If we look at the VMTN community today there are a whole lot of people sharing powershell scripts, perl and even .net programs. Back in the days of ESX 2.x there wasn’t such a huge community, but there was one tool that everyone knew about and probably everyone tested and used at one point, vmktree!
Lars Trøen is man behind vmktree and he just released 0.3.0. For those of you who don’t know what vmktree is:
vmktree is a free web tool that shows you the graphs of resource usage of VMware ESX Server, VMware Server (on Linux), GSX Server (on Linux) and a few other data center devices (ilo/ilo2/rsa2/ds4000).
On VMware Server (and GSX) and ESX 3.x vmktree provides it’s own agent that collects system statistics and does not depend on vmkusage like it does on ESX 2.x. On ESX 3.x there is no agent installed on the ESX server itself as all values are polled from the machine vmktree is installed on.
vmktree is compatible with ESX and ESXi and needs to be installed outside of the Service Console, in contrary to previous versions. Lars created a great howto, which includes a CentOS jeos VM. I hope Lars can find some extra time and get that live esxtop back in again!
It would be very interesting to this as a completed OVF importable Virtual Appliance. Although the instructions (HowTo) are very complete, being able to just import from the VI client into the environment and hit a webpage for configuration would be slick and a no-brainer for everyone. Lars’ hard work produces some very nice graphs for Virtual Administrators.
Carlo.
That would be nice indeed. Or even better have this as a standard package within VIMA!