VMware Communities: Message List - Management / Best Practice / Config / Audit Tool

Re: Management / Best Practice / Config / Audit Tool

kimono — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 04:16:27 GMT

Thanks for the tips Texiwill. There's a similar [thread going on here too.|m-1302207] So I guess it's topical right now.
PS I've been listening to the Roundtable Podcasts. They are a great resource.

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1302207

/kimono/

Message was edited by: kimono --- Blag! Why can't I post links properly! Firefox on OSX?

Re: Management / Best Practice / Config / Audit Tool

Texiwill — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:40:35 GMT

Hello,

* daily / weekly / monthly health checks. I am currently using powershell here with a growing number of things checked .. wondering if there's anything commercial covering the space?

Check out vWire, Hyper9, vKernel, etc.

* best practice analyzer... once again I am using PS to validate new hosts.. Have seen tools like Tripwire Config check but how far do they go on a day to day basis? What others are out there?

ConfigCheck is a Security analyzer not a best practice tool, that would be entirely different. But for security there is Configcheck, Configuresoft, vminformer, etc. Tripwire ENterprise comes to mind for configuration management and policy enforcement.

* Deeper issues within the environment. Looking at VCENTER for errors is one thing, but take a recent issue we had in our environment with SAN fabric, this resulted in lots of SAN path failover errors in /var/log/vmkwarning. Are there any tools that out of the box provide alerting us on this? (i know it's just central syslog, but how about smart alarming on things we care about?)

Splunk, logcheck, vWire, etc.

* Asset Management - e.g we are currently exporting VMs custom fields from VCENTER to maintain a central repository, and then updating the central repo, and pushing back into VCENTER where needed. Then trapping new VMs that don't have this information and updating it.

Chargeback tools come to mind.

Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009, Virtualization Practice Analyst
Now Available: 'VMware vSphere(TM) and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing the Virtual Environment'
Also available 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise'
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Management / Best Practice / Config / Audit Tool

kimono — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:21:18 GMT

Hello Everybody,

Open ended question ... I'm keen to hear peoples opinions and recommendations on some "all encompassing" VI Management tool covering some or all of the following:

daily / weekly / monthly health checks. I am currently using powershell here with a growing number of things checked .. wondering if there's anything commercial covering the space?
best practice analyzer... once again I am using PS to validate new hosts.. Have seen tools like Tripwire Config check but how far do they go on a day to day basis? What others are out there?
Deeper issues within the environment. Looking at VCENTER for errors is one thing, but take a recent issue we had in our environment with SAN fabric, this resulted in lots of SAN path failover errors in /var/log/vmkwarning. Are there any tools that out of the box provide alerting us on this? (i know it's just central syslog, but how about smart alarming on things we care about?)
Asset Management - e.g we are currently exporting VMs custom fields from VCENTER to maintain a central repository, and then updating the central repo, and pushing back into VCENTER where needed. Then trapping new VMs that don't have this information and updating it.

Much of this falls into LifeCycle / Process space, just keen to know other large enterprises experiences with this sort of problem, so I can narrow my focus. Also I'm way out of touch with VSPHERE (training in Sept...) but have seen there's a cut down Orchestrator inside that. How have people found that - useful? Or does it scream "licensed feature only in LCM?"

Veeam Reporter seems like a fit - for some aspects - has anybody had good experiences with that?

/kimono/