VKernel Environment Explorer released today

VKernel have today released a new, free tool to complement their existing suite of effective and useful utilities. For people like me who run a home lab these things are often a godsend and in the field, they're also great for starting to dig into issues that crop up.

Naturally free tools are often reduced functionality versions of full products, designed specifically to give you just enough information to want to buy a license. In this respect, vOPS Server Explorer 5.1 (of which Environment Explorer is a component) is one of those. The nice thing that VKernel does though is to allow you to convert to a fully functional, 30 day trial of vOPS Server Standard at the click of a button. Under the hood everything is the same, regardless of the license being used, the difference between free and licensed (or trial) versions is the amount and detail of the data being displayed.

VKernel's value-add with this new tool is in the presentation of data. Much of it is readily available through a number of default interfaces and views within vCenter etc but it isn't in one place and easy to get to all of the time. Additionally the information is analyzed to present you with useful capacity statistics, resource under / over provisioning and to highlight possible mis-configurations that might affect performance.

As a bonus, if you're not a 100% VMware shop, the tool can present information about multiple hypervisors on one screen.

vOPS Server Explorer 5.1 is available for download now: http://www.vkernel.com/download/server-explorer