Tools

Onyx is a standalone application that serves as a proxy between the vSphere Client and the vCenter Server. It monitors the network communication between them and translates it into an executable PowerShell code. Later, this code could be modified and saved into a reusable function or script. 

http://labs.vmware.com/flings/onyx

VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator is an application awareness plug-in to vCenter Server, and provides continuous dependency mapping of applications. Infrastructure Navigator offers application context to the virtual infrastructure administrators to monitor and manage the virtual infrastructure inventory objects and actions. Administrators can use Infrastructure Navigator to understand the impact of the change on the virtual environment in their application infrastructure.

Infrastructure Navigator helps virtual infrastructure administrators perform the following tasks:
- Make accurate first-level triage to help either eliminate the problem or associate the problem with the virtual infrastructure when business service users report problems.
- Assess change impact, manage, and communicate virtual infrastructure issues for critical applications.
- Understand the application and business impact of changes to the virtual infrastructure on applications.
- Infrastructure Navigator is supported on vCenter Server 5.0 with the vSphere Web Client.

- Simplifies and automates the deployment and the discovery process and keeps manages Application Component Knowledge Base (KB) current Eliminates physical switch spanning or credential based discovery.
- Discovers and maps the application components and dependencies using KBs and presents this knowledge through maps or search for relevant use cases.

- Provide Infrastructure Navigator data for vCenter Server and related solutions Ensures that the application and dependency data is available to the rest of the vCenter Server entities and its various solutions through the vCenter extensibility APIs.
- Supports SRM integration to set up more focused and accurate site recovery and backup plans.

Join Hemant Gaidhani in a video walkthrough of the installation and configuration of the VMware vCenter Operations Manager, a component of the vCenter Operations Management Suite.

VMware vCloud Director 1.5 gives enterprise organizations the ability to build secure private clouds that dramatically increase datacenter efficiency and business agility. Coupled with VMware vSphere, vCloud Director delivers cloud computing for existing datacenters by pooling virtual infrastructure resources and delivering them to users as catalog-based services. vCloud Director 1.5 helps you build agile infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud environments that greatly accelerate the time-to-market for applications and responsiveness of IT organizations. vCloud Director 1.5 adds the following new features specific to accelerating application delivery in the cloud: • Fast Provisioning 
• vCloud Custom Guest Data • Expanded vCloud API and SDK • vCloud API Query Service • vCloud Messages • Cisco Nexus 1000v Integration • vSphere 5.0 Support • Microsoft SQL Server Support • Globalization • vShield Five Tuple Firewall Rules • Static Routing • IPSec Site-to-Site VPN This white paper addresses three areas regarding vCloud Director performance: • vCloud Director sizing guidelines and software requirements • Best practices in performance and tuning  • Performance characterization for key vCloud Director operations

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vcloud-director-perf.pdf

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.0 provides business continuity and disaster recovery protection for VMware virtual environments. Protection can range from virtual machines (VMs) residing on a single, replicated datastore to all the VMs in a datacenter and includes protection for the operating systems and applications running in the VM. The goal of this white paper is to provide you with SRM performance data and recommendations so that you can architect an efficient recovery plan that minimizes the recovery time for your environment. This white paper addresses various dimensions on which the recovery time depends: • Number of virtual machines and protection groups associated with a recovery plan • Leveraging DPM and DRS for a better recovery • Configuration of various recovery plan parameters • Priority assignment of virtual machines in the recovery plan • Improvements to the performance of recovering multiple protection groups within a single recovery plan Furthermore, VMware suggest best practices in applicable areas so that you can optimize the recovery time using SRM.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/srm5-perf.pdf

HD_Speed measures both sustained and burst data transfer rates of your virtual disks, cd/dvd-roms, flash cards/sticks, floppys, etc, and offers a realtime graphical display.

Download

I/O Analyzer is a virtual appliance solution by VMware that provides a simple and standardized way of measuring storage performance in a VMware vSphere virtualized environments. I/O Analyzer automates the traditional storage performance analysis cycle and reduces the performance diagnosis time from days to hours.
 
Features include:

• Integrated framework for storage performance testing
• Readily deployable virtual appliance
• Easily configure and launch I/O tests on multiple hosts
• View integrated performance results at both guest and host levels
• Easily export performance data for off-site analysis

 

vPanorama provides an integrated simpler and smarter view of all the resources in a VMware environment. vPanorama gives VMware Administrators and Managers a simple, action-oriented way to grasp the complete VMware environment including storage and network resources. It shows you where in the network and storage bottlenecks are occurring, identifies which VMs are responsible for the bottlenecks, and provides a integrated way to address the bottleneck using vMotion, or Storage vMotion.



For up to 250 VMs it is free, get the Big Picture at http://www.vpanorama.com/

The ESX System Analyzer is a tool designed to help administrators plan a migration from ESX to ESXi. It analyzes the ESX hosts in your environment and, for each host, collects information on factors that pertain to the migration process:

• Hardware compatibility with ESXi
• VMs registered on the ESX host, as well as VMs located on the host’s local disk
• Modifications to the Service Console RPMs which have been added or removed or files which have been added  or users and cronjobs which have been added

This tool also provides summary information for the whole existing environment

• Version of VMware Tools and Virtual Hardware for all VMs
• Version of Filesystem for all datastores

By having this information, administrators can determine what tasks need to be done prior to the migration. Examples include:

• Relocate VMs from local datastores to shared datastores
• Replace cronjobs with equivalent remote scripts written with PowerCLI or vCLI
• Make note of what agent software has been added to the host and obtain the equivalent agentless version

Be one of the first one to try, rate and comment - ESX-system-analyzer

Update: Remon Lam over at VirtualVlouds.info has figuered out the username and password, he also has a link to the userguide.

As of today, the software-as-a-service solution opvizor for analyzing and rectifying configuration, performance and security errors in virtualized environments is available on the market in Version 1.5. The new version’s architecture has been optimized in particular for medium-sized and large virtualized infrastructures. This is coupled with improvements in performance, disguising, in reporting and with an enlarged set of rules. As was the case for its predecessor, opvizor 1.5 is available on www.opvizor.com as a commercial and a free version. Continue reading "Icomasoft has released opvizor 1.5 also..." »

PowerShell is a scripting language Microsoft developed to help administrators manage the Windows environment. Third parties can write their own snap-ins (dynamic linked libraries) to implement new commands, which are called cmdlets. With VDSPowerCli, users can use the cmdlets provided by PowerCLI to manage vSphere Distributed Switch(VDS). VDSPowerCli gives you the ability to manage:

• VMware vSphere Distributed Switch
• Distributed Port Group
• Distributed Port

Download and try out VDSPowerCli

Foglight Network Management System (NMS) is an enterprise ready network performance monitoring and configuration management solution. It installs in less than 15 minutes and auto-discovers key metrics for network resources, including hardware, operating systems, virtual infrastructure, databases, middleware, applications, and services allowing you to:

- Reduce the wasted time and chaos associated with sudden network issues
- Mitigate the risk of downtime
- Reduce mean-time-to-resolution of network incidents
- Provide admin and management level visibility
- Manage up to 100 network devices for FREE
- Download and install in only 15 MINUTES

http://www.quest.com/foglight-network-management-system/

vScope Explorer is a free tool from VKernel that analyzes and visualizes the entire virtual environment across:

- Resources - CPU, memory, storage, network
- Data centers, clusters, datastores, host, virtual machines

Identify peformance, capacity, and resource efficiency issues in your virtual environment based on analysis from VKernel's Capacity Analytics Engine. This powerful visualization capability, displaying the results of intensive analytics of 20 key VM performance metrics, provides a number of important capabilities for a virtualized data center's staff. 

http://www.vkernel.com/products/vscope-explorer