If you are looking for an application, VMware Lifecycle Manager does a great job at finding abandoned VM's. If you just want to look at a few VM's, then if it is a Windows VM's we usually Check the security logs to see the last time someone logged into the VM. I am sure there are a lot of other ways to do this though






David Strebel
www.holy-vm.com

You might want to look at vmSight they offer a free basic version which can monitor VM activity.

http://www.vmsight.com/solutions_vc.asp

David Strebel
www.holy-vm.com

I totally agree William it would be a huge hassel for what should be a easy task. I am sure someone with scripting skills could manage to come up with something.






David Strebel
www.holy-vm.com

Hello,

However it is not really an easy task. Let's give a few examples..... Development VM is powered off for 60 days. They use it once every 60 days. Your tool would possibly find this VM.

Or, VM has trivial utilization but is running. This utilization is a mumble but the VM is running. Nothing in the database would tell you that this low utilized system is actually a very important system.

So you need to get a list of all VMs, you need to be able to find out who owns and therefore maintains those systems. Spreadsheets work but they do get laborious over time. List of VMs is fairly easy to get. THe other data is more important. Who owns the system, how often it runs, etc.

LifeCycle Manager is designed to answer these questions. You get to set lifespans on each VM and who is the owner, etc.


Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky
VMware Communities User Moderator
====
Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.
CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354
As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

Hello,


I have not seen anything from Vizioncore on this. But CapacityIQ is a bit in the future. The others, may have something. LCM does quite a bit of what you want and has quite a few bells and whistles that would help. THere are others out there I am sure. I know of one free tool as well.


Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky
VMware Communities User Moderator
====
Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.
CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354
As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

But what about the server side? Doesn't seem like login activity would be the sole metric but might be if it was coupled with some utilization trend? If my dev guys spin up a webserver and forget to spin it down I'm trying to figure out how to at least identify candidates (ones that already exist and unfortunately didn't have a lot of process/structure around them). I'm betting i have a big chunk of them out there and i'd like to find them.

Most people only have a few hundred servers at most, which is not as big a problem. I have thousands of desktops however, and that is a problem. I estimate that right now, I've got 200 vm's that aren't in use. But short of going to each one to see the last login time, I don't have a way of determining.

On servers, different problems. Can't determine by low utilization, I've got criticals that might hover under 100mhz...but I need what they do. I can't go by login, because they are rarely logged into. Different problem entirely, where a lifecycle manager may be to advantage. It's not however in my desktop scenario, because what I need should be easy...I just don't know how to do it. When I don't have as much on my plate, I'll probably try to figure something out....But it will be a while.

W