The musings of an IT Consultant » vCenter

Using Microsoft SCOM to Monitor VMware

Raj Perumal — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:06:57 +0000

Hi folks! So you have Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) and you want to monitor not just Hyper-V but VMware vSphere too?

Some people are content to use a myriad of tools under multiple panes of glass, but If or one prefer the single pane of glass for my monitoring. Well the good folks at Veeam have developed a management pack that plugs right into SCOM and provides VMware monitoring right back into that single pane of glass.

The product is called Veeam nWorks and it is the cat’s meow. There are other solutions that can achieve similar goals, but in my opinion none go as deep as Veeam. Veeam also has their own custom metrics that they can alert on that make it an even more attractive solution.

Check it out and give it a try!

-RP

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ

Raj Perumal — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 17:45:40 +0000

Hi folks! So everyone and their dog is virtualizing right now. The question is, how do you know you are planning for the right capacity? How do you know if you are over or under provisioned?

You can make a ball park guess and just eyeball it, but that isn’t really a technically sound way of proving things to your boss when it comes time to budget. Instead what you need is a tool that can help you with this process.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ can do just this. It will provide you with reporting the outlines exactly how you are using your capacity. This is an easy to setup and use tool that no administrator should be without. You can read more about it here.

-RP

Are your physical servers ready to be virtualized?

Raj Perumal — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 21:04:04 +0000

Hi folks, one of the common questions in virtualization is, are your physical servers ready? Also how do you tell if they are ready? Luckily VMware has the answer.

VMware offers a feature called guided consolidation that comes with vCenter. You can install this from your VMware vCenter installation media. What it does is install a collection service that gathers performance data on your existing environment and then makes recommendations on whether to consolidate or not.

Then you can pursue virtualization with the confidence that your environment is ready. Guided consolidation is ideal in smaller environments. If you would like to find out if an enterprise environment is ready for consolidation then you might want to go forward with a VMware capacity planning engagement. You can do this by contacting your local VMware partner.

-Cheers, RP

Upgrade ESXi 3.5 to ESXi 4.0 without vCenter

Raj Perumal — Sun, 31 May 2009 19:26:22 +0000

So ESXi 4.0 is now available and you want to get cracking learning everything you can about it. You go to upgrade it in your home environment or your test lab and you realize you can’t do anything because you don’t have vCenter. What do you do?

Never fear! You can upgrade it anyway! What’s the secret? The vSphere host update utility! You can gain access to it by downloading the vSphere upgrade zip file from the VMware website first and then extracting it using the program 7zip. 7zip will allow you to drill down into the following path: VMware-viclient.vib\data.tar.gz\data.tar\.\4.0.0\client\VMware-viclient.exe to extract the VMware client install file to install the vSphere client.

Once you install the client it will ask you to install the host update utility and then after that is done you can just launch the utility. Point it at your server and tell it to upgrade after putting your ESXi host in maintenance mode and presto, your ESXi server has been upgrade to 4.0. As per usual I always recommend you do backups before you attempt any upgrading or patching.

There is detailed instructions with screenshots you can follow here.

-RP