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By admin, August 27, 2011 9:41 pm

Today is another one of my lucky day for vSphere treasure hunt. I was able to locate three really useful ones again.

VMWare Compliance Checker for vSphere
Not much to say here, simply get it and run through your infrastructure, the assessment report is mainly related to the default settings causing security holes on ESX hosts and recommendation how to fix them.

VMTurbo

If you have already got Veeam’s Monitor (Free Version), then this is the one that you shouldn’t omit. It’s a compliment to Veeam monitoring tool where you can use VMTurbo Community Version (Monitor+Reporter) to see those details are only available for the Veeam paid version. Furthermore, it clearly displays a lot of very useful information such as IOPS breakdown of individual VMs.

Except the recommendation part is a bit too aggressive. For example, if a VM has been idled for 1 day, then VMTurbo would recommend to reduce the Ram size, but in reality the size is required during the user session. Another example is VMTurbo always suggest to reduce the size of those already Thin-Provisioned disk as it think they are taking too much wasted storage space.

The Report Feature is probably the Best I’ve ever seen and the most easiest one to setup, there is no more complicated steps like in Veeam Reporter (setup MSSQL Reporting Service along is a pain) as VMTurbo itself is a virtual appliance.

Overall speaking, it’s a very good product, way better than Xangati IMOP and has a great potential to match Veeam’s product. I still haven’t got time to play the Capacity Planning feature, last time I ran VMKernal’s Capacity View (Free Version), the recommendation was simply a joke as it said there are only 2 VM we can add while in reality there is a couple of hundreds of Ram that’s free to use, hopefully VMTurbo can give me some insight for real capacity growth prediction.

AVG Anti-Virus ISO
Simply use it to boot the VM, scan and clean the whole volume or designated directories. It also allows you to update the virus definition file in real-time. Just to make sure the disk type is not paravirtual as it won’t recognize this new disk type.

Update Aug-31

Well, after extensively testing VMTurbo for 3 days, I must admit it’s probably the most comprehensive monitoring and reporting product I’ve ever seen. I love the features that I couldn’t find in Veeam’s free edition and VMTurbo probably got every scenario combination you can think of, like those vCPU/MEM/IOPS/Network, etc.

Of course there is some drawback, one of the biggest drawback is to manage the product itself is too complicated, somehow, I don’t get the same easy to use feeling as Veeam. I understand both have tree on left pane and details on the right, but somehow it just takes me a few more clicks to find out what I need on VMTurbo, it would be perfect if they can improve this aspect. It actually did happen to me that I got lost after 10 clicks for in-depth information of what I was looking for.

Another thing is I still haven’t got the Planning working out correctly, I tested on a 2 hosts cluster with even load (probably 53%:47%), the result strongly recommend to shift all the load from host 1 to host 2, so I got a 2%:98%, isn’t this suppose to be evenly balanced? (ie, close to 50%:50%)

Finally, I understood the concept and calculation how to derive the available HA Slot today. ESX 4.1 did a great job in simplifying the whole calculating thing and present the available slot number automatically. This HA Slot Availability number is crucial in estimating the future capacity growth. The other thing is I’ve learnt  instead using Reservation, Use Limit instead for your SLA as this will not change your default HA Slot. So simply create a Resource (ie, Jail) Pool and assign CPU & MEM Limit (for Network, use VLAN with capped speed, for IOPS use SIOC) to it and place those abusive VMs into the “Jail”, Btw…there is no chance they can ever “Jail Break” under vSphere.