Tag: Free Tools

Dec 01 2012

New free tool – HP Virtualization Performance Viewer

This new free tool caught my eye when it was mentioned on an internal email chain, it’s called the HP Virtualization Performance Viewer (vPV). It’s a lightweight tool that provides real-time performance analysis reporting for to help diagnose and triage performance problems. It’s a Linux based utility and can be installed natively on any VM/PC running Linux or it can be deployed as a virtual appliance. It supports both VMware vSphere & Microsoft Hyper-V environments and has the following features:

  • Quick time to value
  • Intuitive at-a-glance dashboards
  • Triage virtualization performance issues in real-time
  • Foresee capacity issues and identify under / over utilized systems
  • Operational and status report for performance, up-time and distribution analysis

The free version of vPV has some limitations, to achieve the full functionality you need to upgrade to the Enterprise version but the free version should be good enough for smaller environments.

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It’s simple and easy to download the tool, just head over to the HP website, enter some basic information and you get the download page where you can choose the files that you want to download based on your install preference.

hpv11Downloading the OVA file to install the virtual appliance is the easiest way to go, once you download it, you simply deploy it using the Deploy OVF Template option in the vSphere Client and it will install as a new VM. Once deployed and powered on you can log in to the VM’s OS using the username root and password vperf*viewer if you need to manually configure an IP address. Otherwise you can connect to the VM and start using vPV using the URL: http://<servername>:8081/PV OR https://<servername>:8444/PV which will bring up the user interface so you can get started. I haven’t tried it out yet as it’s still downloading but here’s some screenshots from the vPV webpage:

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I’ll do a more detailed review once I have it up and running but it looks like a pretty handy little tool. For more great free tools be sure and check out my huge free tool gallery that contains links to 100+ free tools for VMware environments.

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Apr 28 2011

New free tools section is open

This one is long overdue, I had a section created on my website a year ago that correlated to a link in my book, Maximum vSphere that listed all the many free tools that would be useful to a VMware administrator. But I had forgotten about it until recently so I scoured the internet for free tools and put together a big list of them. The table currently has over 80 tools and is sortable by category, name and vendor to help you go through them. If there is anything missing be sure and let me know.

Click here to access the Free Tools section of vSphere-land.com

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Jun 27 2008

Top 10 Free Tools that must be in every VMware Administrators toolkit

  1. Putty and SSH Plug-in – SSH clients for remotely connecting to the ESX service console. Putty runs as a standalone application and the SSH Plug-in is a VI client plug-in that integrates an SSH console directly into the client.
  2. WinSCP and Veeam FastSCP – SCP clients for browsing ESX server file systems and transferring files to/from ESX hosts.
  3. VI3 SnapHunter and SnapAlert – Utilities that can report all running snapshots on ESX hosts including name, size and date. Can also automatically email reports and optionally commit snapshots.
  4. VI Scripted Backup Utility – A backup utility that is run from the Service Console that provides VMDK level backups of any VM on storage accessible by the host. The script can be targeted at any ESX server or VC server, and if pointed at a VC server is DRS aware.
  5. MCS StorageView – A utility that displays all the logical partitions, operating system, capacity, free space and percent free of all virtual machines on ESX 3.x or Virtual Center 2.x. It can also display how many gigabytes you can save by decreasing the logical partition to a size the VM really needs.
  6. Storage VMotion Plug-in – A VI client plug-in that extends the client’s functionality by providing an integrated, graphical tool that can be used to invoke storage VMotion (SVMotion) operations.
  7. VMotion Info – A program that will collect Vendor, Model, CPU Types and the CPU feature bits from all hosts to check for vMotion compatibility.
  8. VMCdConnected – Scans all Virtual Machines and shows if they have a CD connected to it. After scanning the VM’s you can disconnect all the CD’s with a click of a button.
  9. VMware Converter – Performs hot and cold conversions of physical and virtual servers to virtual machines. Also converts image formats.
  10. Tripwire ConfigCheck – Quickly assesses the security of VMware ESX 3.5 hypervisor configurations compared to the VI3 Security Hardening guidelines. Ensures that ESX environments are properly configured and provides the necessary steps towards full remediation when they are not.
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