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.