Reporting the health of your vSphere environment with vCheck

In this section of the book Learning PowerCLI, I want to introduce a PowerCLI script that every vSphere admin should use. The vCheck script written by Alan Renouf can check your vSphere environment for various configuration issues and report them in an HTML format. The vCheck script reports several issues such as VMs having CD-ROMs connected, VMs with CPU or memory reservations configured, VMs ballooning or swapping, VMs with less than 100 MB free space on a disk, VMs with an old hardware version, and VMs that have no VMware Tools installed. These are just a few examples. The script reports many more issues.

The script is written in a modular way, and it uses a plugin for every check it performs. It is very easy to write your own plugins and add them to the script. There are plugins created to check other technologies such as Microsoft Exchange. Reading the vCheck plugins is a good way to see how the checks are implemented and learn...