Having heard the buzz about Cloudphysics I decided to take it for a test drive, since they have a free edition which gives some limited options but it allows me to see how the software works. Cloudphysics is almost pure SaaS solution. It requires that we first download an virtual appliance that communicates against vCenter 4.5 <+ but it reports all the data back to cloudphysics which runs all the diagnostics and reporting.
Cloudphysics has features like
* Capacity planning
* Performance troubleshooting
* Health checks
* Alerting (and so on..)
So how to get started ? Sign up for a free edition here –> http://www.cloudphysics.com/get-cloudphysics/
Then download either the OVA or point the vCenter to fetch the OVF files from the portal.
On the vCenter side, you just have to import the machine and enter network information during the setup.
After that you just have to wait until it is finished installing. Then start it and configure the last parts. Just we need to enter the vCenter information and the UserID that is used to the cloudphysics account.
After that is done, it takes about 30 seconds and information will be pulled to CloudPhysics service. No CloudPhysics have a concept called “Cards” which are different reports, features and so on. For instance one of the cards is “Snapshots gone wild”
There are a bunch more of these reports and well, but you get the picture.
Now this is a golden example of how we can use a SaaS for report and monitoring purposes. CloudPhysics also has cost calculators for Amazon, Azure and Vmware AIR which allows us to see how much it will cost to move our VMs to one of these providers, but this is only available for premium customers.