Are you looking to make the most out of your investment in VMware automation tools? Today, we’ll help you choose the best tools for your needs.
Modern-day enterprises are always looking to deliver IT services and apps in a faster and more efficient way. In this regard, they use virtualization servers to eliminate the burden of purchasing and maintaining physical hardware.
But there is a catch. Most IT admins find it hard to handle the ever-increasing number of virtual assets. This is particularly true for organizations that fail to use automation tools to address this problem.
VMware enables organizations and enterprises to build cloud environments that increase business, agility, and operational efficiency dramatically. In short, automation tools help organizations to complete tasks in a shorter time and with as little intervention as possible from IT.
VMware has plenty of automation tools IT admins can use to get their jobs done. These tools help with the implementation, maintenance, and backing up of virtual machines.
Here’s a roundup of some of the best automation tools from VMware.
Best VMware Automation Tools
This VMware tool connects to your organization’s vCenter server and records information about your VMs (virtual machines) and VMware ESXi hosts. RVTools lists information about CPU, VMs, memory, disks, floppy drives, partitions, network, CD drives, and other critical areas. It does this extremely fast, and you can export the data to Excel.
This is a command-line tool built on Windows PowerShell. PowerCLI comes with more than 600 cmdlets that allow you to manage and automate vCloud, vSphere, vSAN, vRealize Operations Manager, VMware Cloud on AWS, and other tools. The tool is free and flexible and is a great addition to any IT admin’s arsenal.
vCheck is a reporting framework that you can use to generate HTML reports. It’s a script designed to run as a scheduled task before IT admins get into the office. It provides you with critical information about your VMs through e-mail. It presents the information in an easily digestible format.
vCheck basically picks on key existing issues and potential issues and gives the report in one place. You get this report by checking your e-mail every morning.
This is a handy tool that comes with vSphere. It helps IT admins to identify performance issues as they arise. ESXTOP is a command-line tool that collects data and provides real-time information about how you can use resources in a vSphere environment. This information includes CPU, memory disk, and network usage.
This tool gives IT the ability to move VMs in bulk via a graphical user interface. You get to move the VMs seamlessly between vCenter servers. Some key features of this utility tool include:
- UI driven VM migration
- REST API for the automation of migration tasks
- Enables batch migration of VMs in parallel
- Auto population of inventory to ease management
This configuration document framework uses PScribo and Microsoft PowerShell to create report documents in text, xml, html, and MS Word documents.
This open-source tool allows IT to create “as-built” configuration documentation that is consistent and clear across VMs.
- vSphere 6.5 REST API and API Explorer
This tool allows you to search, browse, and inspect APIs across major VMware platforms. This includes vRealize, vSphere, NSX, and vCloud Suite.
Onyx is a standalone tool that acts as a proxy between the vCenter Server and the vSphere Client. It’s responsible for monitoring communication networks between them and translating it into an executable PowerShell code. You can later modify and save this code into a reusable script or function.
- HCIBench
HCIBench is an automation tool that wraps around the popular VDbench tool. This tool makes it easy to automate testing across HCI clusters. It attempts to accelerate and simplify customer point of contact performance testing in a controlled and consistent way.
HCIBench fully automates the end-to-end process of deploying and testing VMs. It also coordinates workloads, aggregates test results, and collects data for troubleshooting. Benchmarking is not HCIBench’s only function. You can also use it in the performance evaluation of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Storage in an organization’s vSphere environment.
- VMware vRealize Orchestrator
This is one tool that doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves. But it’s hands down one of the most powerful VMware tools available to IT admins. And the best part is, it doesn’t require additional licensing if you have a vCenter license. This tool allows you to create workflows to automate many of the tasks you do daily. You do this through an easy-to-use graphical interface. vRealize Orchestrator comes with a bunch of plug-ins to help you add functionality easily.
Selecting the Right VMware Automation Tools
So how do you pick the right tools for your organization? You need to start by giving these tools a test run. You want to have some first-hand experience using them to understand how they work. It’s trial and error until you find a tool that suits the needs of your organization.