First Look : vKernel SearchMyVM Appliance Beta 1.0

You may have heard about the new search based appliance by vKernel for your VI3 environment, but have you seen it?  I had a chance over the weekend to install it into my lab environment using the nice OVF format.

After a brief setup screen on the appliance itself, you are ready to go. 

Point your browser to the VM’s IP address and you are presented with a nice Googlish splash screen for you to enter your searches.

The first thing you will need to do is click on Manage Connections and enter in your VirtualCenter credentials for it to index the environment.

 

Once you have established a valid connection and your status says OK, you are free to begin searching your Virtual Infrastructure for things!

Here is an example output of a simple search for all VMs running Linux in my environment :

There is also a very powerful Query Builder that allows you to build your own queries by choosing Objects and then properties.  (Reminds me of PowerShell)

Unfortunately, for this Beta, you are unable to save your queries and there does not seem to be a way to pass the appliance search strings through the URL.  This would be a nice feature to custom create reports and bookmark them for handy quick reference.

All in all, for a free appliance, this can be a nice addition to an administrator’s bag of tricks and really demonstrates the ease of adding Virtual Appliances to a virtualized environment.