Does anyone know of some free useful VMWare Management Packs? I know the Veem guys have a great management pack however it is a bit pricey
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OpsLogix, based over in the Netherlands, also do a VMWare Management Pack. I can’t personally comment on it’s quality, but they are generally known for being a bit less pricey than Veeam - http://www.opslogix.com/vmware-management-pack/
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There’s also this community effort from Mitch Luedy https://github.com/Mitch-Luedy/Community.VMware but, again, I’ll have to leave others to comment on whether they’ve got experience using it in production and so on. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look as though it’s been updated very recently
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Silect has stared a contest some month ago.
–> http://www.silect.com/content/vmware-contest-submission
–> https://github.com/Silect/VMware-Management-Pack
They wrote once that they received some good MPs.
Unfortunately I never heared anything about it since weeks…
Looks like they will never release them to public, 
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I’ve asked silect what happened to the contest.
Silects answer:
We invested a significant amount of time with the VMware MPs we received as part of the contest we ran last year however overall we felt the investment of time to develop, test and release an open source VMware MP with the quality and caliber that Silect could stand behind was prohibitive.
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It has been a couple of months since the last post on this thread. How did the OpsLogix testing go? There is a way to monitor VMware via SNMP, it might be useful, I have not had the time to delve into it.
Here is link.
https://system-center.me/opsmgr/monitor-vmware-esx-with-scom-vcenter-for-free/
Thumbs down to Silect for not publishing what was submitted
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Hi all,
I had been on the search for a VMware monitoring tool to work with SCOM for the past 6 months.
Had checked out the following:
- Veeam MP
- VMware’s VRops.
- Opslogix VMware SCOM MP
- Dell’s FogLight for VMware
Veeam and VROps have all the bells and whistle.
Dropped Veeam and VMware VROps as the build, update license and pricing was way above our budget. Did not even try it out in a QA environment.
Opslogix is reasonably priced for what it can do.
It can give you info from a chosen VCenter environment, ESX Host performance data, VM performance data in a typical SCOM dashboard manner which personally I don’t find appealing.
Can tell you the age of Snapshots which is handy. Has descent reporting feature but still fell short of what I really needed. Could not show anything on the Datastores side of the infrastructure.
But on the whole I think it can do better with better graphics and displaying proper object details rather than being cryptic as SCOM usually does.
So we dropped it as well.
Tried out Dell’s FogLight for VMware.
So far in trialling phase and am loving it.
Nice graphics and useful data for the Cluster health, VMware health, nice On Click drill downs.
I also activated the Storage Monitor/Cartridge and this gives awesome views for the Storage Environment, storage switches and datastores sizes, performance and trending.
Use the VMware and Storage together and you can do a one click drill down from the VMware to the datastores to the LUN and the disk IOs in one go.
So far I am happy with it and now have to work on justifying its purchase to management.
Hope the above info is useful to anyone but please note these are my personal views.
Regards
SR
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Have you looked at Sexigraf and Sexilog? both free, grafana based dashboards. Iknow they’re not SCOM MP packs, but might be a good alternative?
http://www.sexilog.fr & http://www.sexigraf.fr
P.S… VMware ?
I am starting down this path myself now. One of our requirements is capacity planning information out of the pack. This narrowed the focus down to Veeam and Nice just released an MP recently and updated it this week and the update is supposed to have capacity planning. We are doing a demo of it next week. I would love to do Veeam as they have written a great pack from everything I have heard. The down side to Veeam is they know what they have written and they charge a lot for it.
If anyone knows of any others I would love to explore them.
Currently developing a VMware MP, hit the same issue as discovered by the community one in that SCOM runs power shell scripts in the same appDomain so they trip over each other. I have a workaround (converting the power shell scripts to C# console apps) I’ll keep you informed of the progress!
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I have come across this one from - Community VMware Management Pack
http://systemcentercore.com/?GetCategory=Community+VMware+Management+Pack
I think that is just the same as Mitch Luedy’s one. System Center Core is really just a compendium of other people’s MPs
hmmm…the Terms & Conditions state that;
you understand and acknowledge that the Sponsor(s) may develop or commission or have
developed or commissioned materials similar or identical to your Entry and you waive any
claims you may have resulting from any similarities to your Entry;
so it may well be that they plan to commercialise one or some of the entries
Same ansver as i got. I am in the process of testing OpsLogix. Will report back when we have done some testing.
I have attempted to use this MP previously but encountered excessive CPU consumption and never fully discovered the VMWare environment. I wouldn’t recommend it.
Although expensive, after spending time talking about Veeam with a certain Vanguad, (thanks Craig) it does look like the best option feature wise.
However, I am now looking at the possibility of integrating VM Turbo with SCOM. You most likely don’t use VMT but if you do, check out this option. VMT seem really keen to get people involved in this connection process.
greigstevenson I believe there are some customers doing some work to integrate Squared Up with VMTurbo via the WebAPI Tile, so hopefully they might hop in here if they have anything helpful to share 
Champion! I’d be interested in this when you’ve finished too