About a week ago Eric Sloof wrote about Datacenter Analyzer(RDA) by a company called Replicate Technologies. I think his blog title is a great caption of the product “RDA Rocks”. It does indeed.
The one thing that really stands out is the simplicity of implementing the product, their website claims 30 minutes and that’s exactly what it took me. (Could have been faster if I had a decent testing kit) You just download the two virtual appliances and import them into your environment. One appliance(the probe) needs to be converted to a template and the other one just needs to be started up.
If you’ve got DHCP running your RDA Controller will be available via HTTP. Just type in the IP and you’re good to go. You still need to install “probe vm’s” for RDA to be able to gather and analyse all the date. The probes can be considered as tiny helper vm’s. They only consume 64MB of memory and 640MB of diskspace, and installing them is just a matter of “next, next, finish”.
Like I said, simplicity seems to be the main theme around RDA 1.0. After the probe vm’s have been installed it’s just a matter of clicking “update analysis”, or you could do this automatically on a regular interval, and after a few minutes of gathering and analyzing data you can already view the reports.
The first thing that pops up is the dashboard, which gives an overview of “possible” problems:
Next two screenshots are more detailed views of two specific sections to give you an idea what RDA is capable of:
I think that this 1.0 version looks really promising for the future. Still I would love to see more detailed information added. I just wrote down a couple of them:
- Time Sync, compare ESX hosts and reveal if all VM’s are syncing or not
- VirtualMachine memory, balooning / swapping / limits set lower than assigned memory
- Storage counters for free disk space etc
- Queues, disk and cpu
- ESX Service Console swapping
- ESX Advanced Settings set (compare with other hosts and display difference)
- Export findings to csv, pdf, excel etc…
Still RDA is a tool you should look into, you can download a free trial for RDA here. Just check it out.
Duncan,
Thanks so much for the right up, AND the feedback!
Our product roadmap is based on customer feedback. Many of these are on our backlog already, with some scheduled for delivery in the next few weeks.
I’m excited you found the product easy – managing virtualized datacenter is hard, so the easier we can make it for our users, the happier we are!
How expensive is it?? It seems that pretty much most 3rd-party tools are priced for the Fortune 500 that can afford thousands of dollars for this.
SMBs using VMware also deserve quality monitoring tools that do not cost many thousands of dollars just to monitor 2-5 hosts, a totally easier situation than the Fortune 500 companies have.
Thank you, Tom