vOpenData - Shared Virtual Infrastructure Statistics

Whether you love or loathe VMware and their products, one area that you can't fault is the community that's built up around them. In that community blood, sweat, tears and a dash of brilliance have produced many amazing things. vOpenData looks like it could be one of them.

vOpenData is the brainchild of Ben Thomas and was built with William Lam and assistance from several other VMware community members. Essentially it is a public database of VMware Virtual Infrastructure statistics / configurations. Users download a script that collects some anonymous data about their infrastructure. Once uploaded and added to the database, the data contributes to a plethora of publicly available statistics.

At the time of writing there are over 50,000 VMs in the database. The average VMDK size is just over 70Gb. For me, as a techie / evangelist / consultant, this is useful information and there's so much more there besides. Here's a quick grab from the public dashboard:

As a community project, its value is huge and will get even better the more people contribute data to it. Head over to the vOpenData website and find out more.