Part 7 - vROps 6.6 : Virtual Machine Inventory Summary Report

Welcome back to the what's new series for vRealize Operations Manager 6.6. While in the previous parts, we have been talking about the dashboards, with this post, I do want to highlight some of the out of the box reports which can help administrators quickly with their day to day activities. A very basic use case of reporting involves a VI Admin to keep a track of all the virtual machines in the environment and share a regular report with people within the organization about the basic configuration and whereabouts of the Virtual Machines.

With vROps 6.6, you can find a useful out of the box report for this purpose. The report is called :

Virtual Machine Inventory Summary

You can find this report under the Reports section of the new Clarity User Interface. Here are the steps to fetch this report.

1- Log in to your vROps instance with a user with privileges to run reports.

2- Click on Dashboards Menu.

3- On the Navigation Pane click on Reports.

4- Use the search filter to search for a report using the name - "Virtual Machine Inventory Summary".

5- Once you click on the Run Report button highlighted in red, you get a choice to run this report against a particular construct. This could the vSphere World, a vCenter Server, a particular cluster or even a custom group you want to report on.



6- Click on OK to generate the report.

7- You can view the report in the Generated Reports section and download a PDF version or a CSV file based on how you would like to present this data.



Once you download the report, you will be able to see all the fields which would provide you all the crucial details about your virtual machines. Here is a quick look at all the fields which are generated in this report. Click to view the image in full screen:




With this report you can cater to multiple use cases by scheduling these reports for target audiences using the simple report scheduling method in vROps. Some of the basic use cases where this report can be used are:


Use Cases:

a) Keeping an inventory of all or subset of the virtual machines in your environment.

b) Reporting this data to VM or Application Owners.

c) Virtual Machine Life-cycle Management

d) Keep a track of configuration inconsistencies. For eg old VMware Tools Versions

e) Tracking OS versions for licensing needs.

and many more.......


So go ahead pull up the inventory summary easily with vROps 6.6 and use the data to improve your virtual infrastructure and make your day to day work easier.

More to come.. Stay Tuned!!