Most companies I visit have spend a lot of money on hardware and software for their primary process.  Operating System software isn’t a problem most of the time, just as the application software.

Management and monitoring software on the other hand is a totally different story. A lot of IT departments have trouble to get their business case positive for management tools. Companies like Veeam and VKernel offer a couple of free tools  for VMware you can install on your desktop.

These tools give you an insight in the health of your environment. When you found out that your environment is less than optimal configured, for example the memory consumption of certain servers, you can fix it with VKernel Optimizer (which costs money, but it  has a 30 day trial). The tools that are freely available from VKernel  are:

Storage View

StorageVIEW provides nearly instant analysis of VM infrastructure path latency, including:

  • Top five host/datastore paths with the highest latency
  • Listing of the associated VMs for these high latency paths
  • Throughput information for each VM in the high latency path
  • Aggregated results for the remaining datastore/host pairs
  • Support for NFS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel

ApplicationVIEW

 

Virtual machine monitoring for your five most important VMs. See detailed data on how these applications are running in your virtual environment:

  • Are VMs having performance problems?
  • Which resources are causing potential performance problems?
  • 30-day history to spot transient issues.
When you find performance problems and wasted resources in your VMs, ApplicationVIEW will let you know what the problem is and provide links to Optimizer and Capacity Manager for deeper performance analysis, root cause analysis, capacity planning and resolution. Watch the ApplicationVIEW overview video.

Current and Historical VM Reporting

ApplicationVIEW provides current and 30 day historical ESX performance monitoring to potential CPU, memory, disk and storage I/O bottlenecks for your top five application VMs. As priorities change, you can change to a different application VM and start collecting data immediately.

CapacityVIEW

  • Provides diagnostics and alerts for storage and server performance issues
  • Analyzes CPU, memory and storage data
  • Shows virtual machine I/O Latency
  • Exposes under-provisioned and over-provisioned memory, CPU, storage
  • Gives key deployment statistics:
    • # of VMs, hosts, data stores, clusters, etc.
    • Total available CPU, memory and storage
    • Resources allocated as a % of available capacity

Capacity Modeler

Capacity Modeler lets you run predictive “what if” scenarios for environment changes after importing your existing VMware environment and incorporating accurate specifications from a list of 428 IBM, Dell and HP server models. Installed as a virtual appliance, Capacity Modeler provides value within 20 minutes from download by:

  • Quickly modeling and validating VM deployment, as well as host, cluster, and resource pool allocation scenarios
  • Simulating the effects of adding more virtual machines(VMs)
  • Assessing the effects of suspending hosts in maintenance mode
  • Testing how changing server hardware configurations will affect an environment
  • Providing visibility into how implementing VMotion will affect capacity and performance
  • Avoiding capacity-related performance issues when making a data center change