July 16, 2021

vSpeaking Podcast: Top 10 VMware Admin Tools

VMware admins use a number of tools to help monitor, manage, and optimize their virtual environments. Recently we surveyed the VMware community to find the 10 most popular VMware admin tools. This week on the Virtually Speaking Podcast Pete and John welcome Duncan Epping and William Lam to walk through the results.

vSpeaking Podcast - Top 10 VMware Admin Tools

VMware admins use a number of tools to help monitor, manage, and optimize their virtual environments. Recently we surveyed the VMware community to find the 10 most popular VMware admin tools. This week on the Virtually Speaking Podcast Pete and John welcome Duncan Epping and William Lam to walk through the results. As you already know, there are a lot more than 10 VMware admin tools. This post reveals the top 10 from the poll as well as a list of lesser-known tools that admins might find useful. 

Links Mentioned

Top 10 VMware Admin Tools

The Top 10 VMware admin Tools are listed below. For the full list of tools be sure to read the blog Top 10 VMware Admin Tools

#1 PowerCLI

#2 in 2019

VMware PowerCLI is a command-line and scripting tool built on Windows PowerShell and provides more than 600 cmdlets for managing and automating vSphere, vCloud, vRealize Operations Manager, vSAN, NSX-T, VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware HCX, VMware Site Recovery Manager, and VMware Horizon environments.

Visit the PowerCLI page on VMware {code} and choose your release to learn about PowerCLI.

# To install PowerCLI just open a PowerShell console and run the command below:
Install-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI

#2 RVTools by Rob de Veij

#1 in 2019

More than 1.4 million copies downloaded

RVTools is a VMware utility that connects to your vCenter server and captures every bit of information about your virtual machines (VMs) and your ESXi hosts that you’d want to know. It is able to list information about VMs, CPU, Memory, Disks, Partitions, Network, Floppy drives, CD drives, Snapshots, VMware tools, Resource pools, Clusters, ESX hosts, HBAs, NICs, Switches, Ports, Distributed Switches, Distributed Ports, Service consoles, VM Kernels, Datastores, multi-path info, license info, and health checks. It does it fast and in a format that readily exports to Excel.

The download is free, but you have to register with Veeam before you get your download. By downloading, you agree to join Veeam’s mailing list, which you can choose to unsubscribe from, but don’t unsubscribe too quickly, Veeam offers some great VMware-related products, many free of charge.

The latest version is of RVTools is 4.1.4

Download RVTools

#3 ESXTOP

#4 in 2019

With vSphere comes a very handy tool, called ESXTOP, which is great for helping IT Pros pinpoint performance issues quickly. It is a command-line tool that can be used to collect data and provide real-time information on the resource usage of a vSphere environment such as CPU, disk, memory, and network usage.

#4 vCheck by Alan Renouf

#3 in 2019

vCheck is a PowerShell HTML framework script, the script is designed to run as a scheduled task before you get into the office to present you with key information via an email directly to your inbox in a nice easily readable format. This script picks on the key known issues and potential issues scripted as plugins for various technologies written as PowerShell scripts and reports it all in one place so all you do in the morning is check your email.

#5 vCenter Converter

#9 in 2019

vCenter Converter quickly converts local and remote physical machines into virtual machines without any downtime. The Centralized management console allows you to queue up and monitor many simultaneous conversions, both local and remote, (i.e. headquarters and branch offices).

#6 vDiagram

The vDiagram project is based on a PowerShell script originally created by @alanrenouf. It was then picked up by @jtrainmar & @vDiagram_Tony. vDiagram draws VMware environments in Visio. Download vDiagram 2.0

#7 AsBuilt Reports by Tim Carman

#6 in 2019

AsBuilt Report is a configuration document framework that uses Microsoft PowerShell and PScribo, to generate and build as-built report documents in HTML, XML, Text & MS Word document formats.

AsBuilt Report is an open-source project developed primarily for IT professionals to allow them to easily produce ‘as built’ configuration documentation that is clear and consistent, across multiple IT vendors and technologies.

The framework allows users to easily run and generate reports against their IT environments and provides contributors the ability to easily create new reports for any IT vendor and/or technology that supports PowerShell and/or a RESTful API.

#8 mRemoteNG

mRemoteNG is a fork of mRemote: an open-source, tabbed, multi-protocol, remote connections manager. mRemoteNG adds bug fixes and new features to mRemote.

It allows you to view all of your remote connections in a simple yet powerful tabbed interface.

mRemoteNG supports the following protocols:

  • RDP (Remote Desktop/Terminal Server)
  • VNC (Virtual Network Computing)
  • ICA (Citrix Independent Computing Architecture)
  • SSH (Secure Shell)
  • Telnet (TELecommunication NETwork)
  • HTTP/HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)
  • rlogin
  • Raw Socket Connections

#9 HCI Bench

#10 in 2019

HCIBench stands for "Hyper-converged Infrastructure Benchmark". It's essentially an automation wrapper around the popular and proven open-source benchmark tools: Vdbench and Fio that make it easier to automate testing across an HCI cluster. HCIBench aims to simplify and accelerate customer POC performance testing in a consistent and controlled way. The tool fully automates the end-to-end process of deploying test VMs, coordinating workload runs, aggregating test results, performance analysis, and collecting necessary data for troubleshooting purposes.

HCIBench is not only a benchmark tool designed for vSAN, but also could be used to evaluate the performance of all kinds of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Storage in vSphere environment.

#10 vSAN ReadyNode Sizer

vSAN ReadyNodes provide the most flexible server options to build Hyper-Converged Infrastructure based on VMware vSAN. Selecting a vSAN ReadyNode is simple. Choose the vSAN version you want to deploy, pick a ReadyNode profile based on your specific needs, select your preferred server vendor, and then pick one of the available models.

Refer to this step-by-step guide on How to Configure a vSAN ReadyNode

Episode 184

The Virtually Speaking Podcast

The Virtually Speaking Podcast is a technical podcast dedicated to discussing VMware topics related to storage and availability. Each episode Pete Flecha and John Nicholson bring in various subject matter experts from VMware and within the industry to discuss their respective areas of expertise. If you’re new to the Virtually Speaking Podcast check out all episodes on vSpeakingPodcast.com and follow on Twitter @VirtSpeaking.

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