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We got 10 ESXi hosts running. We don't have budget for Virtual center licenses. Is there some free tool that just gives us consolidated view of all VMs with poweroff and poweron options for each VM.We don't need Vmotion, all other stuff.

Thanks

RainDoctor
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7 Answers7

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It's not a GUI, but I know libvirt is able to talk to ESX machines.

wzzrd
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VMware Go allows you to do some fairly limited ESXi centralised management. There are some compromises and none of the advanced features (no cloning, deploying VM's from templates and VMotion\DRS\HA etc are totally out) but it does provide a single console for powering on\off and some other basic functions. The main drawback is that it is a cloud service.

Helvick
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The facilitites you describe are all accessible via ssh on ESX.

While its technically possible to use libvirt (with additional software on top) this will be a painful process.

If you can't afford the components to make VMWare workable for you, why are you using VMWare? You might consider migrating to Proxmox. I moved my employers onto Proxmox from Simplivity (VMware with added secret sauce) not to save money (which it did) but because of the stability and functionality benefits.

symcbean
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I believe the current version of Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager will allow you to administer (power on/off) VMware images. Of course it's not free - but you can demo it for 100+ days, during which time something better/cheaper may come along. Runs on Windows Server 2008.

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On the libvirt page, there are a list of applications that leverage libvirt. Some of them may solve your problem either collectively or individually.

gWaldo
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I know this thread is quite old, but since i had a very similar need (on both Vmware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V) I started developing an open source very basic alternative.

The project is gCenter, an opensource project on GitHub that run on every LAMP server (also on linux on arm).
Github public link : https://github.com/gcaglio/gCenter

Here some of the feature actually implemented.

Vmware ESXI

take vm snapshot list esxi information (software, hardware, etc) list vm for each esxi host check vm cpu and memory statistics/graphs list datastore for each esxi host list and take vms snapshots list datastore content (filesystem tree) list vswitch/portgroup informations list network interfaces and porgroup assignation

Micrososft Hyper-V

hyperv-wmi-http-adapter-service windows service to interface WMI collect hosts informations collect vms informations poweron/poweroff vms taking vms snapshots listing vms snapshots check vm cpu and memory statistics/graphs

hope this helps.

GCaglio
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Convirture is probably exactly what you're looking for - the OpenSource version is free, if you get to the point where you feel you have want to spend some money, they have a couple of commercial products Convirture Enterprise & Convirture Enterprise Cloud. Only problem is that Convirture currently does not support ESX (AFAIK) - only KVM and Xen - maybe you should reconsider your Hypervisor choice and go all open source.

naw
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