This is a little view that I created in vRealize Operations because of a customer issue. As you hopefully know in vROps 7.5 the idle VM detections is back. You can switch it on in the reclaim settings. On the home screen go to the Reclaim dashboard and click the wheel next to the title. Now you can switch on idle detection, powered-off VMs and snapshots. Even orphaned disks can be hunted down!

The idle detection looks if CPU consumption in the chosen period is less than 100 MHz. The customer wanted to check also memory, disk and network access to decide on which VMs needed to be singled out for deletion.

I created a view using the new colorisation in v7.5. Attention! Colors only work in dashboards you create with this view or the view itself. In reports they do not show up.

I put in some specific parameters, but you can change them. CPU and memory color red if they use over 500 MHz or 500 MB respectively. Disk and network access go red over 100 kBps. CPU, memory, disk and network are sorted in ascending order.

The preview is on vSphere world. If you get VMs that are green for all metrics over a month, you know they are good candidates to delete… In the image above you see a preview in my little home lab…

We can now use this view in a dashboard so that we can click on a VM and get some more info such as the parent host and cluster and data stores. Well any excuse to use the exquisite new advanced object relations widget! The sparkline widget is used with the VM Capacity metrics to show the configuration of the VM. Of course you can build your own dashboard on top of this!

To use this in your environment download the zip file from VMware Code and unzip. First install the view by clicking on Dashboards, Views, Manage Views and import “historic idle detection view.zip”. Afterwards go to Manage Dashboards and import “historic idle VMs dashboard.zip” there. Both View and dashboard are now available in your environment.

Let me know what you think!