I was just testing Replicate Datacenter Analyzer(RDA) 1.2 at a customer site. Well “testing” might not be the correct word in this case. RDA 1.2 discovered several things which are impossible to discover manually when you’ve got 5+ hosts. In this case there were over 50 hosts and RDA exposed the following:
- inconsistent portgroup names
- inconsistent portgroup provisioning on hosts
- multiple VM’s with diskfiles on more than one datastore
- multiple VMr’s with more than one connected NIC
RDA can do a lot more of course, so I suggest you head over to their website and download the demo and see if your VI3 environment is healthy or not. For those that already tested the previous release, 1.2 offers the following new capabilities:
New IP Knowledge Module – including the ability to detect and resolve configuration issues across a broader range of network issues. RDA can now identify routing and subnet misconfiguration and can determine if a guest VM network stack is operating correctly, as well as check for duplicate IP address usage in a common subnet.
Expanded drill down diagnostics – providing data to explain issues and guide IT towards a quick resolution – going beyond the basic identification of errors to save IT time and money.
Advanced item level notification – offering email notifications which now include full details on the exact changes that RDA has detected. The detailed notifications provide IT administrators with the latest information, delivered directly to their inbox.
Broader platform support – including support for VMware ESXi.
Increased scalability – offering significant performance improvements, including enhanced support for large scale datacenters of 100+ hosts.
pironet says
Hi Duncan, does that tool advice you as well?
Does it contain a sort of best pratice KB ?
Thx,
D.
Duncan Epping says
No, there’s no best practice DB behind this tool. It just notifies you of possible issues.
justme says
Hi Duncan,
Could you let me know why the following is ‘bad’ to have?
# multiple VM’s with diskfiles on more than one datastore
# multiple VM’s with more than one connected NIC
I really don’t see what having disks on multiable datastores or having more than one network is a bad thing
Thanks
Duncan Epping says
It’s not a bad thing if you intended to do this. But if you setup a bridge between two networks which was never the intention…
and if you move your vmdk’s to a different datastore but leave you VMX behind on the old one, or leave a disk behind this will make troubleshooting much tougher. Especially if you’ve got over 500 VM’s and no registration of these special cases.
Both aren’t a bad thing to have usually, but in this case it was unintentionally.