vOpenData is a community driven project where user submit virtual infrastructure configurations, (collected via script) where only anonymous data are collected. Those data then feed up a database which is accessible in a form of dashboard where you can see most common configurations.
Ben Thomas and William Lam had a dream which came true very quickly. Actually it was Ben Thomas who started, and William Lam helped to move on with a project. The project was to create an open community database which would be accessible to anyone.
The project is online since only few days ago, but there are new submissions every day and the database grows up very quickly! vOpenData Dashboard provides different statistics and data for virtualized environments.
How it works?
First of all, what's collected as a data? Simple, only Anonymous data are collected:
We made an effort to not collect specific information such as hostnames or even display names that could be used to identify a particular organization. Instead, we are using UUIDs which are automatically generated by the virtualization platform to uniquely identify a particular object. This allows us to keep track of changes in the our database when a new data set is uploaded from an existing environment. In addition we are collecting various configuration data and you can find a complete list in the Data FAQs.
vOpenData – What can I do to contribute?
You'll download a script that collects anonymous data about your infrastructure. Once uploaded, the data are added to the DB, together with other user's data. As a result, there is a nice view in a form of a dashboard visible to anyone, where you can find different informations about virtualized infrastructures all around the world. When you load the vOpenData Dashboard it shows a cool animation of increasing numbers of virtual infrastructures loading…
It provides a valuable informations for any IT admin or consultant running VMware vSphere. Information about average size of VM's disks, clusters, vCenters, datastores and many other useful information.
Go to vOpenData.org and get the code and participate!
Source: VirtuallyGhetto Blog
This sounds like a great crowd sourcing VI project but I missed where you cite the benefit to the contributors besides “a cool animation”
I suspect there could be many relative metric comparisons and best practice recommendations based on this concept – just need more in depth analysis – will check it out!
thanks!