by VMware has a pretty good foundation with VI3 and vSphere, but they only go so far. With the ability to use the VMware VI Toolkit or VMware vSphere Toolkit, custom scripts performing data collection and actions can now be leveraged by third party vendors to, put simply, get more out of the overall management experience.
I am a fan of Tripwire’s freebie tools ConfigCheck and OpsCheck. I use ConfigCheck from time to time, and I use OpsCheck pretty much after any change in ESX host configuration, or if I have to perform any significant number of VMotions. But unfortunately, these tools, being freebies, require me to use them manually, and only report what they find. Free tools will only get you so far. Sure there are a ton of Powershell scripts out there to do this, and do that, but I have to run them manually too.
I had the opportunity to kick the tires of Tripwire’s new product release, vWire. I have had pretty good success with ConfigCheck and OpsCheck, so I figured I would take a look at it. I like the level of information and monitoring it has at the host and guest level, not to mention some little nice to haves like alert assignment and extended attributes, but what really grabbed my attention, was the fact that I could load custom Powershell scripts. Now there’s a place to upload Powershell scripts to, and have them execute whenever custom alarm conditions occur. No more, “better go check”. With vWire, is it more like, “hey, Mr. Admin, this just happened, and I took care of it, Sincerely vWire.”
That’s pretty useful!
I am looking forward to learning more about vWire, and from what I can tell they did a pretty bang up job on it.
Here’s the URL for more info:
http://www.vwire.com/
