Free
Free tools I use and I recommend.
Veeam FastSCP : FastSCP can help you to do a fast and secure copy of your VMs and files across your VMware ESX environment. Especially usefull when copyin large ISO files into and from your VMware ESX infrastructure… The latest version 3.0.2 includes Microsoft Windows 7 and Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 support
VKernel StorageVIEW – instantly shows five host/datastore pairs and with associated VMs with the highest latency. See my post about vKernel Storage view here.
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 4.0.1 – 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 … 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.
VMware Player is great do 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. 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 4 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.
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.
I have done a blog post in the past also : Top 10 free tools to managie Virtual Infrastructure.
