Dell vOPS Server Explorer 6.3 Adds Storage Explorer and Change Explorer

Storage often is viewed as the foundation of virtual environments, and it is the subsystem that can be the root of most performance or capacity challenges. Thankfully Dell has a FREE solution to help.

Assessing storage metrics is critical to ensuring the virtual environment continues to operate with expected performance and availability. Unfortunately, due to the magnitude and complexity of these metrics, proper analysis can require a significant amount of manual data mining and calculation. Storage Explorer is designed to alleviate many of these challenges by using the same analytics and advisory engine found in the core vOPS Server Standard product to provide virtual administrators with a rapid assessment of the state of their storage environment.

Assessed values include:

• Storage performance across datastores, highlighting performance bottlenecks
• Storage capacity and over-commitment across datastores, highlighting low-capacity environments
• VMs causing the most storage traffic and potential bottlenecks
• VM disk capacity alerting to those virtual machines running out of space

While storage is a critical part of the virtual environment, changes in the virtualization layer also can have severe impact on performance. When there are multiple VM administrators, one admin can make a single change that drastically changes the performance characteristics for the entire environment, which consumes troubleshooting time for all administrators.
To address these issues, Change Explorer lists all changes that occurred to datacenters, clusters, resource pools, hosts, datastores, and VMs within the previous seven days, and includes associated risk impact. Using Change Explorer, problematic changes to virtualization environments are easily identified for rollback.

Both Change Explorer and Storage Explorer are part of vOPS Server Explorer, a single downloadable virtual appliance that now offers five free utilities:

Source: http://www.vkernel.com/reader/items/storage-and-change-tracking-utilities-added-to-freeware-suite