Tuesday, 22 January 2008

Change Reporter for VI 3

New on vm4all.com Change Reporter for VI 3 : Change auditing is an important process for controlling the management of your virtual environment, to limit unauthorized changes and errors in VI3 inventory. Erroneous and unauthorized changes usually occur every day in organizations in which many IT professionals manage different aspects of virtual infrastructure. Such changes can cause failures and outages in your virtual infrastructure. NetWrix Change Reporter for VMware Infrastructure 3 audits all changes and enforces controlled change management processes across your virtual environment. This freeware tool sends a daily report pointing to every change made to your ESX servers, folders, clusters, resource pools, virtual machines, and their hardware (*), including previous and current ("before" and "after") configuration values.

Title	Change Reporter for VI 3
Company	NetWrix Corporation
License	Freeware / Commercial
Author	NetWrix Corporation
Website	http://www.netwrix.com

Posted by

Eric Sloof

in VMware at 21:17 | 4 Comments | No Trackbacks

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Have you tested this? I installed it today, and I must say it's pretty horrible. Needs more time in the oven...

#1 Justin Campbell (Homepage) on 2008-01-24 04:17 (Reply)

Hi Justin, No, I haven’t tested the product yet, what do you mean by pretty horrible ?

#1.1 Eric Sloof (Homepage) on 2008-01-24 08:16 (Reply)

Well first I need to say I was testing the free version, so the additional features may be much better. What I was expecting was a semi-graphical report of what has been moved, configuration changes, and those sort of things. The report it gives you is pretty simple. I don't know that the summary infromation would have given me the data in a presentable way. What I do know is that the data below under _The following changes were detected in your VMware Infrastructure 3 inventory:_ were full of useless information that I wouldn't bother drudging through each day. I addition to this, there are still references to their AD Change Reporter. The error log has entries relating to the AD version of the software, and the VI3 version just feels slapped together. The program runs as a scheduled task, and has a single configuration screen. The configuration screen simply changed the command-line paramaters of the EXE run (which, by the way, is where the encrypted password is stored). It also seemed to use the web interface to VirtualCenter to gather the information instead of the API or the VirtualCenter DB. We only have 19 VMs, so I can't imagine what getting a report for 100-200 VMs would look like. Maybe I should test the full version before passing judgement, but the free version left me bad first impressions. But if this is the case, they shouldn't market this as freeware, but instead enable a short trial of the full feature set.. This is what you get when it emails you: Change analysis completed successfully. Summary information: Objects added: Commercial version only Objects removed: Commercial version only Objects modified: Commercial version only Freeware version reports changes only for virtual machines. Change reporting on entire VI3 environment available in Commercial version only. The following changes were detected in your VMware Infrastructure 3 inventory: Change Type Object Type Object Name Details Modified VirtualMachine \Datacenters\VAK\vm\ANGELLvm guest.disk[0].freeSpace: "11365912576" -> "11365847040" runtime.memoryOverhead: "132120576" -> "131072000" summary.quickStats.guestMemoryUsage: "112" -> "97" summary.quickStats.hostMemoryUsage: "307" -> "331" summary.quickStats.overallCpuUsage: "40" -> "46" summary.runtime.memoryOverhead: "132120576" -> "131072000" [There are one of these ^ for every VM in our environment]

#2 Justin Campbell (Homepage) on 2008-01-24 13:55 (Reply)

Hi Guys! First of all, Justin, thanks for the time you spent reviewing this product. This product is very-very young (v.1 actually) and of course not ideal. I'll try to answer your questions and address concerns. I work for NetWrix Corp., so please don't expect fully unbiased opinions here

Semi-graphical report - yes, this is something we're currently working on. The idea of the product is to show what was changed at all levels. So some kind of drill-down functionality showing VMs, devices, permissions etc. would be just perfect to see there. About garbage in reports. This can be easily filtered out, and we just didn't have enough time to develop a set of good filters. Fortunately this can be done by users, without modifying the product. However you need the most recent version (just re-request your download from http://www.netwrix.com/active_directory_change_reporting_freeware.html). It has some built-in filters and custom ones can be added manually. Just ask our support team how do that or learn in the readme.txt file coming with the product. This is a v1.0 of the long awaited product. I expect user-friendly, nice-looking reports created soon. At least I'm trying to do my best at developer meetings

For now, you should try this one. We have released it now because the sooner we get feedback from real guys like you, the faster we get the best product for VM change auditing. Why developing monster-like-but-useless stuff in the lab for months when we can get into the field and create something that people really need in their environments. On a side note, both products, Change Reporter for VI3 and AD Change Reporter, are based on the same platform. While the CR for VI3 is a new thing, the ADCR is a proven solution used by hundreds of customers. Unsurprisingly, we decided to develop the CR for VI3 on the same platform. To answer your question about marketing: Our change reporting products have both commercial and freeware versions available. The free version can be used to perform some basic tasks and suitable for smaller organizations. The commercial one is for organizations who need full control over changes made to their environments, typically when many IT pros manage one big environment. Best regards, Darren Moore Marketing Manager NetWrix Corporation 888-638-9749

#2.1 Darren Moore on 2008-01-28 22:21 (Reply)

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Change Reporter for VI 3

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Tuesday, 22 January 2008

Change Reporter for VI 3

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