Archive for August 2012

vmkusage (VMware Monitoring Tool)

August 30, 2012 Monitoring, VMware No comments

What is vmkusage?

vmkusage used to be a very nice tool VMware provided (non supported application) that existed for ESX 1.5x and 2.x. In the beginning you had to download it separately from VMware, but since ESX 2.1.0 it was included in the standard ESX install (but not activated).

When ESX 3 was released, a lot of things had changed. VMware also wanted a single point of operation and the performance stats in the Virtual Infrastructure Client had been much improved and was meant as a replacement of vmkusage. The result was that vmkusage was discontinued.

In Virtual Center 2.5u4 a similar service as vmktree was reintroduced as an optional plugin, and this is installed by default in vCenter 4.0. It is not vmkusage (which was perl based), but a java based solution that runs on port 8443 and is accessed directly from vCenter 4.0.

Link for Install Instructions

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1008296

vmktree 0.4.1 with support for ESX(i) 4.1

August 30, 2012 Monitoring No comments

Key features:

– Support for 4.1 ESX and ESXi only
– Providing stats for core four of the host (+more). Currently lacking networking stats per VM.
– Supporting many new values provided by ESX 4.1 such as: memory compression, power usage, disk latency, queues, etc….
– Since many new values have been added, the database is not backward compatible with older versions (only parts)

Installation:

1. Deploy VMware vMA from URL:  http://download3.vmware.com/software/vma/vMA-4.1.0.0-268837.ovf
2. Start the vMA VM, configure ip, pw, etc. Login as vm-admin
3. Download vmktree: wget vmktree.org/vmktree-0.4.1.tar.bz2
4. tar xjvf vmktree-0.4.1.tar.bz2
5. cd vmktree-0.4.1
6. sudo ./install.pl
7. vmktree-addesx
8. Open your web browser and point to http://ip-or-name-of-vma/vmktree

SSH needs to be enabled so make sure your ESXi hosts have “Remote Tech support (SSH)” enabled.

ESXi hosts lose their ssh keys after reboot so check out this workaround.

Download Link

http://vmktree.org/