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.