Vkernel – Optimization Pack for Esx, Vcenter or Vsphere

March 12, 2010 admin IT Shop, Virtualization, 8

OP pack has helped  to identify my whole virtualized environment at work from an eagle eye view. I initially ran it at home but with a single esxi host, it was not able to tell me anything new that I didn’t know. Moreover the VM to Physical Hosts ratio were far better for this product to show its results at work.

Getting OP pack is quite easy, a simple registration here and click of a download button you get OP downloading in no time.

Once the pack has been downloaded:-

1. Unzip the package
2. Run VMconvertor to have the VM files pushed to a platform to run it from meaning an Esx, Esxi or probably VMware server , workstation and player (the last 3 I haven’t tried tho)

This is because it’s packaged within a Suse Linux sandbox fully configured and ready to run in no time. Power up the VM and wait for it to pick up an IP address. Once the box is up and running I would highly recommend setting it up with a static IP, since the license pack that gets send to register the device may be depended on that.

Once the IP has been set, fire up your favourite browser to the location of the OP VM and you will reach your login screen:

The default username and password is Vkernel which can be changed easily.

Go through the initial configuration of adding your esx, esxi ‘s or Vcenter to start the initial configuration and study of your network. This will take a while depending on your setup.

Once the initial configurations are collected you will be presented with the following screen

Clicking on VM Stats on the right hand side will give you an overall picture of your environment as shown. I was only able to add 4 of my esxi servers as the trial license is limited to 8 sockets.

The left hand pane also shows a quick overview of all your VM’s and Datastores. I am sure this view is available on Vcenter as well but for an Esxi user this is really helpful.

You can get to the Capacity Rightsizer from the View Detail button or click the same option from the right side

The following shows the various tabs available under Rightsizer. As you can see there is an execute button which is disabled under trial version, I guess but may be useful but I would rather do this manually based on the recommendations:

Now let’s get into the Capacity Waterfinder

Various tabs take you through some really good and surprising ( found some long lost VM’s lol J )

The inventory TAB on the right hand side gives an overall picture of the CPU , Memory and storage of all the VM’s that have been added:

Hit home and let’s get under the hood of OP or the configuration tab

During initial setup you are provided with an option to choose the DB where the data needs to sit. I choose the Embedded DB since I didn’t want to go through the hassle of setting up communication between an external and the OP box. I am sure its quite straight forward. Anyways you get to tweek it here as well

Configration related to your esx, esxi’s Vcenter info can be found here

You can setup how the Dollars should be read as well threshold settings and so forth.

Next lets jump into the notifications and there are the usual suspects such as email and snmp which is quite straightforward to setup. Most of it would have been finished by the time you have started OP during initial setup.

Users tab to reset or change your settings from the default login details.

License tab is quite important as you need to add the different esxi in my case to the licenses sockets tab.

Unless you do this step all the information on the left hand side will be greyed out and you won’t be able to view any other information as well.

So according to OP pack I have the following savings waiting for me, but how much of it is true numerical value I am not sure but this product was really useful and highly recommend for those with Vcenter or esx clients. Though Vkernel doesn’t pass any information about its use with esxi servers I haven’t run into any issues at the same time. So I guess its all good if you are running esxi 4 and above .

Cheers

Read about Vkernel OP from here .

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esx, esxi, OP pack, vcenter, virtualization, vkernel, vmware, vshpere

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