Sometimes, you just need to have a quick and easy way to review what’s going on with your virtual machines. A free tool called RVTools does this really, really well and even provides with you a very simple way to upgrade any systems that have outdated VMware Tools installed. I downloaded and installed RVTools. Once installed, I opened the tool and pointed it at vCenter where RVTools then made use of the VI SDK to extract all kinds of information about the infrastructure.
In the screen shots below, you’ll see that I’ve provided you with a look at two tabs available in the RVTools window. The first screen shows you the vTools tab on which you’re shown the status of the VMware tools. toolsOk indicates that the tools are current, toolsNotInstalled means, as you might suspect, that the tools are not installed and toolsOld means that the tools are out of date for that system. Systems that are in a powered off state can’t report tools status, so they show up as toolsNotRunning.
In this screen, you’re being shown vPort information. Specifically, RVTools is reporting to you the states of each and every port on all of the systems in vCenter.
As you can see in the screens, there is a whole lot more information shown on the other tabs in this utility. It’s a free tool and a very quick and easy installation, so give it a try!
Do you know what firewall ports RVtools uses for communication? I've read the documentation and it doesn't mention anything about it.