vMotion Report

Question

Looking for a way to build a report of a given VM on which host it was at any given time.  Basically, the report would show any vmotions that occurred.  Any ideas?

I tried to look through Time Travel in VMAN, but it seems to be inaccurate in terms of when the VMs moved.  For example, I looked up server that got vmotioned from Host A to Host B this morning.  If I look at Time Travel for this morning, it shows that the host is currently on B.  However, traveling back in time, it shows that it was on B since the last Configuration collection.  So, the time travel seems to only be accurate for real time and the configuration collections.  Anything in between seems to be questionable.

mprobus · Answer

That is what I thought.  More frequent collections is not feasible to me.  I even backed down the collections to 24 hours, so I only get 1 a day.  I guess where I'm getting confused is how VMAN knew about the move shortly after it happened, but then it updated the Map to show that it had been on that host for the past 9 hours.

tinmann0715 · Answer

I've run into similar challenges when I attempted to setup auditing on my VM Hosts. I wanted to be alerted whenever someone create a new server, deleted a server, stopped a server, updated passwords, etc. I escalated to both VMware and SolarWinds to help me with this and they were not able to identify the Syslog entries that record these changes. Granted, we are running VMware 5.5...

mesverrum · Answer

Solarwinds only gets new information about where a VM lives during the configuration collection, so you basically only get 2 datapoints 12 hours apart each day for VM locations.  If you want it to be more accurate about the time of a move you can increase the frequency of your collections, keeping in mind that will also put additional loads on the Vcenter servers.  In smaller environments it is no big deal but I have seen at larger clients with several thousand vm's per Vcenter that get a measurable hit to CPU loads when they get polled.

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