VM Management Tools

VM Management Tools

1. Virtualization management tools are designed to administer the operations and processes of a virtualization environment. The number of virtual machines running in the data center can reach hundreds and thousands. For this reason, it becomes imperative to have visibility into the virtualization environment to understand the overall performance and health of the system.

2. vCenter Server

   • Pros
     • Good UI.
     • Mostly intuitive to navigate
     • Allows easy management and snapshot of VMs.
   • Cons
     • Updating was not the most intuitive.
     • Some things were very easy and intuitive while some decisions just didn't make much sense.

3. FogLight

   • [Foglight is] used to monitor virtualized environment (VMware) Active Directory, Exchange, SQL Server w/ Analytics and other physical servers and software subsystems.
   • Pros
     • Graphing and visualization of complex data sets
     • Automation of common tasks for response to known issues
   • Cons'
     • Groovy requires a learning curve/specialized skill set for modifying rule sets
     • Other products offer more advanced analytics so it seems they have been falling behind. If this were a very inexpensive product I would not fault this but the licensing for Foglight is not inexpensive.

4. Nedio

   • We use Nerdio to manage the Microsoft Azure server environment. It makes management tasks easier to execute. Azure tasks can be complicated and Nerdio simplifies those tasks. We use it for all our Azure management. Whether we're creating a new environment or just managing an existing server environment, we use the Nerdio tool set.
   • Pros
     • Simplifies management tasks for Azure
     • Simplifies creation of servers