Windows Server 2012 R2 has now reached end of life on October 2023. Which means free updates, bug fixes, and technical support for the OS has ended. Microsoft has allowed customers to purchase Extended Security Updates until 2026. With that being said, I have created this dashboard to easily check which environment still has Windows 2012 server and below in just one click of the button.

Download Dashboard here

https://developer.vmware.com/web/dp/samples?id=6554

User Guide

Select an Environment to do a Windows Check. Select vSphere World to search for all environments.

Get a nice breakdown of all Windows variants in the environment.

Anything in this column are Windows 2012 and below

Anything in this side are Windows 2016 and above

Download Dashboard here

https://developer.vmware.com/web/dp/samples?id=6554

This must have dashboard will come in handy when you need to know how is your cluster, host, and virtual machines are performing in any point of time. For example if I do load testing on my cluster, how can I monitor the performance of all my Host, Virtual Machines, and overall health of my cluster during that time? This dashboards shows CPU performance, Memory performance, VM Growth, network usage, disk space growth, and more. Please see the youtube video below for full instructions on how to fully use the dashboard and some live examples on how it help solve one of my customer’s recurring issue.

Download here: https://developer.vmware.com/web/dp/samples?id=8089

Guide and demo on how to use the Dashboard

Installation Instructions:

Download the .json file from the above link and import into your dashboards. Then look for the dashboard named VMignite.com – Environment Benchmarking

First thank you everyone for making this the number 1 most downloaded dashboard on Vmware code. Also, a big thanks to the Vmware TAM community for all the positive feedback they have been telling me on how my website has helped their customers. The feedback will drive me to write even more useful content. With that being said, what better way to start than to share out my latest 2.0 version of the vSphere Health Check dashboard which has many major enhancements and has a greater amount of details than before. In this post I also wrote a full guide on how to resolve some of the main issues.

Download on VMware Code Exchange Here https://code.vmware.com/samples?id=5639#

Purpose:

Does a full health check of problems found in the environment (VMs, Host, Clusters, Datastores, vCenter).  This dashboard will help prevent issues before they happen (being proactive) by identifying everything wrong with your environment today so you can fix it before it causes a problem in the future.

What it monitors:

Monitor’s capacity issues, configuration issues, and performance bottlenecks (CPU, Memory, Contention, Disk Latency)

User Guide

Select any vCenter Servers, Datacenter, Clusters, or entire environment (vSphere World) to do a complete health check on it

You can also use the search box to search what you are looking for

Any of these widgets can be easily exported to excel. They are also report ready, meaning you can add any of the filters I’ve created to a custom report.

Monitoring vROPS

Monitor the health of all vROPS nodes. Make sure the vROPs DB Usage % doesn’t reach over 90%. You will need to add more disk to vROPS if this gets high. It will also monitor any adapters that are down and any vROPS alerts.

Monitoring vCenter

This monitors vCenter for any disk space issues and vCenter alerts.

Monitoring Virtual Machines

When monitoring high CPU and high memory usage. It is important to see the 7-day average as well. If the average is high, then the VM pretty much needs more resources immediately.

If any VM has high contention, CPU ready time, CPU Co-stop, or memory ballooning. It basically means something is constraining the VM from getting the resources it needs. There is no one simple way to fix this. These are the checks I would perform to troubleshoot the issue.

• Check to see if there are any memory or cpu limits on the VM
• Check to see if the VM has an alert that states that the Host Power settings is causing contention. ESXi Host that are not set to high performance in the power settings usually causes contention
• Check if the VM is on a highly utilized ESXi Host
• Check if the VM is on a resource pool that has resource limits assigned
• Check to see if the VM has enough CPU and/or memory resources. Notice how this is the last step. This should be your last resort

If the VM Disk latency is high, this means your disk performance is suffering.  Check to see if the datastore that the VM is on has high latency as well. If the datastore is overworked, it will cause latency on other VMs that are hosted by it as well. Another good way to find out if it’s the VM or the datastore that is causing the latency is by doing a storage vMotion to an isolated datastore. If the latency drops down dramatically you will know it was the datastore that caused it

For VM Disk IOPS and Network Usage notice how this widget says awareness only. High Disk IOPs doesn’t mean there is a disk performance issue. It just means that the VM has lots of disk activity. A typical VM usually doesn’t have more than 1000 IOPS. A busy VM such as heavy Database servers, File Servers, Exchange Server, etc will have IOPS in the range of 1000-8000 depending how busy it is. If any VMs that has high IOPS or high network usage that looks off to you should be investigated. Anything over 10,000 IOPS is extremely rare and should be investigated immediately. None of the Fortune 500 companies that I know of has a VM that is higher than 10,000 IOPS.

If I see any VM that has 0 capacity on the C: Drive or the Root Drive. The performance of the VM will suffer dramatically until you add more partition space. For snapshots, most of the time snapshots should not be older than 7 days.

Note: If this is blank you will need to enable the Guest File Free metric for VMs in all the active policies. This is not enabled by default in vROPS.  Use this guide to enable this metric.  http://www.vmignite.com/2021/02/vrops-8-how-to-enable-hidden-metrics-and-properties/

If you see any type of VM limits this is not a good sign. A limit on a VM basically means the VM won’t perform more than what the limit is set to. For example, the VM I highlighted below has a memory limit of 8GB. However, the configured memory is set to 24GB. Even thou the VM has 24GB of memory configured, it will only be consuming 8GB of it because of the 8GB limit set on the VM. You won’t get full performance until you remove the limit of the VM in vCenter. Hopefully you now understand why Limits are not good at all for any reason.

Monitoring Clusters

Cluster HA and DRS in mostly all cases should always be enabled. A large company could have 100s of clusters, it will be quite a nightmarish task to check all these manually. Luckily, I got you covered as all you need to do is look at my dashboard. Another thing to look for is DRS Policies not set to automatic. Although DRS is enabled, if it is not set to automatic, resource balancing will not automatically occur. This setting is often overlooked.

Monitoring Datastores

Any datastore that has high latency is not a good sign, most of the time it will affect the VM performance as well. Do not let your datastores run more than 80% utilized. A datastore that is out of space will cause outages.

Monitoring ESXi Host

This is one of my favorite widgets because it reports back on physical ESXi host failures that vCenter detects. Customers have told me that this some times detects issues that even the vendor software didn’t even detect.

Download on VMware Code Exchange Here https://code.vmware.com/samples?id=5639#

Instructions on how to Import Dashboard

To import in version 7.0 and above

1. First unzip the file you just downloaded, it will contain a dashboard and a view file
2. Go to Dashboards > Actions > Manage Dashboards

   

3. Hit the dropdown and select Import Dashboards. Import the Dashboard.zip file
   

   

4. Next to go Views > Dropdown > Import. Import the View.zip file

   

5. If you get any errors during the process, make sure to click overwrite before importing

The new vCenter Inventory is even more complete than the last one. In one click you can get a complete inventory of your environment and performance stats. I’ve enhanced this dashboard with dozens of more metrics, features, and inventory objects collected in this new update. Also newly updated is the ability to highlight any object (vCenter, Host, Clusters, etc) and it will update the list to reflect related objects to it (super useful for unlimited drilldowns capability). Read the full guide below to see how detailed this dashboard is.

Download here https://code.vmware.com/samples?id=5629#

What it provides in one click?

• Count of how many objects of each type in the environment (folders, switches, VMs, etc)
• Environment Capacity Total, capacity used, and capacity provisioned
• Chart on all Physical Host types
• Chart on all Operating Systems
• Chart on all on all ESXi Host versions
• Graph on VM memory configurations
• Charts on Cluster HA, DRS, Admission Control, and DRS Policy settings
• Latest VMs, Host, Datastore, vCenter, and Clusters added in the environment
• Complete vCenter Inventory in a list view with performance metrics and properties
  • vCenters
  • Datacenters
  • Clusters
  • Hosts
  • VMs
  • Datastores
  • vDS Switches
  • Port Groups
  • Datastore Clusters
  • Resource Pools

User Guide

Select any vCenter or all of them combine (vSphere World). Also shows you inventory and performance stats

Get an object count of everything in that environment

Get Inventory and capacity details down to the used, total provisioned level for your selected environment

Get a great overview of what is in your environment. What are all the Physical Servers models? Which server model is the majority? Also shows ESXi Host versions, Operating System, and VM Memory configured.

Clicking on the pie chart will show you what those objects are on the right side

Shows latest Objects added to the environment (VMs, Host, Clusters, Datastores)

Shows List of Inventory along with useful performance metrics

Can instantly export most of the content to Excel by just clicking on the export button

Highlighting anything in the inventory will update the related objects below it. For example I highlighted a Cluster and it instantly updated the Host that are on it below. (Note: Do not click on the object name but highlight the metrics on the right side of it to highlight it.)

Download here https://code.vmware.com/samples?id=5629#

Personally, Virtual Machine uptime is the hardest metric to calculate and create by far. Luckily, my co-worker Iwan has already created one using his own logic. All I had to do was update it and improve it as needed. Rather than rewrite everything he wrote; you can read a full explanation of how the metrics work here: http://virtual-red-dot.info/vm-availability-monitoring/

You can download the new version that I modified below. In my next post, I will show you how to monitor and get an alert on a Virtual Machine going down using this metric in vROPS 8.2. If you want this capability, it is best to download and activate this supermetric now.

https://code.vmware.com/samples?id=7421

On January 14^th 2020 Microsoft will be officially ending its support for Windows 2008 Servers. In this post I will share you an awesome dashboard that will instantly check for how many servers that are running version 2008 and below. Below is a handy user guide. Works for version vROPS 7.0 and above.

Download it here
https://code.vmware.com/samples?id=6554

Select your Environment (Cluster, vCenter, Datacenter) or select vSphere World for everything

View a Pie Chart Breakdown of various Windows Server versions in your environment

Instantly identify which Windows Servers are 2008 and below and which are above. As you can see in this example we have 129 Window Servers that are version 2012 and above and six 2008 Servers.

Scroll over to see which Clusters and Host they belong to and to see more properties of the VM

Instantly export it to excel as needed

Note: Once you finish upgrading the Windows Server 2008 VM. While it is still Powered Off go to Edit Settings > VM Options > General Options and change the the Guess OS Version to the same version you just upgraded to.  For example: Windows Server 2016. This will update the VM and also update the dashboard as well

Download it here
https://code.vmware.com/samples?id=6554

To import in version 7.0 and above

1. First unzip the file you just downloaded, it will contain a dashboard and a view file
2. Go to Dashboards > Actions > Manage Dashboards

   

3. Hit the dropdown and select Import Dashboards. Import the Dashboard.zip file

   

4. Next to go Views > Dropdown > Import. Import the View.zip file

   

Has your manager ever ask how much capacity is being used in a particular vCenter or your entire environment? This dashboard is now upgraded to include all this information and more. The dashboard shows complete inventory of your environment (vCenter, Hosts, Clustes, VMs, etc), how much capacity you have in total, how much you are actually using, and how much is configured. It breaks down in greater details of what those Hosts, VMs, Clusters, etc are. It also shows you the latest Host, VMs, Clusters, etc that were added to the environment.

Download for vROPs 7.0 and above only!

Download here https://code.vmware.com/samples?id=5629#

Nice pie chart that provides great insight of how your Operating Systems are being distributed in your environment. In this example I can see 50% is running Windows Server 2008 R2 64bit. Coming in second is Windows Server 2012 64-bit

I can click on any part of the Pie chart and it will instantly display which VMs are they

Click on the Export Icon and I can export a breakdown in Excel form

Next section shows me the entire inventory, how much total capacity do I have, how much capacity am I using, and how much is configured. Notice I even included Network Usage and IOPs

All Performance Metrics are color coded and each can be sorted

Click on the Export button to export to Excel

Scroll to the bottom to see Total and Averages

View the latest VMs, Datastores, Hosts, and vCenters collected

To import in version 7.0 and above

1. First unzip the file you just downloaded, it will contain a dashboard and a view file
2. Go to Dashboards > Actions > Manage Dashboards

   

3. Hit the dropdown and select Import Dashboards. Import the Dashboard.zip file

   

4. Next to go Views > Dropdown > Import. Import the View.zip file