Tools - 31

Vkernel's free “Google-like” SearchMyVM tool now includes the #1 feature you asked for -- the ability to export searches to CSV format reports that you can print, email, and use to quickly document your infrastructure. Find things fast in your VMware ESX environment download SearchMyVM and give it a try. What do you have to lose?  It’s free and you’ll quickly see its value.

Community Website for Benchmarking Virtual Machine Resource Allocations CompareMyVM.com, a free website tool that allows visitors to exchange and compare VMware ESX Server virtual machine (VM) resource allocations with that of the community at large. If you’re unsure about how much resource capacity (CPU, memory, and storage) to allocate to an Exchange VM supporting 1000 users as an example, you can use CompareMyVM to find detailed information on similar VM profiles submitted by the user community. When you visit CompareMyVM, you can take the following actions on the site:

• Submit – Anonymously contribute by submitting VM profiles via the ‘Snapshot My VMs’ Java applet or manually loading the info.

• Browse – Peruse the community submissions to learn how other are allocating resources and how to better provision specific application VMs.

• Edit – Make changes to your VM profile submissions as you change resource allocations.

• Vote – Help rank user submitted VM profiles based on proper resource allocations

The download seemed to take forever and after the first 30 MB it stalled. It took more than two hours to receive the full 100 MB. Finally I installed Veeam Monitor with the local SQL2005 Express database. I tried to monitor a vSphere server but after the initial connection, it greyed out. Adding an ESX 3.5U3 server succeeded. I could even add my VC server. The tool looks great and has a feature I didn’t see before. Veeam implemented the remote console ActiveX object. I tried out some features like generating a report and alarm modelling. Everything works great, good job Veeam.

Veeam Monitor 3.0.2 features a new functionality mode which is automatically enabled when you install the product without a license, of if your license expires. Veeam Monitor Free Edition has the following limitations compared to the full version.

- Performance history lookup is limited to 24
- Number of alarms is limited to 10
- Performance and trend reporting is disabled
- Alarm modelling is disabled

Veeam is pleased to announce a new free version of Veeam Monitor. The Veeam Monitor Free Edition is an easy-to-use VMware monitoring solution designed to meet the day-to-day needs of VMware administrators who need real-time performance monitoring and alerting. Built from the ground up specifically for the virtual world, Veeam Monitor provides a bird’s-eye view of key performance metrics across your virtual ESXi infrastructure.

With Veeam Monitor, you can view real-time resource usage data for any virtual infrastructure object or collection of objects, as well as known infrastructure events, all on a single screen. This allows you to finally see your virtual infrastructure as a unified entity, not just a collection of isolated hosts and guests.

After last night’s launch, I’ve downloaded and imported the new version of PowerGUI’s VMware Infrastructure Management PowerPack.  Upgrading and importing of the PowerPack goes straight forward. Many elements in the three are completely restructured, it really rocks and it’s also vSphere compatible. Here’s a screenshot of my vSphere server running on Workstation 6.5.1 managed by PowerGUI. :-)

Rich Brambley over at VM/ETC did some great research, he found out what Veeam’s Christmas holiday gift will be. It’s Veeam’s Monitor 3.0, a tool for performance monitoring, capacity planning and troubleshooting for your entire VMware Infrastructure Veeam Monitor is an easy to deploy, framework-independent VMware monitoring solution that was created expressly to help you better manage the health and performance of your VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) environment. Veeam Monitor provides support for troubleshooting and issue resolution, as well as trend reporting and capacity planning - equipping you to proactively manage ESX / ESXi infrastructure system health and performance today and over the long term.

Veeam will be unveiling a new free tool is on Dec. 22 – everyone who registers will automatically receive a download link that day via e-mail. This holiday gift is marked “do not open until Dec. 22.”

veeam @rbrambley Veeam does not comment on speculation or rumorsvr, dec 19 15:16:54 from digsby in reply to rbrambley rbrambley @veeam no comment is all I needed to hear ... LOL!vr, dec 19 15:18:18 from TweetDeck in reply to veeam

Vkernel just released our Capacity Analyzer 3.0.  In addition to showing you bottlenecks in hosts, clusters, and resource pools, they can now show you bottlenecks in VMs -- both inside and outside of VMs. Even small environments have hundreds of VMs, causing ongoing monitoring and finding problems in each individual VM to be very time consuming. Capacity Analyzer 3.0 sorts through them to show you the most problematic VMs first, so you can quickly see which VMs are having current performance problems. With predictive analytics, they also identify which VMs will have performance problems and when, so that you can take necessary proactive measures.

Veeam will be unveiling a new free tool is on Dec. 22 – everyone who registers will automatically receive a download link that day via e-mail.  This holiday gift is marked “do not open until Dec. 22.”

Certified Smart Plug-in for VMware for HP Software Operations Manager. An agentless way to bring VMware monitoring into your enterprise management console  Leverage your investment in HP Software Operations Manager to confidently give operations personnel the ability to assume routine VMware infrastructure monitoring. Free up VMware professionals to focus on troubleshooting, capacity planning and other specialized tasks.

The innovative nworks Collector does not require agent software on ESX hosts, which eliminates any risk of agent software impacting ESX availability. Because the nworks SPI uses the VMware API, ESXi is fully supported.

Version 4.0 includes new features such as CIM SMASH hardware sensor status and alerts, graphical representations of data stores, flexible collection intervals, VirtualCenter 2.5 performance counters, and more!

The nworks SPI provides access to 300 VMware-specific metrics – data like CPU, memory, disk and network utilization by host and guest. It also provides access to VMware-specific health and performance metrics like CPU % Ready and Balloon Memory, and can provide composite information around VMware clusters and resource pools. The SPI also includes the event stream from VirtualCenter, VMware topology and configuration information and a dynamic service map of your virtual environment.

Click here to view a short presentation and demo of the nworks Smart Plug-in for VMware for HP Software Operations Manager (OVO)

Last week I delivered a VMware Deploy Secure and Analyze  course at the Global Knowledge training facilities in Nieuwegein ( 4.8 - 4.8 ) :-). At the end of the week I rolled out Replicatetech’s RDA version 1.1. This new version of the Datacenter Analyzer includes over 20 new features and enhancements, including:

• Easy wizard based setup - get up and running even faster!
• Larger scale support - RDA now supports much larger deployments.
• Highly detailed diagnostic analysis, helping you find and fix problems more quickly.
• Full support for ESXi

The wizard is a real improvement, just walk through the steps and you’re up and running before you know it. I analyzed 6 ESX 3.5 servers managed by one vCenter server. While the students were checking their environment, I took the opportunity to make some screenshot’s. Just click the picture to enlarge.