitigates downtime, and reduces maintenance overhead.
The patent-pending analytics engine is the brain that correlates application to infrastructure performance metric by providing the smarts to pinpoint the infrastructure root cause behind application performance degradation. The trending reports generated from the historical data helps identify infrastructure hot spots, and maintains optimal application performance. The Uila Dashboard offers a simple and yet powerful way to view the results of the analytics engine and reveal the health of applications and the underlying infrastructure in compute, storage, physical and virtual networks.
Virtual Smart Tap (vST) is deployed in a distributed manner across the data center. The vST installs in the host in a smallfoot print and efficiently designed guest Virtual Machine or container where it promiscuously listens to all traffic from the virtual switch or Docker bridge that traverses the virtual networks (North-South and East-West). Using embedded Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology, the vST identifies unique applications and their attributes.
The vST measures application response time,network latency, and other network performance data in meta data form. No packet payload is stored, thus removing the risk of exposing sensitive data. The vST passes this Application & Network Metadata to the Virtual Information Controller (vIC) for further processing and correlating with the infrastructure metadata collected by the vIC.
Uila Virtual Information Controller (vIC)
Virtual Information Controller (vIC) is the integration conduit to the data center Virtualization Management System e.g. VMware vCenter and Docker Container Enterprise Edition. The vIC retrieves your infrastructure configuration as a template to build Uila monitoring domain and to streamline deployment.
The vIC collects network, storage and compute performance metrics that are maintained by vCenter, combines it with the application and network metadata from all deployed vSTs, and then securely transmits it to the Uila Management and Analytics System, either on-premise or in the cloud.