This free Management Pack was developed by Onur Yuzseven as his contribution to the vCommunity (VMUG, vExpert, VCP). It's not an official VMware project, and there is no support from VMware GSS. Deploy at your own risk, or consult PSO for a custom solution.
It's built using the VCF Operations Integration SDK. It uses the Python programming language and the VCF Operations API. It was developed originally for the following use cases:
- Capture ESXi Host Advanced System Settings (esxi_advanced_system_settings.xml)
- Capture ESXi Host Software Packages (esxi_packages.xml)
- Capture VM Advanced Parameters (vm_advanced_parameters.xml)
- Capture VM Options (vm_options.xml)
The user can customize what is being captured above by editing the associated XML files, which are installed with examples by default. For details, see this blog and this blog by Brock Peterson.
In addition to the four use cases above, this Management Pack also addresses these two use cases:
- Captures Microsoft Windows Services (windows_service_list.xml))
- Captures Microsoft Windows Event Log Events (windows_event_list.xml)
The above implementation is agentless. It uses GuestAPI with the provided Guest OS credentials. For details, see this blog. As it does not come with a dashboard, Dale Hassinger has created a cool dashboard here. Before monitoring hundreds of Windows machine, check the additional load in both VCF Operations and the Windows machine.
New Dashboards:
- Critical Business Application
- vSphere Resource Management
- VM Storage Configuration
Enhanced Dashboards (replacing existing ones):
- VM Configuration
- VM Capacity
- VM Performance
- vSphere Cluster Performance
- vSphere Cluster Capacity
- vSphere Cluster Configuration
- ESXi Configuration
- vSphere Network Configuration
Reports: Reports were designed to replace all the existing vSphere adapter reports. They were designed top down, as a set. They are also purpose-built. The PDF format and the CSV format is targetted for their specific use cases.
Super Metrics: They are used in the dashboards. Super Metrics can be found here. You can bulk enable them in Policy, after Management Pack installation.
The above was provided by Iwan Rahabok. They are documented in his books, available for download here.
Additional Properties & Metrics:
- Cluster HA/DRS/EVC
- Virtual Machine Snapshot Count
Login to VMware Hands-on Lab, then test drive this MP. Abhijit Timble has installed it so you can evaluate it before deciding in your environment.