**UPDATE** 9/8/2011 - This list has been updated to Top 10 Free VMware vSphere Tools and Utilities for 2011

**Update** 7/22/2010 If you want to dive into performance, take a look at VM Advanced ISO. Free Tools for Advanced Tasks

Over the past month I have installed and tested almost every single tool on my previous blog post of A List of FREE VMware vSphere Tools. I will be doing a demo of these Top 10 tools and utilities at the next Kentuckiana Virtualization Users Group meeting on May 21st. (note: I did not put any free tools from VMware in the top 10. Why? Alot of products from VMware are awesome, I just wanted to give other vendors and contributers of the VMware community a chance to shine.)

How the scoring went down:

1. Can It be used on ESX, ESXi, and vCenter?
   • 1 point for standalone ESX, 2 points for standalone ESXi, and 2 points for vCenter
2. Ease of installation
   • 1 to 5 points on ease of installation
3. Feature Rich
   • 1 to 5 points based how many different features are included
4. How well does it perform
   • 1 to 5 points based on how well it's main feature performs
5. Can this be used as an everyday tool?
   • 1 to 5 points based on if it's a one time use or if it can be used everyday. More points for an everyday tool

Without further ado, here are your Top 10 Free products to use with VMware vSphere

Someone on the VMTN forums was able to use the Free ESXi license with ESX. Not sure if this is a bug or not, but as @mattliebowitz has pointed out, it is against the EULA.

Here is how it's done.

• Go get your Free ESXi4 License Key.
• Go download the ESX4 DVD as part of your vSphere Trial.
• Start Installing ESX4

There was an article on the VMTN forums the other day. Someone was sitting in the same position I was almost a year ago. They were confronted with a task of being the sole person responsible for buying the shared storage for their vSphere implementation. Having a team tackle this is the best approach so everyone can be happy with the decision, but when you're on your own, it's a very daunting task. Your strapped spending 5 or more hours a day just reading websites, watching WebEx's, or on the phone listening to a vendor. Here's a few tips from what I learned in my experience to those out there that need a little help in making their decision.

1. How much storage do you need? It's a good baseline for talking to any storage vendor. 3TB vs 3PB makes a difference. Especially when some storage companies have different products geared towards your level of business.
2. How much storage will you need in the future? You might not think about it now, but you have to anticipate storage growth. Just how fast are you going to grow? Some vendors have 1 model of their product and they can add on to it. Some vendors will hit a TB or drive capacity on their models. Some might just try to sell you the next model up.

EDIT: 11/29/2011

I have no updated these to reflect vSphere 5 changes!

VMware vSphere 5 Host Network Design Layout and Configuration

Another free consulting gig from yours truly. I was asked for some help through VMTN Forums and LinkedIn on planning a host NIC design. The design incorporated 6 NICs and it was going to be used as a proof of concept based on all vSphere features. Well, I couldn't just do a design based on that alone so I figured I would diagram out a few different solutions for the masses.

So here we go. If you want to do just a proof of concept and don't care about doing it "right", you can always design it as pictured below. This design gives you the ability to incorporate all of vSphere's features and should have plenty of bandwidth to take care of everything. Of course, this is proof of concept so I didn't take NIC redundancy into account. This design is solely to give you the ability to test out all of vSphere's features. One thing I constantly see mistaken on VMTN forums about NIC design is the Fault Tolerance network. To my understanding, when you enable FT on a VM, there is going to be tons of traffic flowing through that particular NIC and VLAN so you want to have it segregated from everything else. So if you are designing a vSphere environment to use Fault Tolerance, I would think about adding a few more NIC cards and checking out my blog post on vSphere Host NIC Design - 10 NICs. **UPDATED 5/28/2010** Check the bottom of the page for a layout to use FT.

NOTE: vmnic0, vmnic2, vmnic3 must all be configured as trunk ports on your physical switch, use VLAN tagging on your vSwitch Port Groups to allow traffic to flow.

VKernel is announcing a new free product called AppVIEW. AppVIEW will monitor up to 5 VMs within a virtual infrastructure. AppVIEW doesn't care what applications you have installed (which you may think based on the name) but it's measuring the utilization of particular VMs to help better fit your environment. The goal of the product is to monitor the resource allocation to your 5 most critical VMs, find hidden performance constraints, and examine performance of virtualized applications. If you have a web application that once ran on a dedicated physical server and is now a virtualized application experiencing performance issues, the only thing that changed is the virtualization layer, and 9 times out of 10, it's related to some sort of capacity constraint.

VKernel AppVIEW is a small 2mb installation and works with any size infrastructure. If you read my blog on VKernel Capacity View and took the two minutes to install it, you saw that Capacity View gives a good amount of generic information, but details are missing to help alleviate issues. This is one spot where VKernel AppVIEW breaks that boundary.

This has been an awesome week for me filled with virtualization from 8:00am Monday till 5:00pm Friday. I've given my cloud presentation once again, briefed on an announcement of a new free product (that will be updated on Monday), visited the VMware Express bus, attended Virtualization Forum in Cincinnati, and attended Louisville VMUG to hear more about Veeam SureBackup. During all this madness, two products really drew my attention and it's worth letting other know about.

Over the past few days, I figured I would give vShield Zones a shot. It's a brand new feature to vSphere and touted as a "virtual firewall" inside of your VMware environment. VMware describes vShield Zones as: "Monitor and enforce network traffic within your virtual datacenter to meet corporate security policies and ensure regulatory compliance.  VMware vShield Zones enables you to run your applications efficiently within a shared computing resource pool, while still maintaining trust and network segmentation of users and sensitive data."

A few reasons why people would want to use vShield Zones:

1. You have Virtual Machines in your datacenter, but they can't talk to each other for any reason. For instance, you work in a large company and business units don't want their application server to have contact with anything else in the company except their people or their servers.
2. You want all your VMs to talk, but not on every single port. If certain applications on multiple servers need to talk on a specific port, you can cut down on loud noise traffic by only allowing certain ports to talk.
3. The DMZ. Set your VMs up with an IP address to the outside world and start blocking requests.
4. From Eric Siebert's article below: "In some cases, a physical firewall can’t protect a VM. For example, if you have multiple VMs on the same vSwitch and port group on a host server, the network traffic between them never leaves the host to travel over the physical network, so a physical firewall cannot provide protection. Virtual firewalls are also complementary to physical firewalls and provide an additional layer of protection for your virtual machines."

EDIT: 11/29/2011

I have no updated these to reflect vSphere 5 changes!

VMware vSphere 5 Host Network Design Layout and Configuration

I was approached by someone via LinkedIn and the VMTN Community Forums this past week about possible ways to design a vSphere Host NIC layout. The customer has 12 NICs for each server (talk about making it easy), has Enterprise Plus licensing, but wasn't planning on using features such as Fault Tolerance or Virtual Distributed Switches. With that said, here is how I came up with a few designs.

Table Key
2 on-board NICs = vmnic0, vmnic1
4 expansion NICs = vmnic2, vmnic3, vmnic4, vmnic5
4 expansion NICs = vmnic6, vmnic7, vmnic8, vmnic9
2 expansion NICs = vmnic10, vmnic11


Option 1 easier and less configuration:
vSwitch0