Virtual Management and Reporting Tools

[Skiver Veteran]

Hi All,

 

I was just wondering what everyone uses to manage virtual environments at work? We have a mix of Hyper-V and VMware today and they are managed by SCVMM and vCenter independently. As we're a small but growing business we've realised our silo'ed nature for deployments isn't working as efficiently as it probably could be and whilst we can try to move to larger shared infrastructure we have decided to start to look into a single management and reporting platform.

 

I've only come across two companies so far (Veeam and Turbonomic) but was hoping to get some real experience?

 

We're a little stuck for true requirements because this is new to us so I imagine it's a catch 22 of not knowing what we truly need till we start playing with these tools but very loosly we're looking for;

 

• How many resources do we currently have, how much of it is in use and what is free
  • Disk space, Memory, CPU sort of stuff
• Who is consuming the resource
  • ideally both as an individual and a department
• What is the cost of resources assigned to a department
  • Department 1 is using X Disk space, Y Memory and Z CPU which has a cost of £XX
• Self Service Provisioning of Virtual machines across both Hyper-V and VMware with potential for Citrix but not important

 

Any suggestions or experiences would be greatly welcome

 

 

[Skiver Veteran]

no-one?

[joemailey]

Just curious, any particular reason you are using both Hyper-V and Vmware?

 

Could you not start a project that would allow you to move to one primary platform instead of a mix environment?

 

That way you could manage everything from SCVMM or vCenter?

 

I can't help with much else unfortunately. 

[Skiver Veteran]

43 minutes ago, joemailey said:

Just curious, any particular reason you are using both Hyper-V and Vmware?

 

Could you not start a project that would allow you to move to one primary platform instead of a mix environment?

 

That way you could manage everything from SCVMM or vCenter?

 

I can't help with much else unfortunately. 

Hyper-V is our preferred platform, however, some of the R&D teams have requirements for Vmware also. There is a tiny bit of Citrix in there but so far it's completely separate so I'm not considering that.

 

So it just isn't possible to have a single platform and neither SCVMM or vCenter give us everything we want anyways.

[joemailey]

For an update on this:

 

I've just moved to using VEEAM Backup and Replication.

As well as Veeam ONE.

 

I'm using this to backup my HyperV environment.

Seems to be working very well.

Veeam One is a management tool that seems to allow me to monitor all my VMs.

 

This would also include VMware from the looks of it. Far better than Microsoft Data protection Manager that I had previously been using!

 

So far I've been very impressed with Veeam and have just purchased it.

[Skiver Veteran]

Just now, joemailey said:

For an update on this:

 

I've just moved to using VEEAM Backup and Replication.

As well as Veeam ONE.

 

I'm using this to backup my HyperV environment.

Seems to be working very well.

Veeam One is a management tool that seems to allow me to monitor all my VMs.

 

This would also include VMware from the looks of it. Far better than Microsoft Data protection Manager that I had previously been using!

 

So far I've been very impressed with Veeam and have just purchased it.

I've used Veeam One, in fact, we still do have the free version running but I found it to be a bit hit and miss. Occasionally I'd need to restart services as it would just stop responding. The monitoring works OK but I found it a pretty expensive product for just monitoring alone.

 

We already have a system in place for managing backups and we don't actually back up many VMs themselves.

[Mando]

played with Veeam one for a while and it was decent, but i resorted to enabling SSH access and sorting reporting options from esxi to spiceworks tbh, already had a long established instance using it for recording desktop estate.

 

Im in the same boat, both HyperV instance and esxi hosts.

 

management of both platforms,i do in the respective management app. Esxi I still have vsphere client installed on my laptop, sure the web ui is handy, but you cant beat the actual vsphere client imo, ill be sad when its finally EOL.