If you use vSphere and particularly vCenter, you’re probably at least familiar in passing with PowerCLI, a package of snap-ins and modules for PowerShell. This is my preferred language for interacting with the vSphere/vCenter APIs, since it has (IMO) the best documentation of the available languages and API SDKs. If not, I recommend downloading it and playing with it, it can really help you automate many of your repetitive tasks with less Flash and less right clicking.
One of the most popular tools built with PowerCLI is vCheck. It’s a framework for running a number of checks against your vSphere infrastructure and determining what operational issues are present – something every Ops team needs. It won’t replace a monitoring system such as vROps or even Nagios, but it augments such systems very well. For example, it can report on VMs that have ISOs attached, or where snapshots have been present for more than 7 days – issues that probably aren’t worth paging anyone out for, but need to be dealt with eventually. Many of us have built some homegrown solutions for this, maybe even with PowerCLI, but it is difficult to beat a tool designed to meet the needs of a large percentage of vSphere users, is actively developed by VMware employees, and is a framework that you can extend with instance-specific needs. You can always run your tools and vCheck together, too.
Let’s take a look at vCheck and how to get started with it today. We’ll download it, configure it, schedule it as a daily task, review how to enable and disable checks, and store your configuration in version control. This provides a solid base that you can tweak until it fits your specific needs just right.
rnelson0 