Health Check tools I use

A few days ago Scott Lowe asked me which tools I use to deliver a health check engagement. A health check is a standard VMware PSO engagement, a VMware Consultant will be on site to check the status of your environment and will draw up a report.

I personally use the following tools:

Health Check script by A.Mikkelsen → for a quick overview of the current situation and setup, small files and easy to carry around, runs from the Service Console.
VMware Health Analyzer Appliance → A linux appliance that can connect to your VC/ESX and analyze log files. At this point in time it’s only available for VMware Employees or Partners with access to Partner Central.
Powershell: Report into MS Word → Alan Renouf created this great reporting powershell scripts. It dumps info into a word document. (And i’ve heard he’s also working on a Visio export)
Powershell: Health Check Script → Create an html report with datastore, cpu, memory and snapshot info… and more.
RVTools → Gives a quick overview of current VM setup like snapshots, memory, cpu etc.
Common sense → I hardly encounter really huge problems, mainly decreased availability cause of choices made during implementation / design phase without following VMware’s guidelines. Use common sense is the best advise in this case and read the best practice documents and VMware’s collection of pdf’s!
And when there are some disturbing errors in one of the various log files you have the option to run it through one of the many toolkits we internally have.

I’m not using the following tools actively during engagements because of licensing but they can be very usefull in your enviroment:

Replicate Datacenter Analyzer → Analyze your VI3 environment, I wrote an article a few weeks ago on RDA, click here
Veeam Monitor → Monitor your VI3 environment including performance graphs etc.
Veeam Reporter → A reporting tool, which will come in handy when documenting environments and comparing the current config to an old config.
Vizioncore vFoglight → Might come in handy when doing analyses of trends and pinpointing resource contention.
Tripwire Configcheck → Analyze the security of your VMware ESX environment. Check my blog post on Configcheck here.

Koen says:

Friday, December 19, 2008 at 09:11

Hi,

Can you point me to where I can find this VMware Health Analyzer Virtual Appliance ?

Thanks in advance,

Koen

Duncan Epping says:

Friday, December 19, 2008 at 13:10

Koen,

If you’re a VMware Partner you should have access to Partner Central, you can search the site for “health analyzer” and should be able to download it.

Dave Convery says:

Friday, December 19, 2008 at 16:23

Duncan –
You didn’t mention this, but I am sure you do it….
Capture a support file export. If you untar the support zrchives from each ESX server, the .etc folder gives you some nice outputs from things like vdf and esxcfg-hbadevs -l. It also includes logs and vmx files from all registered VMs.

I make sure I capture these while I am running the HealthAnalyzer. I never even thought of using any of the tools that you mention, but it may be nice. I am going to try them on my next HC assignment.

Thanks again!
Dave

Duncan says:

Friday, December 19, 2008 at 16:53

You are absolutely right Dave. That’s was actually the last bullet point, run it through the toolkit. Should have added the vmsupport dump indeed.

Tom Halle says:

Monday, January 5, 2009 at 21:10

Duncan – a bit of a plug here – to add a security dimension to your health check engagements, take a look at the free ConfigCheck tool for ESX 3.0 and 3.5 hosts – http://www.tripwire.com/configcheck – does a very rapid scan of an ESX host’s security-related settings, comes back with a pass/fail for every setting based on VMware’s Infrastructure Security Hardening Guide, and provides step-by-step remediation guidance to bring each setting back into compliance with VMware’s security recommendations. Very fast, very powerful, very free…

Anton Gostev says:

Monday, January 12, 2009 at 13:25

“I’m not using the following tools actively during engagements because of licensing…”

Actually, Veeam Monitor has a fully functional free version as well.

Thanks!

A. Mikkelsen says:

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 at 10:28

Just so you all know, a new version of the ESX Health Scripts, has been released today.

And we are looking for new developers.

A. Mikkelsen

dmann says:

Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 20:41

thanks for the list – great info.

I’ve been hunting for any script to collect disk performance information – ESX host level would be good but would prefer VM level. I’ve not found anything – any suggestions? Closest I found was perf.pl on the communities site – but the disk attributes seem to have broken in an update as the script is pretty dated.

BTW – thanks for blogging – love your site.

-don

Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 21:02

Actually – I found an update to the script that does pull disk usage at the ESX host level:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-1010;jsessionid=3402EFC804BCC04140D8C675AD3CCFB4

Not quite exactly what I was looking for – but might be a nice addition to your list of tools to grab a bit of performance information at both ESX host and VM level. Ran in a few seconds in some of my environments.