vSphere Mobile Watchlist – Mobile app to manage critical VMs

New application for Android or IOs allows to monitor and remediate problems detected on your vSphere 5.x infrastructure. It took my attention and I'm interested on what it does and how to use it.

A screenshot from my phone showing the login screen. I have a new phone, it's Galaxy Note 3. Reasons why I picked up this phone is that it has large screen, good battery life, and it's fits my needs. I know many of you would probably prefer iPhone 5s, but as I'm trying to avoid buying third device – a tablet, and by going the “phablet” way this was a viable alternative.

I haven't tested the connection to my vSphere lab yet, as part of my lab is right now on a boat and second half (one host) is still in my suitcase… -:). But I'll promise to update this post as I'll progress with my installation in my house down here at Reunion Island and try to see the inside out, see the benefits of it.

As for now all I can say is that the application is available for vSphere infrastructure 5.0 and higher.

vSphere Mobile Watchlist  – The Features

• Create VM watchlist – Select a subset of VMs from your VMware vSphere VM inventory to tell the app what VMs to track. Use multiple lists to organize these important VMs.
• VMs at a glance – Review the status of these VMs from your device including: their state, health, console and related objects.
• Suggested KB articles – Got an alert on your VM? Let VMware vSphere Mobile Watchlist suggest what KB Articles might help you or search the web to gather more information.
• Remediate Remotely – Use power operations to remediate many situations remotely from your device.
• Delegate to your team – For those situations where you are not able to fix an issue from the device, VMware vSphere Mobile Watchlist will enable you to share the VM and alert information along with any suggested KB articles and other web pages relevant to the current problem. Your colleagues back in the datacenter can use this context to resolve the issue.

I suppose that the application is using the vmtools to initiate the remediation actions (start, restart, stop …) and that it's possible to get some kind of notification to see which VMs are experiencing problems (or not).

Here is a screenshot from VMware's website showing some error messages etc..

As bein said earlier, I still have tons of things to get done and many administrative work with the change, but things will get done and everything will be back at normal.

Last but not least, check out the VMware Communities – vSphere Mobile Watchlist

Source: VMware vSphere Blog