cloudphysics

Creating reports is a common task that every vSphere administrator must deal with at least once if not many more times in their career. Whether you are tasked to provide an inventory report of all your virtual machines and their configurations to your manager or to provide a compliance report for your security team to ensure that all virtual machines are hardened according to the vSphere Security Hardening Guide, report creations can be a challenge.

The vSphere platform provides a very powerful and rich set of APIs (Application Programming Interface) that can be consumed by both vSphere administrators as well as developers. However, there is a high learning curve when using the API and it takes quite a bit of time to learn and of course your manager is expecting the report to be done in the next 5 minutes. Even with abstraction tools such as PowerCLI, quickly building a robust, scalable and performant script is not always a trivial task, not to mention the maintenance and updates to the script because your manager wants to continually add more things to the report.

So how can we make reporting so easy that vSphere administrators will no longer have to spend time digging through API documentation and instead they will be able to quickly put together reports within minutes? Well, this is something that the CloudPhysics team has been working on as part of their CloudPhysics card platform and they have built a very unique card solution to help solve this problem. I had the opportunity to get an early preview of this new card and I have to say that I am very impressed at how easy and intuitive the interface is to build simple to very complex reports using this new card solution. The coolest part of this solution is that no programming or scripting skills are required!

To give you an example on how easy it is to use the interface, I recently helped a customer with a script to identify all virtual machines that had a virtual disk using the 2gbsparse disk format. I would like to think I know the vSphere API pretty well, so putting the script together took just a few minutes because I knew exactly where to look for this information. That evening I decided to go through the same scenario, but using the new CloudPhysics card solution and I was literally able to create the report in seconds! It probably took me longer to name the report than to actually create it. As you can see, I am pretty excited about the new card solution and it will be interesting to see all the cool new reports customers can now create and share with each other.

Here is a sneak peak at what the interface looks like when creating your own custom reports:

Here is the final report that is produced:

As you can see, I have quickly narrowed down the specific virtual machine that contains a 2gbsparse VMDK and I am able to see exactly which virtual disk that is.

If you would like to learn more about the new card solution, Irfan Ahmad, CTO of CloudPhysics will be hosting a live webinar to go over this new solution next Tuesday, June 25th at 9am PST and I would highly recommend you register for it to learn more.

Below is a bit more details on what you can expect from the webinar and you can register here.

vSphere Analytics Without Writing Code: The Quest for Missing Reports

While vSphere, the best-of-class virtualization platform, brings great efficiencies to the datacenter, reporting still presents challenges and pain to sys admins on a daily basis. CloudPhysics offers a radical new way to complete reporting for your virtual infrastructure. In addition to 20 high-impact reports, you can easily build your own and share the report template and output. When asked for asset reports, trending, activity, auditing and more, you’re never more than a few clicks away from delivery.

In addition to best practices and secrets to amazing mashups, you’ll learn to:

Create easy, visual reports for your vSphere environment
Add multiple vCenters in one view
Automate the report generation

“There’s a CloudPhysics card for that” … is what you could be saying pretty soon with all the great ideas that have been suggested so far in the CloudPhysics Lab for the CloudPhysics VMworld 2012 Challenge. One of the coolest aspect of the challenge, is it is 100% community driven and the idea is really simple. Suggest an idea (using a card) that describes an issue or challenge you have faced or are facing in your vSphere environment.

Note: To learn more about CloudPhysics, check out Frank Denneman’s CloudPhysics in a nutshell article.

An example card suggestion could be automatically validate all Virtual Machines against the vSphere Security Hardening Guide or provide a DRS vCPU analyzer and recommend or automate Virtual Machine migration based on vCPU count.
As you can see, the possibilities are endless and there are currently over 500 cards that have been suggested so far. You still have time to join in on the fun (contest ends on Aug 26th, 2012), just sign up at at CloudPhysics.com and start suggesting your ideas and you can win some really cool prizes if your card is rated as one of the best by the community.

Note: Due to U.S legislation, non-U.S. residents are excluded from winning prizes

The voting system on CloudPhysics just went live yesterday and there is also a new layout for viewing all the cards in the system. The cards are now organized in the following manner:

My Suggested Cards (these are cards you created)
Most Popular
Newest Cards
Random Cards
All Community Cards

So after you are done submitting your card ideas, be sure to vote on some of your favorite community cards or leave comments on the cards. The more voting and commenting you do, the more points you earn!

Here are a few cards that I personally thought were interesting and voted for:

So hopefully in the near future, you can say “There is a CloudPhysics Card for that” and it just might be your card!

Creating Custom vSphere Reports is a Breeze with CloudPhysics

There's a CloudPhysics Card for that