CloudPhysics New Card Builder Launched!

CloudPhysics who I have blogged about in the past announced today their much awaited new feature, Card Builder. Recently I had the privilege to try out CloudPhysics new Card Builder. Picture a dynamic interface reporting tool that is intuitive and extremely flexible! All the features you need when putting together reports for vSphere Analytics!

The card building process allows you to create fully customized vSphere Analytics. The information is extracted directly from the CloudPhysics Observer VM’s running in your environment. I’ve been really impressed by how simple it is to create reports that otherwise take a fare while to put together. According to CloudPhysics you can:

Create easy, visual reports for your vSphere environment
Run mashups across VMs, hosts, datastores, networks, resource pools, VDS, even vCenters
Automatically filter out results
Report on multiple vCenters from one view
Fastest configuration troubleshooting in the world

When you’re a VMware administrator you spend a lot of time on creating reports. vSphere PowerCLI is probably the most common scripting tool you can use to create reports with. It’s pretty easy to see why you could use the new Card Builder. Here is a script to create a ‘tabular report of your Virtual Machines’. This gives you an idea of the operations of pre-defined scripting that occurs behind the scenes with the Card Builder.

New-VIProperty -Name MemReservation -ObjectType VirtualMachine ` 
 -Value { 
 param($vm) 
 $vm.ExtensionData.Summary.Config.memoryReservation 
 } -Force 
New-VIProperty -Name NumVirtualDisks -ObjectType VirtualMachine ` 
 -Value { 
 param($vm) 
 $vm.ExtensionData.Summary.Config.NumVirtualDisks 
 } -Force 
Get-VM | Select-Object Name, MemoryMB , NumCpu, MemReservation, NumVirtualDisks | Format-Table

It’s pretty easy to see why you would want to use this type of tool…

Below are some screen shots from a basic report creation using the Card Builder.