Management 101 - PowerCli or Management Suite?

[chadwickking]

Hello Forums,

I have been doing a lot of thinking and thought that I would attempt to get some answers to see the good, the bad, and the ugly. Being recently new to a virtualized infrastructure we are being faced with some newer challenges. As of late I have been finding a greater need for a capacity and management of the virtual infrastructre. Now we already have whole capacity teams that give us feedback on every VM and physical machine as far resources go and vmware vCenter has some to help with. We are seeing areas of VM sprawl and host capacity becoming loaded quickly in many different ways and instances. We have things pretty dynamic and we need to get to a stronger uniformed approach to our virtualization standards. My questions is there are some great products that can do this from what I can tell. From Quest, vKernel, Veeam, and v-Command. Now we already use SCCM, MOM, and even our custome home grown alerting solution. Of all these things we want to become much more managable and have both dynamics and agility but in a standardized infrastructure. Would a software solution like one of those be better off then trying to come up with a script say...for being able to look at a cluster and feed us back the avg. size vm and about how many more we can fit on it? or use a solution that is always on top of it? Just thinking out loud here.. I hope this helps..

Cheers,

Chad King

VCP-410 | Server+

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cwjking

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[chadwickking]

Just watched and read about the vSphere and VIX API. Does any know of some scripts or ways to do what other tools like vkernel and such do? Just curious as most of these application seem pretty costly.

Cheers,

Chad King

VCP-410 | Server+

Twitter:

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[DSTAVERT]

Most of the information or capabilities these management suites have is already available through vCenter or available directly from the hosts. Simply a difference in presentation. For CLI tools have a look through William Lamb's excellent collection http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9852.

The PowerCLI crowd is pretty big. Just look through the heavy posters and you will find great collections of management scripts. Have a look at RVtools http://www.robware.net and PowerGUI http://powergui.org

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[chadwickking]

Wonderful, I will have a look. Do you know much about the other 3rd party applications? Seems like if one wasn't willing to do the work of scripting things around that it would be the only investment. Also the reporting and things may be a bit neater. I need to have look more into the automation side of scripting. I will take a look at the links.

Cheers,

Chad King

VCP-410 | Server+

Twitter:

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[chadwickking]

Thus far I have been able to achieve most of what I need through PowerCLI and PowerGUI.  Alan Renouf has been very helpful and working with me on some issues with the latest PowerCLI update and the broken scripts in PowerGUI Community Powerpack.  I really need to just learn scripting at this point.  I also saw Cody Bunch doing alot on vCO with management.

Anyways just wanted to say thanks and right now scripting is pretty much my job security so I dont think I want to throw a 3rd party tool in right now.  Also with PowerCLI I dont have any limitations when it comes to doing many things.  I noticed that every Management software has its limitations and cost of course

Thanks again,

Chad King