VMware Videos - Virtualization News and How-To » Performance

Using the Free vKernel Capacity View

David Davis — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 18:23:19 +0000

vKernel Capacity View is a tiny 1MB free application that you can install and analze your virtual infrastructure capacity in under 2 minutes. I know that 2 minutes maysound crazy but, believe me, I tried it. Let me show you how it works.

What is Capacity View?

vKernel makes a variety of virtualization management products. I learned more about them and their products directly from their CTO and Founder, Alex Bakman and CEO Doug McNary at the 2010 Boston Tech Field Day. Here are 3 of the best quotes that I pulled from their presentation:

“Capacity Management = Performance”
“Most virtualizaton issues are related to capacity constraints”
“Admins may buy servers with tons of CPUand RAM but then they have IO bottlenecks – admins are constantly fighting bottleneck and capacity issues”

All of their offerings are either virtual appliances that run on your ESX server or tiny free apps that can quickly analyze your virtual infrastructure. One of their free apps is Capacity View (which could be considered a “teaser”, but a very useful teaser, for their Capacity Analyzer virtual appliance).

Simply, Capacity View is a Windows tray apliance that connects to vCenter or a direct ESX Server and pulls back

Installing and Using Capacity View?

I downloaded Capacity View from vKernel’s website (providing an email address is required). The 1MB install took less than 1 minute and it Capacity View started automatically. Once started, it prompted me for my vCenter or ESX Server credentials, as you see in the graphic below.

From there, Capacity View quickly analyzed my infrastructure and provided the information below…

Among all the things that Capacity View told me on my small lab environment, here were some of the more interesting:

That I can add 57 more virtual machines to my existing infrastructure (in theory)
I have a number of over-allocated resources including excessive CPU, RAM, and Storage
The allocation of my physical and virtual resources
Stats on the number of datacenters, clusters, hosts, VMs, resource pools, and datastores

What is Capacity Analyzer?

While Capacity View is a simple and free tool, Capacity Analyzer is an enterprise-grade virtualization performance management that sells for $299 per socket. Capacity Analyzer runs as a virtual appliance and it can manage multiple VMware vCenter virtual infrastructures as well as Microsoft System Center Hyper-V data centers and here is what it looks like:

You can download the free vKernel Capacity View at this site.

What do you get with Train Signal’s VMware ESX computer training course?

David Davis — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:49:13 +0000

There are a lot of ways to learn VMware ESX & Virtual Infrastructure – books, classroom, video, or just trial and error. In my opinion, video training is one of the best options because you can learn at your own pace, its cost effective, you can review it as often as you want, you can learn on the go (with iPod/iPhone/MP3 training), and its the most fun!

If you aren’t familiar with Train Signal, they are the global leader in computer training for IT Professionals. Their VMware training course covers not only ESX/ESXi 3.5 but also the entire Virtual Infrastructure Suite.

Learn what Train Signal’s VMware ESX video training offers you in this new video:

Click here to watch a sample video or to order your very own VMware ESX Server training course!

Understanding and Customizing VMware ESX Server Performance Charts

admin — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:27:41 +0000

Learn how what VMware ESX Performance charts can do for you and how to customize them in my latest article from VirtualizationAdmin.com:

Understanding and Customizing VMware ESX Server Performance Charts

Learn how vKernel Modeler can help your VMware Performance

David Davis — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 07:29:02 +0000

In this Petri review by VMware expert & VCP, Gabrie Van Zanten, you will learn what vKernel Modeler is & how it can help you. You don’t want to be in the dark when it comes to making VMware infrastructure decisions. Modeler gives you real imperical decision making data so you can make the right choice for your VMware infrastructure!

Read the full review at: How to Model and Predict Changes to your VMware ESX Infrastructure using vKernel Modeler

Learn how to configure and monitor VMware ESX Servers with SNMP

David Davis — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:27:22 +0000

In my latest SearchVMware.com article, I show you, step by step, how to enable and configure SNMP in VMware ESX and ESXi Server. From there, I move on to demonstrating a few different applications that can be used to monitor your VMware ESX Servers using SNMP. Monitoring VMware ESX Servers with SNMP applications is becoming more and more common so I hope you will read my article to learn more about it.

To see the full article, visit: Use SNMP with VMware ESX to monitor server statistics

Download a Free VMware ESX Performance Monitoring tool – VM Monitor

David Davis — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:38:47 +0000

SolarWinds free VM Monitor makes it easy to quickly check the health of your VMware ESX server by monitoring CPU, memory utilization, virtual machine status. The Petri IT Knowledgebase has recently made this tool available to all site visitors. To download your free VM Monitor tool, just visit: Monitor VMware ESX Server Performance for free – VM Monitor