Exporting performance data from virtual center database?

[znmeb]

I want to run some performance tests and collect all of the available data from all of the hosts and all of the guest machines. I can set up Virtual Center to capture the data and store all the values in a SQL Server database. But how do I get the data out of that database? What I'm looking for is "time series" data -- CSV files (I don't care how many) with a timestamp column and metrics in the rest of the columns with some kind of header. I think there's a way to do that by right-clicking on every host and every guest and running a report., but I'm really looking for something automatic. Is there a tool that can do this?

[kjb007]

There are commercial products that can do this type of thing (VizionCore/Veeam), as well as opensource products which I believe can do this as well, but I'm not sure they all have the same reporting capabilities.

If you're into scripting, you can use the vi toolkits to produce similar outputs, but it will be difficult to manage yourself, unless you're a developer, and depending on how many hosts/vm's you're trying to report on.

-KjB

[znmeb]

1. I don't have a budget, so the paid-for options aren't viable.

2. I do have the Perl tookit and will probably try that, but it looked to me like it could only grab real-time data and only from the hosts. It didn't look like it would go to the SQL Server database. The Perl toolkit is certainly first on my list of things to try, though, since I'm a Perl programmer. The "other" SDK requires either .NET/C# or Java, neither of which I know.

3. What are the open source packages?

4. Is there a database schema document for what's in the SQL Server database? I don't mind getting my hands dirty with SQL (or a nice Ruby object-relational mapper like ActiveRecord or DataMapper)

[kjb007]

unnoc.org is one open source, and it uses vi perl toolkit as well, so you could take a look at that. I know there are others, but I can't think of them right now. Hopefully, others will chime in as well. There are stats tables in the sql db, so I'm sure that's a good place to start if you want to get directly into the sql, and I believe there are also views you can work with instead of the tables directly, but I haven't played with that.

-KjB

[znmeb]

unnoc looks interesting. I'm not sure I want to introduce RRDTool into the equation, though -- it has a very steep learning curve.