Recommendation of AWESOME vmware apps from my friend at www.webhackblog.com

UPDATE:

A co-worker of mine pointed out this is actually also available as a standalone program!

http://www.iometer.org/



Hi Guys!
 
So my friend from http://www.webhackblog.com pointed me to a bunch of very very awesome tools for Vmware and storage related stuff now that I am getting into my storage! Plus some Great VMWARE OVA templates.

I had never heard of these before, so if you had good on ya! They ROCK!

go to
http://labs.vmware.com/flings/

You will find a variety of awesome handy little VMWARE tools, I am sure some of you could find ones that are just perfect for you, but for me I was most interested in the I/O Analyzer for my HDD!

The I/O Analyzer is a VM that will benchmark your storage, super easy to use, you can even use it to benchmark your external storage!!!

Very Cool, how?

Just deploy the OVF Template and then check the edit settings to see a disk, like so

I recommend making the disk bigger, when you first open the VM it will have a 100 meg disk, delete this and create a much bigger one, and be sure to thick provision.

THIS IS A MANDATORY STEP IF YOU WANT YOUR RESULTS TO ACTUALLY MEAN ANYTHING, without it at 100 meg you just get everything cached, and you will suddenly believe you have a SUPER SAN because all of a sudden you can do 62000 IOPS per second on a 7200 RPM hard drive (which is what happened to me when I first ran it 100 meg ;))

 You could also create it on a external datastore, the datastore you put your VM's on or whatever your trying to test really: as long as VMWARE has it as a datastore you can test the throughput!


Anyway, Once this is done just boot the virtual image


You will get a screen like this:



Go ahead and either configure network if you have to, or if you have DHCP and it will work for this VM's VNIC just go ahead and login.

Username: root
Password: vmware


You will now get a terminal, this thing runs X because it has a program in the background that needs x server to run. (WTF? XServer on my Server? I suppose it is an "appliance")


To start a new terminal, right click anywhere (no the bar at the bottom is NOT a start bar) then select terminal from the right click menu.



do an ifconfig to find out what your I/O Analyzer VM has picked up as an IP address.


Browse to this address in your favorite webbrowser

Click on I/O Meter at the top, and let's create a configuration:



 
This might not be 100 percent correct but worked 100 percent for me, set the hostname to loopback of the actual Appliance, username to root and password is again VMWARE, click Add Host, you MUST do this before trying to run or it won't work

Once you have done that, the page should refresh or you can refresh it and now on the "Choose how to run IOMeter Tests" you should be able to actually a hostname which is the VM itself, then select a VM (the I/O analyzer VM), select a workload spec (so different kind of tests for different things obviously) and enter 127.0.0.1 as the VM IP address. Then click ADD, do NOT set a run duration until you have actually added a worker.

Finally, set a run duration of at least 120 seconds according to the manual (Yes some people still read them!) I set it as 150.

Ok NOW you can click run ;)


If you did it right, you should actually see the little GUI program start on the console of your I/O Analyzer VM:






You can click    on results display, then drag the slider the update every 1 second, then click the radiobox to say "Last Update"

You can now watch the test live!! Yay!!!





It's like watching F1 Qualifying or something! Horay!

In the bottom right hand corner you can see how much running time remains, when it's finished the screen will close, go ahead and go back to the Web Page and click on results.

Click on the drop down and select your most recent test.

I tested my little 7200 RPM Hdd that came with my C200, not too bad, about what I would expect for a 7200RPM HDD (no Raid)




There are also two other tools that I will mention in a further blog in more detail, the first one is ONYX.

this will actually proxy all your connections to the vSPHERE console and actually show you what commands the vSPHERE is doing in the background in terms of vSPHERE PowerCLI!!!

So now you can tell what commands are being written and therefore can script! I see auto deploying Cisco UCS Blades in my future ;) 

 Finally, the last thing is, if you have VMWARE Workstation 8, You can actually connect to your ESXi Servers and have all your Virtual Machines viewed on a single window, pretty handy! Especially since you can actually specify multiple servers (unlike in vSPHERE) but you can't modify anything to do with the Host that it is running on.

To do this, go to vmware workstation and go to to File -> Connect to Server

fill in your details and click Connect.

Walla you can now see all the virtual machines running on the Host!


This could be considered a Guest Blog Post from www.webhacksblog.com since he showed me ALL of these, Thanks Buddy!