Free VMware tools for virtualization admins are worth a ‘fling’

If you are a VMware virtualization administrator and haven’t been indoctrinated yet into the use of “flings,” perhaps it’s time you climbed on board. There is a community repository filled with golden nuggets created by VMware-employed developers and engineers — and yes, they are offered for the low, low price of free.

We’ve spoken about these free VMware virtualization plug-ins in the past. They are conveniently located within the online VMware Labs, where VMware engineers are empowered to get creative by developing cool and useful tools that are not yet part of any official product by VMware. Flings are shared with VMware’s community of users free of charge, but come with no official support by the company, as they are experimental and offered under Technical Preview and open source licensing.

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Remember, these are plug-in tools meant to fill in the gaps, not production-ready enterprise applications. They include recently launched useful tools such as PXE Manager for vCenter, a management tool designed to support automatic PXE boot (network boot using preboot execution environment) and automatic customization of large numbers of VMware ESXi systems, as well as vCenter XVP Manager and Converter, a fling to help provide basic virtualization management capabilities for non-vSphere hypervisor platforms, such as Microsoft Hyper-V, from within a vSphere Client.

VMware Labs added two new interesting flings to the list this month: I/O Analyzer and ESX System Analyzer.

I/O Analyzer is a 555MB virtual appliance that offers a simple and standardized way of measuring storage performance in a VMware vSphere virtualized environment. I/O Analyzer automates the traditional storage performance analysis cycle and helps reduce the amount of time it takes to perform a diagnosis from days to hours. The tool was designed to minimize burdens and mistakes in I/O benchmarking and help with basic I/O performance troubleshooting in virtualized environments. Some of the features include:

• An integrated framework for storage performance testing
• Easily configured and launched I/O tests on multiple hosts
• A view of integrated performance results at both guest and host levels
• Easily exported performance data for off-site analysis

You can find out more information and download the free VMware I/O Analyzer fling.

The ESX System Analyzer download is a bit beefier, weighing in at 1.6GB. But pound for pound, this fling could prove extremely important in your virtual environment. The ESX System Analyzer was designed to help administrators with their planning process during a migration from ESX to ESXi. It does so by analyzing the ESX hosts in your environment by collecting information on factors that pertain to the migration process, such as:

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

The tool also provides summary information for the entire existing environment, showing information like the version of VMware Tools and Virtual Hardware for all VMs and the version of Filesystem for all datastores. With this type of information VMware administrators can determine what tasks need to be done prior to the start of any migration.

You can find out more information and download the VMware ESX System Analyzer fling.

These are two more flings I would definitely consider clipping on to your VMware tool belt. Or does the fact that these are experimental give you too much pause to operate them in your environment?

This article, “Free VMware tools for virtualization admins are worth a ‘fling‘,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.