Know your gear
Virtual Cascade Shark is a software version of Cascade Shark that has been virtualized to run on VMware ESXi environments. It taps into the virtual switch in an ESX hypervisor to monitor the performance of all inter-VM traffic. Virtual Cascade Shark software is unique in that it can simultaneously send summarized data to the Cascade Profiler console for analysis and reporting and continuously capture packets and capture, index, and store full packet data on the local server or on a storage area network (SAN) for back-in-time analysis with Cascade Pilot software. Virtual Cascade Shark software can also be used to "build your own" packet capture appliance. Leverage any virtualized server running VMware ESXi - such as an existing virtualized branch office server or a Cisco SRE blade on a Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR G2) - to gain cost-effective remote visibility. Monitor branch LAN traffic by spanning from the switch to the physical NIC on the server in addition to monitoring intra-server (VM-toVM) traffic.