VM Monitoring Tool - virtual-machine

I Have 70 VM machine ( Windows, RHEL, Solaris).
Can anyone suggest me any tool that can help me monitor all of them at ta single UI.
Details I can provide:
IP of the VM.
Login Details.
Details that should be provided by the VM Monitoring tool.
Instance is up or no
Number of Disk Drives.
Spaces available in each drive.
Any other details will also be helpful.

You can try ITRS Geneos. It has lots of plug-ins available and work for both Windows/Unix systems. Also can be customized as per requirement.

Zabbix does a great job, and is open source

You can try numerous open source monitoring tools like nagios, zabbix, cacti, Icinga . Zabbix is quite good as it is new in the market.

Related

Is there any open source load generators?

I would like to know if there is any open source load generator for stress testing. I am using JMeter script to run the test. I know there is one called flood.io but think it is not free. Can you please recommend me some option and documentation on how to use it properly? Thanks!!
Well, JMeter is open source, you can observe source repositories so it matches your needs.
The point is where to run JMeter so you need to have your own bare metal machines (or normal desktop/laptop/virtual machine). If you're looking for an open-source operating system there is a wide range of free and open source Linux distributions, FreeBSD, illumos, etc.
If you don't have any machines and any money to invest into these machines there are some free cloud options like AWS Free Tier or Oracle Cloud Free Tier, also some SaaS service providers offer free pricing plans, for example BlazeMeter gives you 50 virtual users, LoadFocus gives you 20 concurrent users, etc.

Configuration Management for Installation of OS

I was looking for a uniform configuration management tool for remote installation of OS on remote servers(similar to puppet/chef) having wide range of platform support. I think we can use PXE/kickstart for remote installation. I am not sure that can be used to install OS on multiple servers in parallel? Other way to spin up the EC2 instance from AWS and pay amazon for the usage. I was wondering is there any other best option for this requirement?
Regards
Bubunia
You can consider ansible as a strong candidate for this.
Some of its features:
Open source with large development community
Number of modules which can help you building flexible solutions.
Cloud focused development modules
Ansible inventory which can help you automate things end to end on the basis of tags to your instances
Agent less
Easy to write, read and understand yaml format
Pre-builded modules for multiple installations available in open source community
Work with multiple OS
It is efficient as well I am using it from last 1 year and found it very good.
Sparrow6 cm supports quite a range of platforms/os. You can choose Sparrowdo to run configuration jobs in push manner over ssh.

ESX 5.5 VM deployment

Is it possible to deploy vm's using a csv or something similar? I want to automate the install of about 100 servers. The only option I have found is using powershell. I would really like some other options though. Thanks.
VCenter exposes an API, the documentation for which can be found here:
http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/sdk_pubs.html
Armed with that API and a template, you should be able to do what you want to do in the language of your choice.
Templates can be customized with a CustomizationSpec directly from the VSphere client as well, which means you can deploy directly from the template in the client.
Other options: VMware's Orchestrator or Microsoft Orchestrator with the VMware plugin.
However, is there really any reason not to use Powershell? PowerCLI can do what you want to do and very easily. I've deployed thousands of servers with it.

Does a cloud service like Azure or EC2 exist which can run arbitrary workloads? (e.g. Client SKUs of Windows)

Azure and EC2 are optimized for running servers. Lots and lots of servers. Both platforms attempt to manage tons of things for you -- in Azure's case, it wants to manage even the target operating system.
However, I'd like to use such a service for a different reason: Testing.
I've got a ton of operating systems I need to support. My tests don't actually take that long, but running them on every platform is time consuming. I was going to just use a cloud service for this, thinking that these machines would be running for much less than an hour, and it wouldn't cost all that much.
The problem is that the major cloud services won't run client versions of Windows -- Windows Server only.
Is there a cloud service which would let me run every client and server version, and every service pack level, of Windows released starting with Windows 2000 SP4 to the present day?
Try CloudSigma, Defiantly can upload your own ISO's and run any x86 and 64bit OS you like on it. They have their in-house versions to get started but you can bring your own OS versions.
Based in Switzerland but they would have also the servers in the US, performance i've expected to quite good.
https://www.cloudsigma.com/
There is also a free trail on at the moment
https://cs.cloudsigma.com/accounts/signup/
The list of Open Virtualization Alliance members may have some candidates for you.
A search on the page for "operating system" suggests the following possibilities (in addition to the already-mentioned CloudSigma):
ElasticHosts
stepping stone GmbH (I'm less sure about this one)
Sublime IP
No, commercial cloud services like Azure and Amazon EC2 are themselves virtual, so you don't get a great deal of control over the operating system.
An option may be to consider renting a full physical server (colocated, or managed) and then use a battery of virtual machines to run the tests. Something like VMWare's snapshot feature sounds perfect: spin up a clean virtual machine, deploy the test code, then throw away changes to the disk once the tests have been completed.
Or, indeed, as #Stuart suggests - run the tests locally.
This definitely isn't something Azure offers - I think all of Azure's images are based near to Windows Server 2008 R2.
For EC2 you could set up images for Server 2003 through to 2008R2 - but nothing else. There are also some services out there to assist with this - e.g. VaasNet http://www.vaasnet.com/catalog
For testing the other Windows operating systems, I simply don't think there's a cloud service available to let you do this. I don't even think there are any cloud services where you can run "Virtual PC" type applications on top of the hosted operating system - as I think most of the virtualization APIs are disabled in the cloud environments (virtualization within virtualization not supported!)
Sorry to say this, but your best bet may be local test hardware running VirtualPC images.
It appears that the Xen Cloud Platform might do what you're after. This page ends with:
Guest Operating Systems: the XCP binary distribution is delivered with a wide range of Linux and Widnows guests. Check out the release notes for a complete list.
And their PDF document Xen Cloud Platform Virtual Machine Installation Guide (Release 0.1, Published October 2009) says that Windows 2000 Server has "No known issues."
(I don't have any affiliation with Xen)
In conjunction with the above, there is also a list of Xen VirtualPrivateServerProviders, several of which say they include Windows.
Buy time on an EC2 instance and use it to host VirtualBox VMs with VMs set up for each operating system you want to test for. Use a RDP client or VNC or some other means to control the guest OS. This forum post seems to point to that being possible. But yes it is not a cloud service itself and you would have todo some initial setup and configuration work yourself.

Any tools to monitor processes and resources consumed of virtual machines?

Hi all,
I need a tool that can retrieve information about used resources of each VM and their processes,
I use KVM as hyper-visor
I also need it to have a programming API
I know it is a tough request :), but any contribution is more than welcome !
Thanx
If you're running *NIX based guests, couldn't you script a set of ssh sessions to login to each guest and grab whatever information you need?
I've heard Nagios and other popular monitoring tools work on virtual machines in much the same way as on the real ones.