VAnalyser vSphere Analysis and Recommendation Tool

Abstract: In the current era of huge datacenters opting for Virtual infrastructure, vSphere provides a vast array of features which makes virtualization very effective and flexible. Major challenge ahead of vSphere administrators is to analyse the capabilities of each ESXi hosts in datacenter and to find out the server which is capable to run a specific vSphere feature. This paper proposes a utility 'vAnalyser' to scan the servers in vSphere datacenter and generate a 'feature to server' compatibility matrix. Datacenter Administrator can refer to this compatibility matrix and quickly identify the server(s) which fulfil the requirements to use a vSphere feature. Currently users do not have such a tool to get a consolidated report to analyse vSphere features usable on a server. For example , Administrators want to know the servers in datacenter on which they can deploy a Virtual Machine of size more than 2TB or list of servers in datacenter between which vMotion is possible. Report generated by vAnalyser answers these queries of feature compatibility requirements. This tool can even be used by vSphere testers to identify servers with desired capabilities to test a specific vSphere feature. The tool will use VMware vSphere Management SDK to trace through the datacenter and prepare the matrix. We show the approach in which data can be fetched from datacenters and presented using an elementary prototype.

Keywords: vSphere, ESX, vAnalyser, Recommendation tool