Why?

I wanted to create a list of free tools that you can use with vSphere. Not just 30-day trial tools, but actually *free* tools. I will be testing out all these applications in the next 2 months in preparation for a Top 5 or 10 blog and presentation at the Kentuckiana Virtualization Users Group meeting May21st

Top 10 Articles from Previous Years

Top 10 Free VMware vSphere Tools and Utilities for 2011

The Top 10 Free vSphere ESX Tools and Utilities post has been released. (2010 Article)

If you want to dive into performance, take a look at VM Advanced ISO. Free Tools for Advanced Tasks

vSphere Utilities & Programs

RVTools - uses the VI SDK 2.5 to display information about your virtual machines and ESX hosts.

VMVision Manager - A new way to view the virtual machines in your environment

CPUID System Information - shows the VMHost CPU Info by NTPRO

VMware CPU Host Info 2.01 - allow you to read out all CPU information from all your ESX Servers by querying your VC server. It will show what features are available on your CPUs and if they are compatible to vmotion VMs and if FT is supported.

Vizioncore vOptimizer WasteFinder - 3.0 - scans vCenter and can shrink VMDKs to reclaim storage and can also realign VMDKs to 64k on 2 VMs for free.

PHD Virtual Patch Downloader 6.2.0.5 - simplifies the task of downloading patches for various ESX and ESXi versions (including vSphere) by automating the task.

Loadstorm - utility to generate CPU and/or memory load within a virtual machine. Great for testing out DRS

vmClient - a lightweight tool which enables you to control the power of your virtual machines, it’s also capable of presenting the MKS console of your virtual machines (Read More)

vDisk Informer - demonstrates which virtual disks have potentially wasted space on them and which virtual disks are misaligned causing a performance impact

VMware Scanner 1.4 - scan for VMware Servers (ESX, ESXi, VirtualCenter and VMware Server). It uses the VMware API to identify a VMware server and query the product name, version and build number.

ESXi Customizer - automates the process of customizing the ESXi install-ISO with drivers that are not originally included

UBERAlign - free and powerful tool to resolve alignment of VMs

SolarWinds VM-to-Cloud Calculator - Discovers Virtual Machines & Estimates the Cost to Move to the Cloud

sfvAlarms - A windows utility to allow the export and import of VMware vCenter Alarms

DoubleCloud Client - a wrapper around a Web browser so that the vSphere Web Client user experience is similar to a standalone C# application.

Foglight for Virtualization, Free Edition - virtualization freeware suite is comprised of six utilities that provide virtualization administrators with 360-degree visibility into heterogeneous virtualized environments (Snapshot Explorer, Storage Explorer, Change Explorer, Environment Explorer, vScope Explorer, SearchMyVM Explorer)

vOptimizer WasteFinder - quickly locate and reclaim over-allocated VM storage and dramatically reduce unnecessary storage costs

Virtual Mac Address management - Virtual Mac management tool that allows you easily to manage the MAC addresses of your virtual machine’s NICs. (not tested on latest vSphere releases)

JAM HeavyLoad - freeware stress test tool HeavyLoad. HeavyLoad puts your workstation or server PC under a heavy load and lets you test whether they will still run reliably.

PowerCLI GUI to edit VM hardware version 10 - A .NET like graphical user interface (GUI) in PowerCLI from which perform all operations for VM editing without using the vSphere Web Client

DBC-VMfinder - search for VMware virtual machines by name, MAC, or IP to retrieve their information. Page is in spanish, use google translation.

Operations and Monitoring

Turbonomic Operations Manager Lite - an application performance control system. It continuously matches any application workload demand to any infrastructure supply.

Turbonomic Virtual Health Monitor - a complete suite of Virtual Infrastructure Monitoring capabilities that also includes reporting. Seen many times on the top 10 Free Tools edition.

Xangati Free - VMs, networks, storage, apps, end-user devices in one pane of glass. Real-time continuous UI with ability to DVR record anything. Rich historical reporting on VM and application activity

Solarwinds SAN Monitor - Gain Visibility into Storage Performance & Stay Ahead of SAN Slowdowns

VKernel Capacity View - provides quick visibility and alerting to the storage and server capacity issues in your VMware virtualized infrastructure.

Take a look at my Home Lab w/ Capacity View. Be sure to include the referral from kendrickcoleman [@] gmail [dot] com for validation(without the brackets of course).

vSphere Mini Monitor 2.0 - VMM will now monitor a large number of changes to multiple objects within the vCenter environment

vAlarm - Windows based application which monitors alarms generated by VMware vCenter.

Vdisk Waste Finder - report which disks are over-allocated

IgniteFreeVM - pinpoints the root cause of database performance issues in the query, virtual server, or physical host

Veeam Extended Generic Report Library - gives you the ability to analyze the health and performance of infrastructure objects without being limited to physical or virtual environments, or specific management packs for Microsoft System Center reporting

Veeam ONE Free Edition - Free powerful and easy-to-use monitoring and reporting. Combination of the previous Monitor and Business View products

Veeam Task Manager for Hyper-V - displays a real-time view of both host and VM compute resource consumption

SolarWinds Storage Response Time Monitor - Identifies VMs With High Storage Latency

MindArray Monitoring - free vSphere monitoring for up to 5 hosts

ManageEngine Free VM Configuration Tool - Configure VMware Virtual server (VM) resources such as CPU, RAM, execute Power operations and change the name of the VM's using the free VMware Configuration Tool. Monitor CPU usage and view memory, provisioned storage, and network adapter details of VMware host server and its VMs. (not tested with latest vSphere releases)

ManageEngine VM Health Monitor Free Tool - Monitor VMware Esx and Esxi servers using VM Health Monitor Tool. This tool helps monitor disk read/write and network Rx/ Tx for virtual servers along with CPU and memory utilization for each guest OS. You can monitor two VMware servers simultaneously. (not tested with latest vSphere releases)

3-year IT budget template - Keep track of your IT budgets for the next 3 years

Backup & Recovery

Thinware vBackup - an actual FREE backup solution for virtual infrastructure that can be easily implemented in any environment.

Veeam Backup & Replication (2 socket license) - If you are a VMware vExpert, VMware Certified Professional (VCP), VMware Certified Instructor (VCI) or VMware User Group (VMUG) member, you can get a FREE 2-socket NFR license for your home or work lab.

Unitrends Enterprise Backup™ Free Edition - Free Edition to protect 4 VMs for free

VeeamZIP - Backup, archive or copy a VM—without pausing or powering it off. Restore data from inside a VM. Migrate and manage VMs and files

Trilead VM Explorer - Backup & Restore & Browse for ESX virtual machines

33Hops XSIBackup - Backup System for ESXi - XSIBackup will copy your virtual machines to a defined backup device in ESXi Hypervisor

SLYM Software vSphere Configuration Backup - an automating tool for saving configurations of multiple ESXi and SQL databases.

PHDVirutual Disaster Recovery Time Actual Calculator - with the use of snapshotting and linked clonesthe tool powers up the VMs and times the process, calculating the total time it will take to recover your VMs. Read my blog post about it at What's Your RTO? Check out this new free tool

vCenter Plug-Ins

vSphere Plugin Wizard 2.0 - create a tabbed plugin of your favorite website or admin page inside vCenter

sshAutoConnect vCenter Plug-in - creates a direct SSH icon to your ESXi hosts using PuTTy

Auto Deploy GUI - a front end interface to the Auto Deploy/Stateless infrastructure (now a VMware Fling)

vCloud Connector - lets you view, operate on and transfer your computing resources across vSphere and vCloud Director in your private cloud environment as well as public clouds from vCloud Service Providers. Walkthru provided by Chris Colotti

VMware vCenter Support Assistant - provides an easy-to-use, secure, one-stop shop BOTH for creating and managing service requests AND generating and uploading logs.

Scripting tools

PowerGUI - a GUI for all those neat powershell scripts :)

PowerGUI VMware Community PowerPack - everything from the VESI PowerPack v3 and much much more!

vGhetto - a nice consolidation of all the scripts written by William Lam and some members of the VMTN community (VMware vSphere CLI & Perl)

Image Builder & Auto Deploy Powerpack - a PowerGUI Powerpack which enables us as VMware admins to have a graphical interface to Image Builder and Auto Deploy which are currently released as PowerShell snap-ins only.

DoubleCloud Proxy - Code Generator for vSphere Java API. Similar to Onyx by VMware Labs.

PHP with vSphere5 Examples - contains examples of PHP code to communicate with vSphere using the vSphere API. it contains the nusoap library files and a small vc_lib file.

vCloud Director REST API Shell (RAS) - provides an alternative interface for interacting with vCloud Director. Rather than using a web browser, this Fling allows you to interact with vCloud Director through the command-line using a small python script.

PAPI, the Performance API project - specifies a standard application-programming interface (API) for accessing hardware performance counters available on most modern microprocessors.

Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) - is a Linux console UI for vSphere, built on the RbVmomi bindings to the vSphere API. RVC is a console UI for VMware ESX and VirtualCenter.

PowerCLI GUI to edit VM hardware version 10 - A .NET like graphical user interface (GUI) in PowerCLI from which perform all operations for VM editing without using the vSphere Web Client

Free tools brought to you by VMware

VMmark - Get an accurate measurement of application performance in virtualized environments with VMmark, the industry's first virtualization benchmark for x86-based computers

vCenter Converter - of course we all know this appliance for easy P2V migrations

vSphere Management Assistant - allows administrators and developers to run scripts and agents to manage ESX/ESXi and vCenter Server systems.

PowerCLI - a powerful command line tool that lets you automate all aspects of vSphere management, including network, storage, VM, guest OS and more.

VMware Support Toolbar - have a direct way for all the necessary links, downloads, RSS feed news for all things from VMware. Compatible w/ Firefox, IE, and Safari

VMware SiteSurvey - Produces a report showing hardware compatibility and software configuration compatibility with advanced VMware features such as Fault Tolerance.

CPU Identification Utility - Displays CPU features for VMotion compatibility, EVC and indicates 64-bit VMware support.

VMware Studio - an integrated development tool that packages software applications into virtual appliances and vApps that are ready to run and optimized for VMware product platforms and the cloud.

VMware vCenter Update Manager 4.1 Sizing Estimator - get the right answer to your question whether to install the VMware vCenter Update Manager database on the same DB as vCenter DB or not. And also if yes or not to install VUM at the same host as the vCenter Server host

VMware Compliance Checker for vSphere - Check the compliance of your IT infrastructure against specific standards and best practices that are applicable for the environment

VMware vCenter Orchestrator Appliance - Begin automating your vSphere environment

Wavemaker - a rapid application development environment for building, maintaining and modernizing business-critical Web 2.0 applications

VMware Posters - VMware posters which were created by Technical Marketing and have been released at VMworld and VMUGs around the world

Free Tools From VMware Labs

Apache Pivot - Like most modern development platforms, Pivot provides a comprehensive set of foundation classes that together comprise a "framework". These classes form the building blocks upon which more complex and sophisticated applications can be built.

Dynamo RIO - exports an interface for building dynamic tools for a wide variety of uses: program analysis and understanding, profiling, instrumentation, optimization, translation, etc.

esxplot - GUI based tool that lets you explore the data collected by esxtop in batch mode.

Onyx - standalone application that serves as a proxy between the vSphere Client and the vCenter Server. It monitors the network communication between them and translates it into an executable PowerShell code. Later this code could be modified and saved into a reusable function or script.

SVGA Sonar - demo application for SVGADevTap

vApprun - vApp features become available to both Workstation and Fusion users

vCMA - VMware vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA) - vCMA allows you to monitor and manage VMware Infrastructure from your mobile phone with an interface that is optimized for such devices.

VGC - VMware Guest Console, too many cool things to list

VI Java - vSphere Java API is a set of Java libraries that sits on top of existing vSphere SDK Web Services interfaces

Virtual USB Analyzer - free and open source tool for visualizing logs of USB packets, from hardware or software USB sniffer tools

Weasel - insert the ESX Installation DVD, this program guides you through the steps of network configuration, disk selection, etc. Or it can perform an automated install based on a script similar to Redhat kickstart scripts.

IOBlazer - a multi-platform storage stack micro-benchmark.

PXE Manager for vCenter - enables ESXi host state (firmware) management and provisioning

Thinapped vSphere Client - Run vSphere client 4.1 in a snap. No install, just download the EXE and double-click.

vCenter XVP Manager and Converter - provides basic virtualization management capabilities for non-vSphere hypervisor platforms towards enabling centralized visibility and control across heterogeneous virtual infrastructures

VMware Auto Deploy - supports automatic PXE boot and customization of large numbers of ESXi systems

Boomerang - allows you to use multiple vSphere servers simultaneously

I/O Analyzer - a simple and standardized way of measuring storage performance in a VMware vSphere virtualized environments.

ESX System Analyzer - help administrators plan a migration from ESX to ESXi

CloudCleaner - It selectively (or completely) removes all vCD-created virtual machines, resource pools, network pools, and networks. It can also unprepare hosts that have been prepared by vCD.

InventorySnapshot - allows a user to "snapshot" a given vCenter inventory configuration and then reproduce it.

vCD-nclient - aims to be a quick start for using the new Notifications feature in vCloud Director v1.5.

Auto Deploy GUI - a front end interface to the Auto Deploy/Stateless infrastructure

SilverLining - allows you to build a simplified interface for vCloud Director that works from any modern web-browser that supports HTML5, CSS and Javascript

Lctree - designed for the visualization of linked clone VM trees created by VMware vCloud Director.

VCD-nclient - a quick start for using the Notifications feature in vCloud Director

ThinApp Factory - brings centralized administration and automation to the process of creating virtualized Windows applications with VMware ThinApp technology

VMware OS Optimization Tool - helps optimize Windows 7 desktops for use with VMware Horizon View. The optimization tool includes customizable templates to enable or disable Windows system services and features, per VMware recommendations and best practices, across multiple systems.

VisualEsxtop - is an enhanced version of resxtop and esxtop. VisualEsxtop can connect to VMware vCenter Server or ESX hosts, and display ESX server stats with a better user interface and more advanced features.

Statsfeeder - is a tool that enables performance metrics to be retrieved from vCenter and sent to multiple destinations, including 3rd party systems.

ESXi Google Authenticator - is a project that provides two-factor authentication by using both a PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) module and a mobile application for generating one-time passcodes.

View Pool Manager - is a Fling that allows VMware View administrators to easily manage users across desktop pools and security groups.

DrmDiagnose - attempts to make this easier by providing resource management recommendations based on inventory dumps of the existing environment. It compares the current resource demands of a VM and suggests changes to the resource allocation settings to achieve the performance you are looking for. It will also let you know how it impacts the other VMs.

vCloud Director REST API Shell (RAS) - provides an alternative interface for interacting with vCloud Director. Rather than using a web browser, this Fling allows you to interact with vCloud Director through the command-line using a small python script.

vCenter 5.1 Pre-Install Check Script - PowerShell script written to help customers validate their environment and assess if it is ready for a 5.1.x upgrade. The script checks against known misconfiguration and issues raised with VMware Support.

Makyo - lets you copy virtual machines and vApps from one vCenter Server to another using a wizard in the vSphere Web Client.

Controlled Recompose of a VMware View Linked Clone Pool of Virtual Desktops - It first identifies a free desktop and recomposes it to create the first Replica Desktop.

Lctree - is a tool designed for the visualization of linked clone VM trees created by VMware vCloud Director.

PAPI, the Performance API project - specifies a standard application-programming interface (API) for accessing hardware performance counters available on most modern microprocessors.

Guest Reclaim - reclaims dead space from NTFS volumes hosted on a thin provisioned SCSI disk.

vBenchmark measures the performance of a VMware virtualized infrastructure across three categories: Efficiency, Operational Agility, Quality of Service

InventorySnapshot - allows a user to “snapshot” a given vCenter inventory configuration and then reproduce it.

VMware View

vAudit 1.5 - a utility for VMware View environments (3.01 and 3.1). The tool will display when your users are logging in to their virtual machines and it can also display and unsuccessful login attempts

VDI Calculator - VDI calculator is targeted for VMware View designs, however you can use the calculator for any VDI running on top of vSphere infrastructure

Quest vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer - 40 optimizations to tweak your golden image.

PCoIP Log Viewer 2.0 - provides capabilities to visualize and analyze PCoIP performance metrics collected from PCoIP server log files and real-time WMI counters.

TS Tweaker - This Application will allow you to tweak some common registry changes to optimise Terminal Server

VMware OS Optimization Tool - helps optimize Windows 7 desktops for use with VMware Horizon View. The optimization tool includes customizable templates to enable or disable Windows system services and features, per VMware recommendations and best practices, across multiple systems.

Controlled Recompose of a VMware View Linked Clone Pool of Virtual Desktops - It first identifies a free desktop and recomposes it to create the first Replica Desktop.

VDI (Display) Protocol Calculator - calculator from Andre

Virtual Storage Appliances (VSA)

Celerra UBER VSA v3 – A VSA of EMC's Celerra

UBER VNX (NFS) v1 - A VSA of EMC's VNX currently only working with NFS

Nexenta - VSA of Nexenta

NetApp VSA - must login to your NetApp Account to download and must be a NetApp customer

OpenFiler - OpenFiler - Download the best up-to-date appliance here -> Openfiler 2.99 ESA in a VMware vSphere Virtual Appliance.

FreeNAS - FreeNAS

StarWind Free Edition - iSCSI SAN with Deduplication

FalconStor Virtual SAN appliance - a feature-limited edition of the FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS) Virtual Appliance.

QuadStor - Enterprise Ready Open Source Storage Virtualizatio

Visio Stencils

Turbonomic Datacenter Stencils - for Microsoft Visio® and OmniGraffle

VMware vSphere Visio Stencils from Maish- Box Shots, Icons, and Products. Get them all here.

Veeam Stencils - free collection of VMware and Hyper-V virtualization Visio stencils

VCE Vblock Visio Stencils - free Vblock Visios

VisioCafe - This site has probably every single Visio you need for your entire datacenter

Deprecated Tools No Longer Available

Veeam Monitor Free Edition - VMware monitoring solution designed to meet the day-to-day needs of VMware administrators who need real-time performance monitoring and alerting.

Veeam Business View - an add-on that works with other Veeam products to provide business categorization for your VMware vSphere environment.

Veeam FastSCP - FastSCP provides a fast, secure and easy way to manage files and bulk copy VMs across your VMware ESX environment. Now Part of VeeamZIP

SolarWinds Free VM Monitor - continuously monitors a VMware ESX Server and its virtual machines. Track virtualization health at-a-glance and impress your boss with X-ray vision into your ESX Servers! <-- not vSphere compatible

VKernel VM Stats - Provides key summary statistics for your VMware environment

VKernel SearchMyVM - “Google–like” SearchMyVM tool, delivered as a virtual appliance, instantly connects to VMware vCenter (VirtualCenter)and indexes the entire VMware ESX environment. Now a part of Foglight for Virtualization, Free Edition from Dell

VKernel SnapshotMyVM - completely automates the time–consuming process of documenting all virtual machines (VMs) in the dynamic data center . Now a part of the Free vOPS™ Server Explorer

ESX Manager 2.3 by ESXGuide - lots and lots and lots of management tools. ESX Manager 3.0 is on the horizon and looks very promising. Not sure how well this version works w/ vSphere. Now a Part of VM Vision Manager

EMC Ionix Compliance Checker for VMware ESX - providing detailed compliance checks against both the VMware Hardening Guidelines and the CIS benchmarks for ESX <-- not vSphere compatible

Hyper9 Virtual Machine Manager - Open source solution to manage VMware VI3/vSphere4, Citrix XenServer 5 or Microsoft Hyper-V from your mobile device or cell phone. Disappeared

Plugin Wizard for vSphere vCenter - allows you to register websites or web portals within your vCenter VI Client.

Vizioncore vConverter SC - 4.2 - Freeware enterprise-class P2V and V2V solution that significantly reduces the time and effort in converting servers. Replaced with vConverter DR which is not free.

Vizioncore vOptimizer WasteFinder - 2.2 - scans vCenter Servers (Virtual Centers) and alerts customers as to how much over allocated virtual storage they have and provides potential savings estimates if this wasted space is reclaimed.

EMBOTICS V-Scout - agent-less tool for tracking and reporting on VMs in VMware VirtualCenter enabled environments (End Of Life September 2010)

Novell PlateSpin Recon 3.7 for Inventory - enables users to take a complete hardware, software and services inventory of x86-based physical servers or virtual machines running VMware or Microsoft Virtual Server with absolutely no manual effort or disruptive agent technology. No longer free.



PHD Virtual Patch Downloader 6.01 - simplifies the task of downloading patches for various ESX versions by automating the task <-- not vSphere compatible

vFoglight QuickView - performance monitoring solution that provides essential alerts and data to enable administrators to quickly detect, diagnose and resolve critical issues within the virtual infrastructure.

CloudCleaner v2.5 - Luke Terheyden of VMware, coded a clean-up tool for vSphere environments prepared and managed by VMware vCloud Director. Now a VMware Labs Fling

VMTurbo Monitor - Discover all physical and virtual resources, View virtual infrastructure hotspots at a glance through a color-coded heat map, Identify overutilized and underutilized resources, Keep your virtual infrastructure healthy while assuring application performance Rolled into the Pay for Product VMTurbo Monitor

VMTurbo Watchdog - detects and troubleshoots problems in real time and helps you analyzes their impact. Rolled into the Pay for Product VMTurbo Monitor

VMTurbo Performance and Efficiency Reporter - Free Right-sizing and Six Other Actionable Reports

Hyper9 Search Plug-in - Enables users to jump directly to a VM in the Hyper9 Virtualization Manager for a VI3 or vSphere 4.0 client. Disappeared. No clue where where Solarwinds hid all the Hyper-9 stuff.

ESX Deployment Appliance (EDA) - an appliance dedicated to deploying ESX servers fast and easy. It has a scriptbuilder to quickly create %post-scripts. No Longer Free

VKernel vScope Explorer - Enterprise wide visualization of performance, capacity and efficiency issues across multiple vCenters and resources - Now a part of Foglight for Virtualization, Free Edition from Dell

VKernel StorageVIEW - instant visibility into the top five host/datastore pairs and their associated VMs with the highest latency. Now a part of Foglight for Virtualization, Free Edition from Dell

vOPS™ Server Explorer - suite of five free utilities for VM administrators. Storage, Change, Environment, vScope, SearchMyVM. Wow!.. Now rebranded as vFoglight Free Edition

vOptimizer Free - helps prevent VMs from running out of space while also identifying misaligned disk partitions to boost storage performance... now vOptimizer WasteFinder No longer a free product

vLogView - a Windows based application which manages VMware ESX Server log files. Can't find the product any more

VKernel Capacity Modeler - allows you to easily assess the performance impact of capacity changes to your existing virtualized environment... Now a part of Foglight for Virtualization, Free Edition from Dell

VMDK Stub File Generator - The PHD Virtual Stub File Generator lets you recreate the .vmdk STUB file so that you can re-attach and access the data in the -flat.vmdk, eliminating any data loss from within the virtual disk making it very useful for vmware systems administrators and disaster recover experts. Can't find the product any longer

VKernel AppVIEW - Monitor your five most important VMs and see detailed data on how these applications are running in your virtual environment. Read my latest blog post VKernel AppVIEW and Your Hidden VI Issues . Now a part of Foglight for Virtualization, Free Edition from Dell

Hyper9 GuessMyOS Plug-in - replaces generic VM icons in the VI3 and vSphere4 client inventory trees with OS-specific icons for both Windows and Linux guests. Disappeared. No clue where where Solarwinds hid all the Hyper-9 stuff.

vSphere Client RDP Plug-in - Xtravirt vSphere RDP Plug-in provides integration of the Windows Remote Desktop tool with the VMware vSphere Client. <- Only vSphere 4 Compatible

vEcoShell - enables IT administrators to unlock the full potential of their virtual infrastructure and reduce the daily operating costs of managing multi-platform environments. Fostered and supported by The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI) - an online community-driven Web site sponsored by Vizioncore - the Virtualization EcoShell is enhanced by the participation of community members through the exchange of new ideas, value-add services and extensible scripts (PowerCLI) - Project is dead and now PowerGUI is the predecessor.

VESI PowerPack V3 - A huge power pack developed by Alan Renouf for vEcoShell that is more than just a one-trick pony tool (PowerCLI). Now held at PowerGUI VMware Community PowerPack

Documentation Downloader by Xtravirt - A practical and intelligent tool for offline access to VMware product documentation

Presentation Pack by Xtravirt - 350 high quality icons to superbly illustrate any virtualization solution