[tweetmeme]
If there is another tool that is a must for a Vmware Administrator then this is it. vCenter CapacityIQ is a trend analysis virtual appliance that monitors your hosts and virtual machines over time and helps with capacity planning. Along with capacity planning you can also run some really neat reports. Some of the most useful reports are over oversized virtual machines and undersized virtual machines. I heard a story from the presenter at this years Vmware Partner Exchange about organization thinking they need x amount of vcpu’s and x amount of ram, but after view what is really happening with CapacityIQ, they saw that most of the vm’s were oversized and therefore could be scaled back on vcpu and ram, which ended up saving them on 50% of resources. This is a great tool and like most of Vmware’s software comes with a 60 day eval which can be found by clicking here followed by clicking on evaluate now at the bottom of the page. Ok let’s get started.
1. After you have downloaded the virtual appliance, log into vCenter and right click on the File Menu – Deploy OVF Template. Browse to where you saves the OVA file. Click Next.
2. This screen will show a summary of the OVF. Click Next.
3. Click Accept on the license agreement and then click Next.
4. Give the Virtual Appliance a name and select the folder that you wish to place the virtual appliance into. Click Next.
5. Select the datastore where you would like to place the virtual appliance. Click Next.
6. I will select Thin Provisioned Format as I don’t want to allocate all the storage space now. Click Next.
7. Select the network you would like to connect to you Virtual Appliance. Click Next.
8. A Summary screen is presented. Click Finish.
9. Once the Virtual Appliance has finished installing, open the console to the vm and power it on. You will be ask to enter a new password for root followed by entering a new username for ciqadmin. The root user is used to log into the operating system, the ciqadmin user is used to login into the web interface of CapacityIQ.
10. The virtual appliance will now boot into the following screen. If you have DHCP on the network, it will obtain and IP address by default. Select Login will take you to the shell prompt. Within the shell if you need to change the root username password again type passwd. Type exit to exit the shell. Select Configure Network to configure a static ip, subnet mask, default gateway, dns servers and to give the virtual appliance a hostname. Lastly set the Timezone accordingly. Once you are done you can close the console window, the rest of the config is done via a web browser.
11. Open up your browser and browse to the IP address of the virtual appliance that you set in step 10. Log in with the ciqadmin user and password.
12. Once you are logged in you will see that we need to make a connection to vCenter and also that our license is a Demo and has 59 days remaining. Click Register.
13. Select Use IP of the CapacityIQ Virtual Appliance, Use HTTPS (SSL) Connections and enter in your vCenter server address, user name and password that has admin access or if you check in the manual you can create a custom role with specific settings. Check the Resources section of the site and click on the CapacityIQ Install Guide. Click Apply.
14. You can now see that vCenter is registered.
15. Click on the SMTP tab and enter in your mail server address and the fields for Default Sender name and Default sender email. This will be used when you schedule reports to be emailed to you. For example email a report each week with all the vm’s that are oversized.
16. Close the vCenter Client and log back in again. You must do this otherwise the extension is not recognized. Once you have logged back in , you may get the following warning, if so select Install this certificate and click ignore.
17. You can also see within vCenter if you click on the Plug-ins menu and select manage plug-ins, the CapacityIQ plugin is enabled.
To log into CapacityIQ click on the Home button. Under Solutions and Applications you will see the Capacity IQ icon. Click it and you will be presented with the dashboard. You may not see data straight away but after about 10-15mins you will. Click on views and reports and have a look around.
Disclaimer:
All the tutorials included on this site are performed in a lab environment to simulate a real world production scenario. As everything is done to provide the most accurate steps to date, we take no responsibility if you implement any of these steps in a production environment.
Be the first to comment