Cloud Physics has cards forfrom everyone
December 9, 2013
Cloud Physics generated a lot of buzz during the 2012 VMworld in San Francisco. I remember them sharing a booth with Fusion-IO and having a large crowd most of the time. They had a little different idea about how to get viability into vSphere environments and it was through the concept of cards.
The Installation of Cloud Physics may be one of the simplest ever done.
1. Go to the CloudPhysics site and sign up for their service. (There is a 30 day free trial available as well).
2. Download the Observer as either an OVA or OVF and deploy it in your vSphere environment.
3. Login to your Cloud Physics account on their site and review your configs.
Once your install is done you’ll notice some very cool information being available right away in your deck. Specifically I’m look to the HA Cluster Health Card, Datastore Utilization, and Host NTP Settings (yeah, I’ve got an issue already). Clicking on these cards will give you more than just an overview though.
When i click on my Snapshots Gone WIld card I can see all my snapshots, how much space they’re chewing up, and how old they are. This makes it pretty easy to go fix whatever errors I have. Other cards may show different information, such as datastore usage, CPU over-commitment, etc.
One of the cards I immediately noticed was a cost calculator for Amazon Web Services (AWS) as well as vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS). The AWS card is shown below and can take your current environment and give you a breakdown of costs for deploying the same thing on AWS. Very Cool!
What if the information I’m looking for doesn’t exist in my deck? Then check out the card store. The store has a variety of different cards with additional metrics to use, but even better than that, there is a way to access the entire community of cards. I downloaded a card built by Josh Coen that shows the number of VM Nics vs VM Nics that are connected. A useful card that can show me if I’ve got virtual machines without network connectivity.
If we dive into Josh’s card we see that in my environment this occurs in a couple of places.
If you’ve got some time, check them out for a 30 day trial. Especially if you’re considering moving your environment to AWS or vCHS!
[…] 3, was CloudPhysics. I was already a little familiar with the company because I’d written a post on my experience in the lab. While my original post was obviously good, you can’t really […]