As a VMware administrator, it's important to have a toolkit of utilities and applications that you can rely on to help you with your day-to-day tasks, as well as those bigger projects. In this article, we'll take a look at some of the top VMware administrator tools for managing your virtual environment.
1. PowerCLI: This is a powerful command-line interface that lets you automate all aspects of vSphere management, including configuration, provisioning, monitoring, and troubleshooting. PowerCLI is a scripting tool that enables you to automate the administration of VMware vSphere infrastructure platforms. PowerCLI provides a set of cmdlets that you can use to manage your vSphere environment. PowerCLI is integrated with vCenter and the components it can manage. PowerCLI enables you to manage your vSphere environment from the command line or from scripts.
2. RVTools: This is a handy tool that provides detailed information about your VMware environment, including datastores, VMs, ESXi hosts, and more.
3. ESXTOP: This is a performance monitoring tool that provides real-time data on CPU, memory, storage, and network usage in your VMware environment.
4. vCheck by Alan Renouf: This is a comprehensive health check and reporting tool for vSphere that can be run on a regular basis to ensure your environment is running smoothly.
5. VMware vCenter Converter: This is a tool that can be used to convert physical machines or third-party virtual machines into VMware virtual machines.
6. vDiagram: This is a tool that allows you to create detailed diagrams of your VMware environment, including datacenters, clusters, VMs, and more.
7. AsBuilt Reports by Tim Carman: This is a reporting tool that can be used to generate documentation for your VMware environment.
8. mRemoteNG: This is a handy tool that allows you to manage multiple remote connections from a single interface.
9. HCI Bench: This is a performance benchmarking tool for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) that can be used to compare the performance of different HCI solutions.
10. vSAN ReadyNode Sizer: This is a tool that can be used to size and configure a VMware vSAN ReadyNode for your specific environment. The vSAN ReadyNode Sizer is a free tool that makes it easy to find the right mix of compute, storage, and networking for your vSAN deployment. With just a few clicks, you can generate a report that includes everything you need to deploy a vSAN cluster including recommended hardware configurations, bill of materials, and network topologies.
11. IOInsight – VMware Fling: This is a tool that provides insights into storage I/O performance in your VMware environment.
12. VMware vRealize Log Insight (vRLI): This is a centralized logging and analytics solution that helps you troubleshoot problems in your VMware vSphere environment. It collects log data from your vSphere infrastructure and analyses it in real time to help you identify and resolve problems quickly.
13. VMware Skyline: This is a proactive support tool that uses machine learning to proactively identify and resolve issues in your VMware environment.
14. vDocumentation (Ariel and Edgar Sanchez): This is a documentation tool that can be used to generate documentation for your VMware environment.
15. Postman: This is a tool that can be used to test and develop APIs for use with VMware products.
16. VMware OS Optimizer: This is a tool that can be used to optimize the operating system settings for use with VMware products. VMware OS Optimizer for Horizon is a desktop management tool that helps you optimize and manage your virtual desktop environment. It helps you to reduce the number of operating systems you need to support and maintain, and provides you with greater control over your desktop fleet.
17. WinSSHterm: This is a great utility for managing SSH connections to multiple servers. It's easy to use and saves you having to remember all the different connection details.
18. Linux VSM: This is a must-have tool for any Linux server administration. It's a great way to manage server configurations, monitor performance and ensure uptime.
19. Hyper.is: This is a great tool for managing your VMware vSphere environment. It provides a web-based interface that makes it easy to view and manage your virtual machines, datastores, networking and more.
20. pgAdmin: This is a great tool for managing PostgreSQL databases. It's easy to use and provides a variety of features such as database backups, query optimization and more.
21. Git: This is a essential tool for any developer or DevOps engineer. It's a great way to manage code repositories and collaborate on code development.
22. Visual Studio Code: This is a great tool for editing and debugging code. It's easy to use and has a variety of features that make it ideal for development workflows.
23. VMware vRealize Orchestrator: This is a great tool for automating VMware vSphere tasks. It's easy to use and provides a drag-and-drop interface for creating and executing workflows.
24. Sexigraf and Sexigraf for vSAN: These two tools are essential for any VMware vSAN administrator. They provide detailed performance monitoring and capacity planning capabilities.
25. PoCLI: This is a great tool for managing VMware PowerCLI scripts. It's easy to use and provides a way to organize, manage and execute PowerCLI scripts.
26. Ansible: This is a great tool for automating tasks across multiple servers. Ansible for VMware is a powerful configuration management tool that can be used to manage various components in a VMware vCenter environment. Ansible modules can be used to manage vCenter server instances, ESXi hosts, and virtual machines. Ansible can also be used to configure network settings, storage, and security settings. Ansible playbooks can be used to automate the provisioning and configuration of VMware environments.
27. Terraform: This is a great tool for provisioning and managing infrastructure as code. Terraform is a powerful tool for provisioning and managing infrastructure in a VMware environment. It has native support for many VMware products, including vSphere, vCenter, and NSX-T. Terraform can be used to provision and manage virtual machines, networks, storage, and other infrastructure components in a VMware environment.
28. Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility: This is a great tool for migrating workloads between VMware vSphere environments. The Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility simplifies the process of migrating workloads across vCenter servers. With this tool, you can easily select a source and destination vCenter server, as well as specify which VMs should be migrated. It also provides a preview feature that allows you to see what VMs will be migrated before initiating the migration.
29. VMware REST API and API Explorer: These two tools are essential for any VMware administrator who needs to work with the VMware REST API. They provide a way to discover and test API endpoints. API Explorer is a tool that allows you to interact with the VMware REST API and try out different API calls and see the results.
30. Onyx: This is a great tool for automating VMware vSphere tasks. It's easy to use and provides a way to automate various vSphere tasks such as VM provisioning, resource monitoring and more.
These are just a few of the many great VMware administrator tools that are available. These tools can help you with both BAU tasks and complex projects. Choose the ones that best fit your needs and start simplifying your VMware administration today.