This has been floating around the virtualization community for awhile, but saw an official announcement of the VI Powershell Toolkit beta, a new management interface for VMware virtualization platform.
Do you think they’re going to aim for the same cross-platform management coming in SCVMM vNext?
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The next release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (currently dubbed “SCVMM vNext”) aims to consolidate management of virtual machines from multiple platforms and sources (VS 2005, VMware 3.x, and Xen in a future release). But to really win the war in the end, I believe MS needs to target the following key areas:
- DR / HA - MS currently has no true VMotion equivalent today. Addressing disaster recovery scenarios is definitely a key area. Check out the High Availability with Hyper-V webcast.
- Performance - By some estimates I’ve seen, VMware outperforms Virtual Server 2005 by 15-20%. We’ll see how far Windows 2008 cuts into that.
- Make virtualization accessible for the mid-market - Virtualization has found it’s way into shops as small as 35 users amongst my clients, but the VMware mgmt interfaces (and let’s face it, virtualization concepts in general) are tough for IT generalists to grasp. Delivering a better mouse-trap to this market is critical for adoption.
- Appliances - With the release of 3i, VMware enterered the world of plug-and-play virtualization with minimal user knowledge of necessary configuration items. This would no doubt ease deployment not only in mid-market, but branch office deployment in the enterprise space.
Read more about Microsoft’s plans for the next version of VMM HERE.
VMware ESX 3.x / VI3 provides a variety of methods for collecting critical performance and configuration data, including SNMP, Syslog, ESXTOP utility (via ssh), the SDK Web Service and the now deprecated ESX COM API.
Jonathan Hambrook has created a very nice 60-page how-to guide taking users through the configuration process of discovery and configuration of basic (and free!) ESX monitoring using SNMP and Telnet. He put many hours into this no doubt. You can down his guide HERE. Very well done Jonathan.
With no budget this is a great start. For those who can spare an extra $975 US (retail), nWorks offers a full-featured ESX management pack leveraging all the available data sources, most importantly the SDK Web Service, which is a very rich data source in the latest release. For a demo of the nWorks offering, see the demo on their product homepage at: http://www.nworks.com/vmware/
