With the launch of VMware vSphere came some new products that I hadn’t really paid much attention to (busy upgrading I guess).  One of the newer products is a Virtual Center reporting tool called Capacity IQ.  This product  gives an administrator the ability to analyze, forecast and plan for future growth across your ESX environment.  I have had a lot of experience with monitoring/reporting tools in the past, I won’t bore you with the details, so I was quite skeptical of a 1.0 reporting tool for Virtual Center.  I must admit I was blown away by the immediate relevant reports the product was able to produce.

After pulling down the trial install and obtaining the demo key, I loaded it up for a spin.  I am not going to document the installation steps needed as Eric Gray has done this for us already.  It by far is the easiest reporting application I have ever installed.  If your interested in taking it for a trial run, download the virtual appliance from VMware’s website here (OVF format).  Once you import the virtual appliance and give it a static IP address, it will need to collect data about your environment for a while.

There are three basic views that CIQ gives you once you install the plug-in, dashboard, views and reports.

Dashboard

The dashboard tab is designed to give you a quick overview of the item you have selected.  Capacity IQ uses the same approach as virtual center does, whatever object you have selected will be reported and focused on.  Here is a view of one of our clusters, notice January 11th on the Trend and Forecast graph on top.

One of our clusters was out of resources, I added two more physical hosts to the cluster.  You can see CIQ picks up the new physical host resources for the cluster and reflects this by increasing the number of virtual machines it believes the cluster can accommodate.  Want to see something even more interesting, check out the pink graph on the 17th.  Capacity IQ is already using a prebuilt formula to assume what it thinks we will have (or won’t have) a week out.  Pretty impressive.

Views

The views tab is designed  to give you a more detailed look on some of the specific data points.  Here is a screenshot of the various reports you can execute:

So here is where you can get some great visual reports to present to either upper management, or a potential customer.  This gives you a nice interface that you can customize with data points that you can tweak.  Check out the first report on this cluster:

This gives you a graphical historical view of your cluster, how many virtual machines you have added over the course of time.  Notice the horizontal sliding bar at the bottom of the chart.  This allows you to adjust your variable time/date window.  The lighter shaded line to the right is the projected or forecasted growth of how the cluster might continue to grow.  The views tab is a great place to run some ad-hoc reports, gives you the ability to select the type of report, and even allows you to export the data.

Reports

The reports tab is the “pre-canned” reports that can be executed by the administrator.  The one thing I was disappointed to not see here was the ability to schedule these reports to run at a particular interval (weekly/monthly).  This is something that I assume will probably be introduced in future releases of the product.

After the report is executed and compiled, you are then provided with a .pdf or .csv version of your dataset to download and review.  The first report totaled 17 pages and provided some great technical information.  Here is the table of contents:

Conclusion

I am very impressed with Capacity IQ.  There are no agents you need to install across the virtual machines you wish to report against.  The installation was very straight forward, I think I had it up and running in about 15 minutes.  Once the virtual appliance was in place, all it needed was a little bit of time to start crunching some data.  The reports are well written and very relevant to what an administrator would desire and wish to see.  If your looking for a nice reporting tool to help you forecast, give this one a test to see if it fits your needs.