Free Tools
Free tools I use and I recommend.
The best of the best only. Only the essentials tools here. Those tools are Free to use in production environment, they are not time limited trials. They are free, because usually you can upgrade to get even more functionalities. There is no Adware or malware in any of those tools. Many of them has been awarded during VMworld.
VMTurbo Community Edition – This product is not limited in time, no spyware or adware. No number of hosts
limitations or VMs limitation. In fact VMturbo has announced a simplified product line with 3 products and the free community edition is one of them. The VMTurbo Community Edition is Free Download and use product – no spyware Ad adware. The product presents itself as a single Virtual Appliance being able to deploy directly into vCenter. Completely agent-less solution.
With full real-time monitoring capability and a complete suite of actionable reports, Community Edition enables organizations to take charge of their virtual environments.
When you download the Community edition, it automatically downloads the full 30 days trial where you can test all the features. After 30 days, only the Community Features stays active… Nice… -:) There is an easy way to upgrade to paid product, since you don’t have to re-install the whole appliance and loose the history… Read More …
vOps Server Explorer - a new free 2 in 1 tool from vKernel. Now with SearchMyVM – a “Google Like” searches integrated. Two-in-one products. This tool is a “light” version of their main product called vOperations Suite and which uses the main analytics engine to discover, which VM or which host (depends of the view you choose) has got an issue. By pointing the mouse over a particular VM you can immediately see what’s going on.
You can find more details about this free tool at the vKernel’s website here.
Free vWorkspace Destkop Optimizer by Quest – a very nice freeware which helps to optimize different settings of Virtual desktops or VMs running inside of VMware Workstation too… -:). This tiny application comes with XML file where one can make it’s own personalizations too…
When tested with Windows 7 clean install, non optimized, the test showed some huge benefits of such an optimization. The optimizations applied by the Quest vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer the IOPS – both read and write – were reduced by more than 90% in test environment.
Up to 10% of RAM savings together with up to 37% of CPU less (the tests were done with no users logged in). You can get this tool from Quest for Free.
Flash VDI calculator - It’s an online tool provided by Andre Leibovici – www.myvirtualcloud.net . It helps to do a calculations concerning the sizing of your VMware View Infrastructure. Have a look at the online manual to know all the meanings in the online tool.
The VDI calculator is targeted for VMware View designs, however you can use the tool for any VDI running on top of vSphere infrastructure.
Xangati For vSphere - Free tool from Xangati which has an unique capability of real time monitoring. It’s a virtual appliance for one ESX(i) host, but you can deploy one xangati per host if you wish. You have a possibility to fully configure of What you See on the dashboard, even if the appliance comes up with 3 different modes already pre-configured.
One fo the new features announced in this release, which is compatible vSphere 5, is the datastore latency monitoring. In fact, It can detect and show a latency and IO stats from different paths to a datastore from a host. The very popular DVR recording feature stays present and in addition, in the paid version this recording starts automatically when a performance hit will trigger a real-time alert. This feature can also be coupled with VMware vCenter alarms. Xangati for vSphere can be found for Free here. You can also read my Detailed Review I’ve done on Xangati’s product here.
Veeam ONE = Veeam Reporter + Veeam Montor + Veeam Business View Full data collection, multi-user support, and Microsoft SQL Server backend. There are no limits on the number of hosts, virtual machines (VMs), users or the size of your archive — you can discover, document and analyze your entire virtual infrastructure, and maintain a complete history of all objects, settings and changes.
There is an excellent article on Rich Brambley’s blog about building “Veeam One server” which combine Reporter-Monitor-and-Business View – read here. You can download it here.
VMware Boomerang - a Fling application which can connect to multiple vCenter servers or ESX/ESXi servers and favorite the most used VMs for faster access. You no more have to have multiple vSphere clients windows open on your desktop to manage multiple ESX/ESXi servers which are not attached into a vCenter. One could imagine that this little tool can help you in a situation where you don’t have a vCenter in your organization – you’re running only ESXi Free VMware Hypervizor…. Read More – >
Starwind SAN – Free version. The free version of Starwind SAN offers some good possibilities : Data Deduplication, Unlimited storage capacity & unlimited number of supported concurrent iSCSI connections. Full Production use is allowed. Caching - a multi-level cache mechanism can use gigabytes of RAM and converts it into extremely fast level 1 write-back or write-through cache.
- Continuous Data Protection and Snapshots that are completely compatible with VSS (Volume Snapshot Services). iSCSI boot is fully supported with iSCSI boot capable NIC. Read More – >
Veeam FastSCP : FastSCP can help you to do a fast and secure copy of your VMs and files across your VMware ESX environment. Especially useful when copying large ISO files into and from your VMware ESX infrastructure…
The latest version 3.0.3 includes Microsoft Windows 7 and Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 support.
vAlarm – The software automatically communicates with a vCenter server on a user configurable schedule, and notifies any active alarms via a popup information bubble in the notification area of a users desktop. See my post about vAlarm.
VMWare vCenter Converter Standalone v 5.0 NEW !! – This is a free tool from VMware that everybody knows. Use converter to do P2V conversions, adjust Virtual disk size during V2V conversions, change from Thick to thin …
New in v. 5.0 is the possibility of alignment of converted VMs on a destination datastore. See my post on it here. You can do a remote conversions or local conversions and much more. You have the possibility to run unlimited tasks at the same time. It’s the same version which is bundled with vSphere Essentials, Essentials Plus or higher versions of VMware vSphere.
See latest promo on vSphere Essentials Plus and vSphere Storage Appliance here – 40% Off.
VMware Player is great for doing some demos or testing. It luck a lot of features from VMware Workstation like snapshots, Autoprotect, AutoLogon, Teams and many others, but I like to use it because it’s very lightweight and handy and the recent features like unity are really great… You can have your VM in the background and the windows and programs executing inside this VM are “in front”. The unity mode is just signaled by an red icon on the window. You will not see the VM player windows floating on your desktop, but the applications.
RVTools – Quick inventory can be done with this free tool from Rob de Veij. It’s a small msi package which after installation can list information about cpu, memory, disks, nics, cd-rom, floppy drives, snapshots, VMware tools, ESX hosts and datastores. Download RV Tools from here.
Pretty usefull to quick gather different informations about your infrastructure.
See my post and video I’ve done here…
vSphere Mini Monitor – free monitoring tool for VI running under vSphere. If you’re more than one administrator of your vCenter, with this tools you can see what the others are doing. It does monitor a large number of changes to multiple objects within the vCenter environment. See my post about vSphere Mini monitor here.
vLogView - helps you view and search all LOG files from each of your ESX hosts from a single application. You can view/search easy in VMware ESX events, by connecting vCenter server you can add multiple hosts and download the logfiles for some troubleshooting. See my post about vLogView here.
Trilead VM Explorer : VM Explorer is a management tool designed to ease management, backup, and disaster recovery tasks in a virtual environment. You can connect easily to your existing infrastructure under vSphere 5 and manage (backup) your VMDK files as needed.
You can connect up to five ESX Servers. There is SSH-compatible terminal client included, so you can remotely connect to Linux or FreeBSD servers as well as the VMware ESX service console. You can get Trilead VM Explorer here.
You can also have a look on my Review of Trilead VM Explorer 3.5.
Putty is used for remote SSH to the VMware ESX service console and Linux servers or desktops. Putty is one of the “classic tools”. Everybody knows putty…. there is also putty portable you can carry arround on your USB stick. You can download Putty Here and Putty portable here.
