HealthCheck for VMware vSphere Environment

This article is in continuation with my first article on this topic. In this article I will discuss step by step process of generating a health check analysis report for a customer.

How to access the VMware Health Analyzer Interface

VMware Health Analyzer interface is a web based interface based on Apache. To start the application you need to go into the directory where you have extracted the VMware Health Analyzer thinapp file. The Directory structure will look like this

Click on that startup.exe file, this will launch a new command line window, once the startup is successful you will see message similar to the window below. Keep this window running and don’t close.

After this you can open a browser such as Firefox (Mozilla) and type http://localhost . This will give the login window or the VMware Health Analyzer interface. If you are already running some other application on port 80 then you need to change the port for VMware Health Analyzer. We will discuss this later in the article on how to do that.

Health Check Mode Selection

Once the VMware Health Analyzer is started and you are able to login you need to decide on what type of health check you are planning to do. There are two types available with VMware Health Analyzer.

You need to go to Admin > Config Settings to change the mode.

Based on your project requirement you can choose which Report mode you are going to start with, in most of the scenarios Standard Health Check is used.

Gathering Data for Analysis

Once the values are set for Report mode you can proceed towards the data gathering phase. This will start with Create New Project.

Give a relevant project name , I usually give the project name as customer name , as I use the same VMware Health Analyzer for multiple customers for analysis , it makes life easier in order to differentiate which project you want to work on.

Click next, this will move to the next step where you have to add a Dataset, dataset is the main component of the report this is where the VMware Health Analyzer goes and connects to either a vCenter Server or a vSphere hosts and gathers data for analysis.

Specify the vCenter server/vSphere host hostname or ip address, provide the user credentials and click Next.

Offline Analysis

You can alternatively also do an import of the data set; this is usually a common practice. As this tool will be installed at the customer site, once the data is collected this tool will be deleted from the customer site and then the dataset will be used for an offline analysis.

You need to first export the data from the VMware Health Analyzer which you have installed at the customer side. Select the dataset and click on Export. Save the file.

For importing the data set you have to click on the dataset and then click on Import.

Give the dataset a name and point to the Folder where you have kept the Dataset files.

Preparing the Analysis Report

Once the dataset information is there, you need to generate the Report, for this select the dataset and click on the Create Report Card.

Give a name to the Report card and Click Next.

This will get us to the next window where you can select the Analysis filter. Analysis filter is basically further selecting which objects in the vCenter hierarchy we want to analyze. Once selected click Next.

VMware Health Analyzer will then analyze the data based on the rule set defined; the rule sets are a bunch of best practices against which the data will be evaluated.

With the current version of VMware Health Analyzer 3.3.2 data collection from vSphere 5 hosts is supported but it doesn’t have the entire best practices rule set defined yet. So you will still see recommendations based on vSphere 4 platform. Once the final report is generated you need to manually go through such items and apply your knowledge and modify with the vSphere5 best practices.

Once the data processing completed 100% you need to select the View Report Card.

The report card displays the best practices in the left pane of the screen and on the right side is the Observations/Findings against that metric from all the entities the data is gathered.

In this section you have to go to each and every rule set, verify the information and change the grade if you think otherwise than the default grading of VMware Health Analyzer.

Once you have made changes to a rule set make sure to select Include in the Include in Report Section. Repeat the same process for all the rule sets and Include in Report.

Then Click on Generate Report, save the word doc and you have the final report from a Standard health check. However there will be more work required to make the report more comprehensive.

Troubleshooting VMware Health Analyzer

Increasing the memory assignment to the HealthAnalyzer virtual application

If you are working with a very large infrastructure there are chances that your VMware Health Analyzer data gathering will stop in between. This happens due to VMware Health Analyzer running out of memory resources. In case you are working with a very large infrastructure make sure that you increase the allocated RAM to the VMware Health Analyzer Tomcat Server and the Collector Process. You can double the values from the default of 512 and 128 respectively to 1024 and 256. This will resolve the issue.

Click Admin > Config Settings

Changing the Port Used by the VMware Health Analyzer

If the machine where VMware Health Analyzer is installed has port 80 occupied by some other application you can change the VMware Health Analyzer default port 80 to the port you want to access. The following process describes this.

Start up the HealthAnalyzer virtual application by running startup.exe. You must start up at least one time to initialize the Server.xml file.
Shut down the HealthAnalyzer virtual application by running shutdown.exe.
Edit C:\Documents and Settings\<login user name>\Application Data\Thinstall\

{06BF15CB-AE8E-4152-B110-C4E2B9E70EE3}\%drive_C%\usr\share\VMware Health Analyzer\tomcat\conf\Server.xml

and change Connector port=”80″ to Connector port=”x” where x = the new port number.