Hello folks,
If you are building a private cloud solution, you understand that capacity planning and virtual machine right-sizing requires an approach that takes advantage of the opportunities and features offered by the virtualization layer which is of course Hyper-V.
One of the concerns I always face is the increase in virtual machine density, preventing overcommitting resources, and tuning the environment to build a tailored virtualized infrastructure for your business needs that will stand long enough. How do you know you have realized all the possible cost savings available to you? and how can you proactively budget for and acquire new cloud hardware before running out of resources?
Get predictive capacity planning, and virtual machine right-sizing for your Private Cloud deployment
The answer is Cloud Reporter, as an automated solution for infrastructure reviews, I definitely recommend Savision Cloud Reporter which analyzes historical data collected and stored by the System Center Operations Manager to predict capacity issues on your Hyper-V environment, it does so by integrating with the Operations Manager. Additionally, Cloud Reporter provides scenario-based reports that allow you to identify opportunities to make better use of your existing resources, especially if you are constantly provisioning, deleting, and adding new Virtual Machines. Cloud Reporter can keep track of and warn you of capacity issues.
Cloud Reporter is also capable of detecting idle Virtual Machines which are turned off in your environment, it can compare advertised allocation requirements for machines to the currently configured requirements. The reports leverage the native features of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS).
In this blog post, we will look at the requirements and the installation of Savision Cloud Reporter for System Center.
Table of Contents
Cloud Reporter-Supported Systems
– Supported versions of System Center: System Center 2012, 2012 SP1 and 2012 R2.
– Supported versions of Hyper-V server: Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, 2012 and 2012 R2.
Cloud Reporter Installation
1. Download Cloud Reporter bits.
2. Save it to a location on the Operations Manager Console machine (i.e. C:\SavisionCloudReporter).
3. For any Hyper-V server that you wish to monitor, you must have its System Center Operations Manager agent set to “Act as proxy”.
4. On the Operations Manager Console, log on as OM Admin, and run the Cloud Reporter Installer.
5. Take note of where the installer places the OM management packs.
6. Open the Operations Manager Console, and import the relevant management packs for your environment, click on Administration and then click on Management Packs.
7. Click on Reporting and then Open the “Cloud Reporter License Management”, but do not run it.
8. Enter the license key you have received for Cloud Reporter into the “Insert License Key” field in the report parameters section.
9. Now click “Run” the report.
10. You may now start exploring the reports, but It may take several days for a sufficient quantity of data to be collected so that all fields in the reports are populated accordingly. The recommendation is to wait 7 days before starting to get accurate data.
Hope this post helps you to get started with Cloud Reporter!
In the upcoming posts, we will start exploring various reports.
Until then… enjoy your day!
Cheers,
-Charbel
