I T U D A » Tool

VMware – vCenter Database Pre-Upgrade Checker

ldhoore — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 09:43:13 +0000

Before you upgrade vCenter Server, you can run the VMware vCenter Database Pre-Upgrade Checker on your current vCenter Server database to reveal problems that could prevent the upgrade or affect the performance of your database after the upgrade.

For more information see KB article 2004286

VMware – Fully automated ESXi installation

ldhoore — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 20:29:56 +0000

Tom Arentsen wrote some nice step-by-step articles about the PXE manager for vCenter fling

VMware – Free compliance checker for vSphere

ldhoore — Mon, 16 May 2011 09:35:52 +0000

Check the compliance of your IT infrastructure against specific standards and best practices that are applicable for the environment. The Compliance Checker is a free, downloadable, fully-functional product for checking compliance of your environment to help you ensure that it remains secure and compliant.

Download here

Dropbox

ldhoore — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 08:55:30 +0000

Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by Dropbox, Inc. which uses cloud computing to enable users to store and share files and folders with others across the Internet using file synchronization. There are both free (2GB) and paid services, each with varying options; the service is cross-platform, with client programs available for several different operating systems as well as a Web-based client.

To get a free dropbox account (and help me to get more free space) click here

There is also an iphone application available.

VMware – Alive VM

ldhoore — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 11:44:12 +0000

As a VMware administrator, you spend up to 80% of your time isolating performance issues in your VMware environment. Diagnosing performance problems in VMware virtual infrastructures should take up far less of your valuable time.

AliveVM is a revolution in real-time VMware performance management, providing sophisticated learning-based analytics and stunning visualizations to reduce the time you spend hunting for the sources of performance problems.

AliveVM abstracts the complexity of your virtual environment to three key measures of performance

Health
Workload usage
Capacity risk

and presents them in hierarchical views that allow you to visually identify problems with virtual elements (e.g., Virtual Machines, ESX Servers, Clusters, etc.) instantly.

Once a virtual element problem is identified, a single click takes you to one screen that shows exactly what the problem is. Whether your environment spans 10 or 10,000 VMs, AliveVM will vastly simplify your performance management and virtual infrastructure optimization.

More info can be found on http://www.alivevm.com

A small introduction video can be found at http://www.alivevm.com/video/video.html

At this moment VMware has a promotion on Alive VM, See http://www.vmware.com/landing_pages/vsphere-promotion/

VMware – Free tools created by VMware

ldhoore — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 06:01:47 +0000

Free tools brought to you by VMware

VMark – Get an accurate measurement of application performance in virtualized environments with VMmark, the industry’s first virtualization benchmark for x86-based computers

vCenter Converter – of course we all know this appliance for easy P2V migrations

vSphere Management Assistant – allows administrators and developers to run scripts and agents to manage ESX/ESXi and vCenter Server systems.

PowerCLI – a powerful command line tool that lets you automate all aspects of vSphere management, including network, storage, VM, guest OS and more.

VMware Support Toolbar – have a direct way for all the necessary links, downloads, RSS feed news for all things from VMware. Compatible w/ Firefox, IE, and Safari

VMware SiteSurvey – Produces a report showing hardware compatibility and software configuration compatibility with advanced VMware features such as Fault Tolerance.

CPU Identification Utility – Displays CPU features for VMotion compatibility, EVC and indicates 64-bit VMware support.

VMware Studio – an integrated development tool that packages software applications into virtual appliances and vApps that are ready to run and optimized for VMware product platforms and the cloud.

VMware vCenter Update Manager 4.1 Sizing Estimator – get the right answer to your question whether to install the VMware vCenter Update Manager database on the same DB as vCenter DB or not. And also if yes or not to install VUM at the same host as the vCenter Server host

VMware – Support Toolbar

ldhoore — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:11:32 +0000

The VMware Support Toolbar gives you instant access to documentation, patches, live peer to peer chat and more.

It can be downloaded at http://vmwaresupport.toolbar.fm/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W875WccJ_E

VMware – vscsiStats

ldhoore — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:30:27 +0000

vscsiStats can be used to perform storage performance analyses. vscsiStats collects and reports counters on storage activity. Its data is collected at the virtual SCSI device level in the kernel. This means that results are reported per VMDK (or RDM) irrespective of the underlying storage protocol.

How to start it up

Open a putty session to your ESX server

Get help on vscsiStats: /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vscsiStats -h

Start collecting statistics (collection stops after 30 minutes): /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vscsiStats -s -w <worldgroupID>

To find the worldgroupID of the Virtual Machine you want to monitor: /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vscsiStats -l

Display counters: /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vscsiStats -p -c

histotypes can be one of the following: all, ioLength, seekDistance, outstandingIOs, latency, interarrival

the option -c will use a comma as delimiter

VMware – esxtop

ldhoore — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 13:39:13 +0000

A very good article about ESXTOP can be found at http://www.yellow-bricks.com/esxtop/

Reference card: http://www.vreference.com/public/vReference-esxtop1.2.pdf

Read also the VMware article http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9279

VKernel: Product Offering

ldhoore — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 03:32:46 +0000

VKernel’s award winning Capacity Management products help system administrators reduce the costs of virtualization and ensure application performance. VKernel’s suite of Capacity Optimization products reduce the cost of virtualization by optimizing server and storage resource utilization. The Performance Optimization products ensure application performance by identifying and resolving capacity bottlenecks. The Cost Visibility products provide application and business level visibility to determine infrastructure usage and allocate costs.

Capacity Optimization

Reclaim under-utilized server and storage resources to maximize capacity utilization and minimize costs.

Optimization Pack – $299/socket
Easily reclaim under-utilized and over allocated server and storage resources to maximize capacity utilization. Reduce virtualization infrastructure costs by up to 30%!

Capacity View – FREE
This powerful, FREE tool installs on your Windows desktop in minutes to provide quick diagnostics and alerting to the storage and server capacity and performance issues in your VMware infrastructure.

VM Stats – FREE
This powerful, FREE tool provides a quick summary of your over allocated and under utilized VMware server and storage resources.

Performance Optimization

Identify and resolve capacity bottlenecks and reallocate infrastructure resources to optimize performance.

Capacity Analyzer – $299/socket
Quickly identify and prevent virtualization performance problems across server and storage in VMware and Hyper-V environments. Increase performance of virtualized applications.

Capacity Modeler – FREE
This powerful, FREE tool allows you to easily assess the performance impact of capacity changes to your existing virtualized environment. Make changes with confidence.

Cost Visibility

Gain business level visibility into virtual infrastructure usage and cost by application and department.

Chargeback – $299/socket
Chargeback is a powerful, easy to use and affordable product that enables IT managers to accurately map VMware virtualization costs against applications and users. It provides business level visibility and cost reporting, by application or business group and by actual resource consumption or allocation.

SearchMyVM – FREE
“Google-like” search tools helps you quickly find information about VMs, hosts, clusters, resource pools, and more.

SnapshotMyVM – FREE
This powerful, FREE tool documents VM configurations in VMware ESX environments.