KendrickColeman.com has compiled a nice list of no-cost VMware vSphere utilities. A grading scale was disclosed to provide a value ranking of the utilities.  Information like this is valuable because I often see questions raised in the virtualization community about low-cost or no-cost ways to do this or that with VMware virtual infrastructure (backup is a frequent request).  I will be the first to admit that lab time is precious.  KendrickColeman.com has used their free time to install, test, and summarize each application for the benefit of the community.  Nice job and on behalf of the virtualization community, Thank You!

Speaking of free, KendirckColeman.com has also pointed to a VMTN forum member who stumbled onto a way to use a free ESXi 4.0 license key to permanently license ESX 4.0.  Interesting find there.

Last month, I attended Gestalt IT Tech Field Day in Boston.  This is an independent conference made up of hand selected delegates and sponsored by the technology vendors whom we were visiting.  All of the vendors boast products which tie into a virtualized datacenter which made the event particularly exciting for me!

One of the vendors we met with is VKernel.  If you’re a long time follower of my blog, you may recall a few of my prior VKernel posts including VKernel CompareMyVM.  Our VKernel briefing covered Capacity Analyzer.  This is a product I actually looked at in the lab well over a year ago, but it was time to take another peek to see what improvements have been made.

Before I get into the review, some background information on VKernel:

VKernel helps systems administrators manage server and storage capacity utilization in their virtualized datacenters so they can:

• Get better utilization from existing virtualization resources
• Avoid up to 1/2 the cost of expanding their virtualized datacenter
• Find and fix or avoid capacity related performance problems

VKernel provides easy to use, highly affordable software for systems managers that:

• Integrates with their existing VMware systems
• Discovers their virtualized infrastructure and
• Determines actual utilization vs. provisioned storage, memory, and CPU resources

 And the VKernel Capacity Analyzer value proposition:

Capacity Analyzer proactively monitors shared CPU, memory, network, and disk (storage and disk I/O) utilization trends in VMware and Hyper-V environments across hosts, clusters, and resource pools enabling you to:

• Find and fix current and future capacity bottlenecks
• Safely place new VMs based on available capacity
• Easily generate capacity utilizatino alerts

Capacity Analyzer lists for $299/socket, however, VKernel was nice enough to provide each of the delegates with a 10 socket/2 year license which was more than adequate for evaluation in the lab.  From this point forward, I will refer to Capacity Analyzer as CA.

One of the things which was noticed right away by another delegate and by myself was the quick integration and immediate results.  CA 4.2 Standard Edition ships as a virtual appliance in OVF or Converter format.  The 32-bit SLES VM is pre-built, pre-configured, and pre-optimized for the role which it was designed for in the virtual infrastructure.  The 600MB appliance deploys in just minutes.  The minimum deployment tasks consist of network configuration (including DHCP support), licensing, and pointing at a VI3 or vSphere virtual infrastructure. 

CA is managed by HTTP web interface which has been the subject of noticable improvement and polishing since the last time I reviewed the product.  The management and reporting interface is presented in a dashboard layout which makes use of the familiar stoplight colors.  A short period of time after deployment, I was already seeing data being collected.  I should note that the product supports management of multiple infrastructures.  I pointed CA at VI3 and vSphere vCenters simultaneously.

One of the dashboard views in CA is the “Top VM Consumers” for metrics such as CPU, Memory, Storage, CPU Ready, Disk Bus Resets, Disk Commands Aborted, Disk Read, and Disk Write.  The dashboard view shows the top 5, however, detailed drilldown is available which lists all the VMs in my inventory.

Prior to deploying CA, I felt I had a pretty good feel for the capacity and utilization in the lab.  After letting CA digest the information available, I thought it would be interesting to compare results provided by CA with my own perception and experience.  I was puzzled by the initial findings.  Consider the following physical two node cluster information from vCenter.  Each node is configured identically with 2xQC AMD Opteron processors and 16GB RAM. Each host is running about 18 powered on VMs.  Host memory is and always has been my limiting resource, and it’s evident here, however, with HA admission control disabled, there is still capacity to register and power on several more “like” VMs.

So here’s where things get puzzling for me.  Looking at the Capacity Availability Map, CA is stating
1) Memory is my limiting resource – correct
2) There is no VM capacity left on the DL385 G2 Cluster – that’s not right

After further review, the discrepancy is revealed.  The Calculated VM Size (slot size if you will) for memory is at 3.5GB.  I’ not sure where CA is coming up with this number. It’s not the HA calculated slot size, I checked.  3.5GB is nowhere near the average VM memory allocation in the lab.  Most of my lab VMs are thinly provisioned from a memory standpoint since host memory is my limiting resource.  I’ll need to see if this can be adjusted because these numbers are not accurate, thus not reliable.  I wouldn’t want to base a purchasing decision on this information.

Here’s an example of a drilldown.  Again, I like the presentation, although this screen seems to have some justification inconsistencies (right vs. center).  Reports in CA can be saved in .PDF or .CSV format, making them ideal for sharing, collaboration, or archiving.  Another value add is a recommendation section which is stated in plain English in the event the reader is unable to interpret the numbers.  What I’m somewhat confused about is fact that the information provided in different areas is contradicting.  In this case, the summary reports VM backupexec “is not experiencing problems with memory usage… the VM is getting all required memory resources”.  However, it goes on to say there is a problem in that there exists a Memory usage bottleneck… the VM may experience performance degradation if memory usage increases.  Finally, it recommends incresaing the VM memory size to almost double the currently assigned value – and this Priority is ranked as High.

It’s not clear to me from the drilldown report if there is a required action here or not. With the high priority status, there is a sense of urgency, but to do what?  The analysis states performance could suffer if memory usage increases.  That typically will be the case for virtual or physical machines alike.  The problem as I see it is the analysis is concerned with a future event of which may or may not occur.  If the VM has shown no prior history of higher memory consumption and there is no change to the application running in the VM, I would expect the memory utilization to remain constant.  VKernel is on the right track, but I think the out-of-box logic needs tuning so that it is more intuitive.  Else this is a false alarm which would cause me to overutilize host capacity or I would learn to ignore which is dangerous and provides no return on investment in a management tool.

I’ve got more areas to explore with VKernel Capacity Analyzer and I welcome input, clarification, corrections from VKernel.  Overall I like the direction of the product and I think VKernel has the potential to service capacity planning needs for virtual infrastructures of all sizes.  The ease in deployment provides rapid return. As configuration maximums and VM densities increase, capacity planning becomes more challenging.  When larger VMs are deployed, significant dents are being made in the virtual infrastructure causing shared resources to deplete more rapidly per instance than in years past.  Additional capacity takes time to procure. We need to be able to lean on tools like these to provide the automated analysis and alarms to stay ahead of capacity requests and not be caught short on infrastructure resources.

Rob de Veij has released version 2.8.1 of his stellar virtualization utility RVTools.  I love this free tool as it provides valuable information about my infrastructure in a fast and easy format.

New in this version:
- On vHost tab new field: number of running vCPUs
- On vSphere VMs in vApp where not displayed.
- Filter not working correct when annotations or custum fields contains null value.
- When NTP server(s) = null the time info fields are not displayed on the vHost tabpage.
- When datastore name or virtual machine name containts spaces the inconsistent foldername check was not working correct.
- Tools health check now only executed for running VMs.

Go download this tool today and be sure to tell Rob how much you appreciate his development efforts!

VMware, much of this information is vital as it pertains to configuration maximums and should be available in the VMware vSphere Client for capacity planning purposes.

Hyper9, a virtualization management startup company based out of Austin, TX, is expected to release version 1.4 of its self titled flagship management product on Wednesday. This is an exciting release as many notable improvements have been made to the user interface.

New to this release is a dashboard which is designed to help the end user “hit the ground running” immediately after the product is installed. Upon login, the administrator will immediately presented with the “My Environment” tab of the dashboard. “My Environment” contains many of the most useful canned reports about the environment in which Hyper9 has been instructed to catalog.

If you find “My Environment” is jumping in just a bit too fast, take a look at the “Getting Started” tab which contains several instructional videos that can be launched from within the Hyper9 console.

Veteran Hyper9 users will find that the “Results” display has been cleaned up with no-nonsense resource indicators that are very much appealing to the eyes in my opinion.

Hyper9 has been making great strides with their products and I’ve been very impressed with the amount of end user feedback they have taken to their developers and integrated into future product versions.  Hyper9 is available today on a subscription basis.  Head on over to their site for more information.  While you’re there, be sure to check out their other products, such as the Virtualization Mobile Manager (VMM) which allows administrators to manage their infrastructures from a hand held device.

TRIPWIRE LAUNCHES vWIRE, A VIRTUALIZATION MANAGEMENT SOLUTION TO MONITOR, MANAGE, AND AUTOMATE VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE
vWire gives visibility and control to virtualization engineers to dramatically decrease complexity, downtime, and operational costs in virtual environments.

PORTLAND, Ore. – June 9, 2009 - Tripwire® today announced vWire^TM, the first virtualization management solution to integrate change and configuration awareness into Virtual Infrastructure (VI) management. Solving a real business need for virtualization administrators, vWire continuously monitors the state of virtual systems and correlates data with critical events to provide context and insight into potential issues, and then acts to prevent and resolve problems that cause downtime.

vWire was designed based on direct input from the virtualization community to introduce a greater level of control and visibility over virtual environments. The new offering from Tripwire reduces the time that virtual infrastructure managers spend troubleshooting system failures. With vWire, IT organizations can optimize their virtual infrastructures, decrease downtime and improve reliability, while reducing operating costs through automated monitoring and problem detection.

“Tripwire is working with VMware to provide customers with solutions and tools that offer a holistic view of their virtualized environments while improving operational compliance of these systems,” said Shekar Ayyar, vice president, infrastructure alliances, VMware. “Tripwire’s new vWire extends the robust management capabilities of VMware solutions with capabilities targeted at providing increased visibility and helping troubleshoot problems quickly.”

vWire is easy to set up and requires no special training. Once installed with sufficient licenses and credentials, vWire automatically starts recording and analyzing the status of the entire virtual infrastructure. vWire is comprised of three major components:

• Comprehensive Monitoring and Data Collection – vWire monitors all change, configuration and critical event data, providing a database of up-to-the-minute information that can be quickly accessed, searched, and filtered. vWire complements the availability features of the VMware platform by monitoring systems to help prevent or eliminate virtual system downtime.
• Shared content – vWire data can be accessed with various combinations of filters, scripts and alerts, easily accessed through the vWire dashboard. Administrators can see at a glance the aggregated information that is relevant to ensuring the health of their virtual infrastructure. These capabilities ship with out-of-the box content, but can be easily customized. Users can also import shared content from the community, expanding the library of tools and solutions.
• The vWire community – This online forum provides an opportunity for VI administrators, industry experts and product specialists to share content, expertise and solutions for issues involving the management of virtual systems.

According to Stephen Beaver, co-author of two books on virtualization, “Essential VMware ESX Server” and “Scripting VMware Power Tools: Automating Virtual Infrastructure Administration”, Tripwire Virtualization Evangelist, “virtualization is unique in that there can be thousands of unique configuration properties in a virtual infrastructure, and the number quickly goes up when you consider multiple objects. For example, a moderately small installation with two clusters, six ESX hosts, and 60 VMs will have 38,700 configuration properties for the clusters, hosts, and VMs. vWire’s configuration automation gives virtual administrators new visibility to effectively monitor and manage configuration, change and performance data across the virtual infrastructure – all from within VMware vCenter^TM Server.”

vWire is available for immediate purchase and download at www.vwire.com. Also available at vWire.com are two free, downloadable tools to help manage virtualized infrastructure: OpsCheck, which helps ensure systems are configured to support VMware VMotion^TM by rapidly analyzing ESX 3.0, 3.5, and ESXi hypervisors; and, ConfigCheck, which helps ensure VMware environments are properly configured, a recommended and essential first step when deploying and virtualizing additional servers.

Tripwire is the leader in data center compliance and infrastructure management solutions, building confidence for IT across both virtual and physical infrastructures. Tripwire Enterprise and vWire software, helps over 6,500 enterprises worldwide meet their configuration auditing, file integrity monitoring, virtual infrastructure management and change auditing needs for IT operations, security and compliance. Tripwire is headquartered in Portland, Ore. with offices worldwide. Tripwire can be found at www.tripwire.com, www.vwire.com, and @vwire on Twitter.

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©2009, Tripwire, Inc. Tripwire is a registered trademark of Tripwire, Inc. All other marks are property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.