Today while taking a break from writing some project related IP, I kicked over to my home lab rebuild that was pretty much stalled in lieu of the other things I have running around these days. While I was waiting for some things to update I decided to take a look at one of the free tools the folks over at SolarWinds have called VM Monitor. Now I have always been a fan of both their free tools as well as some of their full versions. In the next month or so I may be kicking the tires on more of them just to see what they have these days.
This little gem is actually perfect for me in my home lab since I only have a single physical ESX host. The tool is very easy to set up and I actually had nothing on the ESXi 5.0 host to configure. It gives you some instant real-time data of all the Virtual Machines running on the selected host. Seeing as I only have one host running, this is a perfect tool for me to keep an eye on them without hitting the host or firing up vCenter Server. So how do you set this thing up? Easy as 1….2….3
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Step #1 – Download the Tool
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Step #2 – Configure for the ESX server
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Step #3 – Look at the details of your Virtual Machines
What you get is a really nice graphical view directly from your windows workstation of the real-time stats of the Virtual Machines on the host. This little guy is so easy to set up and get running you should give it a try if you have not yet. This tool has been out for a while, but is still pretty cool to use. I will be downloading some of their other tools as well to see how they work with vSphere and vCloud Director once the lab is re-built.
