Discovery and Health check processes

I am currently working on putting together IT environmental discovery processes, health check and standard documentation processes in place goal is to put together these documents for following areas, it will take me a while but hoping to get it done in next couple of months…

1. Microsoft Active Directory

2. Exchange

3. SQL

4. VMWare Vsphere

5. VDI Readiness

6. Citrix XenDesktop

7. VMware View

8. Storage Environment – FC, FCoE and iSCSI

Dell Performance Analysis Collection Kit – DPACK

Dell just came out of with a new server profiling tool. Dpack can be downloaded from support.dell.com can and typing DPACK in search box. It can scan Windows, Linux and ESX/ESXi 3.5, 4.x and 5.x using VCenter.

It allows collection periods from 4 hours to 24 hours unless changed from command line to increase the period by using /extended switch in that case it will allow for data collection for up to 7 days It runs from memory and is 596k executable.

Dell encourages to include end user information in final report. it saves iokit file. report includes IOPS, MB/Sec, Avg. IO Size, Avg. Latency and Queue. It is not clear or documented that how to parse  iokit file.

Nirsoft, Sysinternals and WSCC

I use Nirsoft and sysinternals tools quite a bit. They are very useful in complex troubleshooting scenarios. They go through updates regularly. In past I will manually check their website to download newer version but I just came across Windows System Control Center it updates those utlities automatically for you.

WSCC can be downloaded from www.kls-soft.com/wscc/. Nirsoft utilities are located at www.nirsoft.net and Sysinternals Suite can be downloaded from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals