Back in May I posted an article about VMTurbo releasing a new free virtual appliance called Performance and Efficiency Reporter. Yesterday, I took the 10 minutes to actually get this puppy up and running and I'm actually very pleased to see the results.
At first, I thought to myself, how good is this actually going to be? After just 1 night of letting the appliance do its job and collect statistics, I'm very happy with the turnout. And come to find out, it works with Free ESXi as well! This is a great tool to have some reports emailed either to yourself or your managers every morning so you can see what yesterday's virtual environment looked like. The Host/VM Resource Utilization Heatmap is the best report out of all of them because it's a summary of what is out there. If you have a large environment, I would think this report could get a bit bulky.
Here are all the reports you have access to once it runs after 1 night...
There is a potential security flaw. Once the appliance is up and running, there are no passwords needed to get into the reporter configuration. You open it up, add your vCenters and standalone hosts and it just goes. Anyone with the ability to scan the network and find the appliance could easily delete your configuration and report history. Not a huge security flaw, but its one.
I've attached a few of the reports from my home lab at the bottom of this page so you can view different kinds of reports. The reports go in depth using CPU ready time, storage latency, IOPS on a per VM basis, datastore latency, etc. Some really great reports. If you are only going to look at 1 report, make sure it's the Host/VM Resource Utilization Heatmap. Take the 10 minutes to download and install the appliance, it will be worth it!