As you may know I do a lot of work around Hyper-V, System Center and Windows Azure Pack. One of the most critical parts of the Microsoft Cloud is System Center Virtual Machine Manager. VMM is the component where mostly everything comes together in some way. From the Fabric resource such as Storage, Compute and Networking up to the Virtual Machines and Services running on top of the Fabric layer. Virtual Machine Manager basically allows you to pool resources and offer them to tenants which can than deploy services and virtual machines to the pools.
This means VMM manages not only your Virtual Machines, Virtual Machine Manager also manages your network environment, your storage and a lot more. So wouldn’t it be great to use the data Virtual Machine Manager collects to review your environment and get some tips you can optimize it? This is exactly what Savision did with their Virtual Machine Manager Add-in called Cloud Advisor which includes tuning and optimization recommendations.
Savision’s Cloud Advisor looks for problems like:
- “Virtual Machine Appears to be Unused”
- “Prediction: All Available Memory Will Be Consumed By…”
- “Virtual Guest Services Are Not Installed”
- “Starting Memory Is Too High”
- “Low Disk Space On Cluster Shared Volume”
- “Dynamic Memory is not enabled”
- and a lot more…
Most of you will think okay, this sounds great but how much will this thing cost. Well that’s the great part, the Savision Cloud Advisor for System Center Virtual Machine Manager is absolutely free. So there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t deploy the Savision Cloud Advisor in your Virtual Machine Manager environment.
Simply go the Savision homepage, download the Cloud Advisor and import it to VMM.
After that you will have to connect to the VMM database and to let the Savision Cloud Advisor his job, showing you tips and recommendations for your environment.
By the way there are other cool VMM Add-in from Cisco for their UCS Bladecenter and 5Nine for the Virtual Firewall Appliance.
Tags: Add-in, Cloud Advisor, Clouds, Fabric, Fabric Management, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Monitoring, problems, recommendations, Savision, SCVMM, solutions, System Center, System Center 2012 R2, Virtual Machine Manager, Virtual machines, Virtualization, VMM, Windows Server, Windows Server 2012 R2 Last modified: March 6, 2014
Hello ,
Im trying to install the add on and i take the following error ” The assembly ” Microsoft.SystemCenter.VirtualMachineManager.UIAddIns.dll” referenced by the add-in assembly ” Savision.CloudAdvisor.VMMConsoleAddIns.TuningTips” could not be found in the add-in package. Make sure that this assembly was included with the add-in package.
Any ideas ? Thanks
Can you see the .dll in the zip file? How big is the file size?
Can you find the file here: C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012 R2\Virtual Machine Manager\bin\AddInPipeline\AddIns\USERNAME\Savision Cloud Advisor VMM Add-Ins
Hi Thomas,
Same here, as soon as I gave the path to the Zip file, I received the same error message. It seems that this Microsoft.SystemCenter.VirtualMachineManager.UIAddIns.dll is missing from the package.
Now I tried on R2 and it seems running for SP1 only, no ?
Thx
Christopher
Hi I just was in contact with Savision and they told me that this is a kown bug:
“Unfortunately, this is a bug within VMM that Microsoft did not resolve in the R2 release. We’ve documented it in the Cloud Advisor Installation Guide. There is a workaround. In the ‘%PROGRAM FILES%\Microsoft System Center 2012\Virtual Machine Manager\bin\AddInPipeline\AddInViews’ folder create an empty .txt file. This may seem obscure, but by changing the contents of this folder, it forces VMM to reload its cache, and then it will once again understand how to properly load add-ins. “
Solved the import problem SCVMM running as administrator, even logging in as administrator