HealthCheck for VMware vSphere Environment – Part1

Lately I have been doing lot of customer engagements on vSphere health Check, which basically consists of examining a customer’s vSphere Install base against the vSphere Best practices in the standard health check projects. I thought about doing a write up series on how we approach these engagements.
For the part 1 of this series I will be taking you through the vSphere Health Analyzer toolkit which is available to VMware Consultants and also to VMware Partners through Partner Central.

What is VMware Health Analyzer aka vHA?

vHA is a tool developed by VMware for auditing the vSphere install base, this tool consists of scripts to gather data from customer environment and validate the data sets collected from the vSphere farm against the vSphere best practices.So mainly vHA does the tasks below…

• Assess and summarize the VMware vSphere environment in terms of its current health and architecture, with a focus on technical and organizational aspects.
• Provide clear recommendations to improve the performance, manageability, and scalability of this environment.
• Serve as a reference for Customer to review best practices and communicate current infrastructure issues among stakeholders.

The current released version of vHA at the time of writing this article is 3.3.1. This is available through two delivery mechanisms.

• VMware HealthAnalyzer OVF Appliance
• VMware HealthAnalyzer 3.3.1 ThinApp’d application

My personal favourite is the Thinapp’s vHA application, this is pretty kool stuff. No need to install anything on the OS, for details on thinapp you can look here.
Now let’s talk about the prerequisites for this application to run in your customer environment.

vHA System Requirements:

• 512MB RAM (default) is required for Tomcat server memory and 128MB (default) is needed for collector.
Note: In my experience for larger environments it is advised to increase both the Tomcat server memory as well as the memory needed for collector to a higher value, else the data gathering may fail.
• For Thinapp application you can use Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 2003 Server, Vista or Windows 7 system that has network access to the customer’s target server(s).

vHA port requirements:

This concludes the Part -1 for the vSphere Health Check Series; in my next article in this series we will discuss on how to analyze data using the vHA. Stay Tuned ..