VM Creation Dates (Birthdays)

It's going to definitely be off of a service, just curious if other objects would be beneficial.  I can add a total count at the bottom and also maybe a little view that just sums them up seperately as well.

That's looking good.  Can it also have a summary of total created for the period?  Also, its probably a lot to ask, but rather than filter on cluster, I'd like to filter on something like a service (example, a service created based on VM attributes like "BusinessUnit") so that the list can be tied to specific BUs.

Good stuff!

Added the sum count and added a view driven from a service.  I will probabaly have a cartridge for this later today/this week.

If you were looking for other useful items, besides the sum of the total created, the basic resources given to the total created would be good to have as well.  That would give a rough idea to the report viewer the amount of capacity delivered to these new VMs and help forcast new host/disk needs.  My thought would be total vCPUs, total Memory, total Disk from the VM's specs.

I can add those to the same dashboard and just hide them.  I'll look to add them.  Also any additional feedback we can move into the document page as well :-)

So, how do I use the cartridge? I added it, but how do I use it? I added a new Dashboard with the VM Creation Date, but the Creation Dates are not correct? It shows these VMs as being created on 6/14/13, when they are older VMs created long before that period.

Thanks

Once installed you can create a custom dashboard and drag out a service and select it as a view, or you can grab the view that has all VMs birthdays.

I'm not sure this is working right, or I'm not using it right? I tried the "Views" tab, and grabbed the "Summary: VM Creation Date" onto the Dashboard, but it says we had 56 VMs built this week. The creation date is still not pulling the correct date for the VMs? We I go to a VM and check the Creation date, it is different.

Hmm it should pull the first version of when we saw them.  Since there isn't a real birth date stored in vCenter (only an event tells us the real date if it still exists) and we don't pull that so I go off when I see them added in.  I might have to make a debug script to see what is going on.

I just had some time to start playing with it and for what its worth, I'm getting the correct create dates.

The ide may not be supported officially, but that really applies to the ide itself not the contents imo.  Once you place registry variables, views etc... into an FMS they can be supported/maintained.  I've personally not run into issues with the it, and I've had a lot/most of my cartridges run through our internal support certification process with no issues (and I used fglide for it). 

As for a better method/distribution for cartridges, I'm not privy to any discussion on that so I can't really say for sure.

Thanks for the quick reply, I spoke with Mathias Sundling some time ago when he mentioned that Quest/Dell was currently developing an own solution for distributing cartridges. Do you know anything about this matter, if it's in the pipeline and scheduled for the 7.0 release maybe?
The reason I ask is that we are trying to distribute rules/registry etc. variables across multiple FMS in a MSP like solution. My suggestion is using fglIDE but since it is communitybased it's not supported external to the community. But maybe the fglIDE will not dissapear in the comming releases?

Thanks again

Great features in a simple form. Doesn't Foglight for Virtualization have any of these dashboards by default? It would also be cool to be able to present the number of removed VMs and their dates to further the VM lifecycle management dashboard. Is this anything you've seen of created yourself?

Another question, do you create your cartridges with FglIDE created by Stefan Marx or has Quest published a non-community cartridge packaging utility?

Keep up the good work and thanks!

Generally, I use FGLide for making cartridges these days vs. the command line (it's just easier).  As for the rest I generally create what I need or extend the functionality as folks ask for it.  Adding removal dates shouldnt be too hard if I can find some free time again.