List of Free Available Tools for VMware SMB Environments
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List of Free Available Tools for VMware SMB Environments

CIO Review

Buying VMware management tools for the new and growing businesses involves costs. The entire enterprises depending on few important applications to function can become complex and expensive. Moreover, IT enterprises looking for management tools cannot deploy applications that exceed their budget. It due to these reasons, organizations are seeking for an alternative to handle critical VMware management tasks.

Alternative VMware Management tools for SMB

Looking at the SMBs, various companies face the unique challenges of managing their complex IT environments. To protect IT infrastructure, and to save the overall IT costs, companies should emphasize on solutions that refocuses on growing the business through robust tools. To avoid the need for costly management tools; enterprises are compromising with alternative free tools that provides similar features and functions.

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For the SMBs, buying VMware’s vSphere tool cannot be an affordable option. Instead, for the successful virtualization environment management, tools like ESX deployment appliance can be eventually installed as an alternative to deliver similar solutions. While, setting up vSphere creates the demand for manual basic installation, EDA functions by allowing the user to boot an empty host through pre-boot execution environment.

Also, monitoring the log files is an absolute necessity to manage any VMware environment. These log files can be managed using several syslogging applications that are available for free. The syslog application permits the separation of software that generates messages and is labeled with a facility code. Looking at health care monitoring, the SMBs can prefer buying veeam Monitor 4.5 free edition, as it provides a number of utilities for managing VMs. It further compliments the user’s backup tools by enabling easy ad hoc backup for individual VMs.

Moreover, in the case of health reporting, for the user’s weekly or monthly health checks, the VMware community power pack comes in the picture. It functions through the isolated set of power shell scripts that helps the user to perform health checks.

Challenges faced by SMBs

The SMB deals with different budgets and projects, and they are often confronted with problems comparatively to larger companies. The problems include:

- Lack of IT Support

In every organization, IT is considered as the backbone which literally increases the demand for their service in bigger organizations and MNCs. At the same time, it is difficult for the SMEs to afford a separate dedicated IT team for support.

- Lack of Formal Procedure

Since SMBs are just evolving, the formal policies and procedures are in the implementation stage and are not executed. Furthermore, there are also chances of the policies being altered with timely manner. This further creates a level of confusion in the minds of newcomer in understanding the existing business practices.

- Lack of Financial Resources

The SMBs always starts small with the limited allocation of financial resources. In contrast, this makes company to prefer a budget oriented solution. Although, during the implementation, there are chances of exceeding the expected budget; causing financial crisis.

- Lack of Human Resources

Implementing new workloads and IT projects require the need for robust human intervention during the process. Most of the SMBs lack the required manpower causing them difficulty to allocate time to carry out implementation. Moreover, completing the tasks within the stipulated time-frame brings conflict in the daily routine work.

The key challenges of SMBs are to provide effective back-up, recovery and high availability of applications, and address unplanned downtime issues. SMBs incorporating the basic level of data protection should include backup and restore to deliver disaster recovery capabilities. Moreover, SMBs should also incorporate business management concepts to manage the complexities of building the business and avoid the need for change management while incorporating any changes on a large scale.

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