RVTools - The Ultimate free VMware Tool you need to have!

was you guys know I run VMware vsphere in my home lab environment and if you're running VMware vsphere there are a myriad of tools both native VMware tools as well as open source tools that provide a lot of value to your VMware vsphere environment however there is one tool that I want to introduce you guys to if you're not familiar with it that can be a game changer when it comes to gathering information from your vsphere environment health statistics configuration information and a myriad of other things you're going to want to see this tool and it is completely free stick around let's see what we're talking about [Music] thank you down well you may be wondering are we talking about a VMware fleeing are we talking about another free and open source solution while there are a myriad of VMware flings out there that I have used and they are fantastic there is one tool that I'm going to introduce to you guys today if you've not heard about it you're going to want to go out and download this tool this tool is called RV tools from robware.net RV tools is based on a windows.net application which uses the VMware vsphere management SDK so it interacts with that SDK to pull all kinds of statistics and information from your vsphere environment and one of the things that I think is super cool about RV tools is the compatibility of this tool so if you're running a legacy version of vsphere if you're running bleeding edge vsphere as in vsphere 8 this tool covers the gamut of vsphere versions so you don't have to worry about compatibility with this tool you're going to find Value in using it no matter which version of vsphere that you have in your environment whether that's a home lab environment or production RV tools is able to list information about many different things in the environment including VMS CPU memory disks partitions Network CD drives USB devices snapshots VMware tools vcenter server resource pools clusters esxos you get the idea it can list pretty much anything so how do we get RV tools installed what is the installation process and configuration process look like let's dive into that the process to download and install RV tools is extremely easy in fact if you just Google RV tools download you're going to No Doubt land on the page that I have displayed here and it's going to take you directly to the download link so what you need to do is fill out this simple form there's no cost associated with downloading RV tools and all that's required is simply signing up with your name and email address from what I have seen there is no spamming that hap with RV tools I've downloaded it many times and I've never seen spam emails coming from and you can select to receive Communications however as you can see this is unchecked by default and not required so fill in the form and register and the download will begin and as you can see the MSI file downloads and all we need to do is run the MSI file to install RV tools once you kick off the MSI installer the RV Tools installation process is a simple next next finish type installation that we're all accustomed to from Windows apps for decades now first we're going to accept the EULA click next we're going to select the installation folder as well as the scope of the installation already we are to the confirm installation prompt so click next if you're running UAC you're going to get the UAC prompt and windows just click next and that quickly RV tools is now installed so we just click the close button you will notice once you launch the RV tools utility it's a simple form that you need to fill in to connect to your environment so you simply need to enter the IP address of an esxi host or a vcenter server so here I'm going to enter my vcenter server address as you notice the boxes automatically check to use Windows session credentials now if you don't have your domain delegated in your vsphere environment you're going to want to uncheck this here I'm going to enter my SSO administrator account to connect to this research over once RV tools launches you're going to notice the interface already has displayed a wealth of information across the top you're going to see tabs you're going to see menus and automatically we're going to see a wealth of information about virtual machines running in our vsphere environment one of the things that I think is super cool about this tool outside of the compatibility and the obvious information that you can pull about all the configuration of your virtual machines networks hosts vcenter server is the V health check that RV tools is able to perform if you don't know where to Land once you first open RV tools the V health have is one of the ones that I would say this is your go-to tab in fact with the V Health tab you're going to be able to proactively check the health of your environment based on a number of different health checks in fact the documentation for rbtools mentions there are 23 possible health check messages just to call out a few of those checks and messages you can see such things as does the VM have a CD-ROM ISO connected does it have an active snapshot what is the condition of your VMware tools and is it current is it out of date is it running is it even installed what about disk space what about the number of virtual CPUs and one that I especially think is phenomenal that is difficult to get from many other tools especially free and open source tools is the check for zombie vmd case now what are zombie vmd case well as you guys know know when you are in VMware vsphere especially in the vsphere client you can right click on any powered off virtual machine and you can simply say remove from inventory this removes it from your view for managing that virtual machine however it leaves all of the relevant files on your data store so if you have a one terabyte or multi-terabyte virtual machine lurking on your data store and you simply remove that virtual machine from inventory you will essentially still have the same amount of disk space that is being used on your data store however you may quickly lose sight and visibility of that zombie virtual machine and that's exactly what a zombie vmdk is is it is those vmdks that are sitting on your data store not attached to a virtual machine in inventory in addition to zombie vmdks you can spot out zombie VMS inconsistent folder names is the folder different than the inventory name in vsphere client what about multi-path operational State virtual machines that need disk consolidation what about data store errors ntp issues cluster config errors SSH enabled on the host you're going to be able to bring the health and the configuration state of your virtual infrastructure to a really good point compared to where it may possibly be today with all of the errors that RV tools is able to shed light on so what you see is RV tools loaded and connected to my quote unquote production lab environment and what I have done is I've navigated to the V Health tab all the way to the right hand side of your RV tools interface and then I have sorted by message type and what this will do is it will group together the issues that RV tools has found in your vsphere environment so as you can see I've got these grouped and they are listed alphabetically so right off the bat we've got a number of virtual machines that have a CU ROM device attached and according to best practice that is something you don't want to run in production as we scroll on down we can see some CPU best practices that are being violated here we've also got inconsistent folder names so what the virtual machine is in inventory differs from what the virtual machine is on the data store and aside from just causing confusion it's not in line with best practice to run in that fashion now in my lab environment I have added and deleted virtual machines and renamed just due to various purposes so that's what a lot of this stems from now it also includes best practices for your esxi hosts as you can see here we've got ntp warnings either I don't have any ntp server set or the ntp service is not not running we've got some performance tips security tips as well with the SSH service that is running snapshots that are present on a majority of the virtual machines I have running in the lab then as we scroll down we've got VMware tools are out of date now scrolling on down to the zombie VMS and zombie vmdks now this is a really awesome check that RV tools makes clearly visible so these are virtual machines that I have either removed from inventory forgot to delete or the delete process for whatever reason did not clean up the vmdk files so this is a great check especially for data store usage so if you have a data store that is getting close to some thresholds possibly of usage this is a great tool to pull out and just at a high level make a quick check of your zombie vmdks or VMS if you're like me how many times have you quickly spun up a power CLI Pro prompt to connect to a cluster to then figure out your power CLI query to be able to pull the exact information that you want from your vsphere infrastructure I do that all the time however I then usually pull out RV tools and I'm able to look and query for information in the pre-built views in RV tools and pull the relevant information from my vsphere infrastructure and to me time is so valuable as vsphere admins as it off as devops Engineers that we need these types of tools to quickly gain access to information and RV tools allows you to do that so I want to show you guys some of the information that you can gather outside of the V Health tab that we've already looked at now you have the tabs all the way across the top of the program so you can click on each Tab and view the relevant info information for that particular tab however I want to turn your attention as well to the menu so from the menu you can break out the information based on the virtual machine itself or the ESX host so if I start with the virtual machine we can look at info CPU memory disk so on and so forth snapshot VM tools so the snapshot one is always interesting you get an instant filter of information for your snapshot view hop over to the ESX menu I can take a look at all of the hosts that are in the vcenter server connection that I have made and as you can see you get a wealth of information about the host CPUs detailed CPU information such as hyper threading course for socket we get the ESX build the boot time DNS servers Network information serial numbers for the virtual machine service tags if those are available get the BIOS information uuid you can view your license information you can view the switch information so which switches are assigned to which hosts and then you also see detailed information about the virtual switch itself you can look at service console information VM kernel information so if you want to see all of the information regarding the service ports as well as VM kernel ports such as vmotion you can see all of those things here in this particular view on the VM tab if you click the info selection you get a wealth of information here creation date change version you get the CPUs memory mix total capacity get resource pool information fault tolerance ha monitoring if I look at the CPU information again detailed information on the CPUs disk information we can take a look at all of the hard drive disk sizes for the virtual machines that are configured the path on the data store you guys can see this is just a phenomenal wealth of information and a shout out to the developer Rob who is a fellow VMware V expert and an awesome developer who has provided this tool for the vsphere community hopefully this video has brought this tool to your attention and after watching it you can run straight out and download your own copy of RB tools well I'm Brandon Lee please do like this video subscribe to the channel I hope you guys are doing well I hope your home labs are being upgraded expanded and otherwise running very well in 2023 please do like the video and subscribe to the channel and I will see you guys on the next video [Music]

Channel: VirtualizationHowto

Views: 7,688

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Id: 2A-fOuNQWKc

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 09 2023