Hi folks, first time poster here.
We just upgraded our ESXi VMs from 6.7 to 7.0. After completing I was trying to find a way to confirm that auto-started windows services are in fact running. Short of logging into each VM individually I couldn't see how. There must be a better way (I hope).
Thanks in advance for any suggestions that may help.
-Tony
PowerShell?
It’s not really a VMware “thing” unless you could find out by calling an in-guest script via VMware Tools (assuming it is running)
Thanks for the reply @scott28tt - yes PowerShell and Power CLI were the first thing that came to mind. Alas, my PowerShell environment is virgin and hasn't been set up for the task. I started and tried to connect to a VM, and got all kinds of warnings about "Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -Scope User -ParticipateInCEIP $true or $false" and so on.
I thought about messing with it another day but maybe I will take another look.
Thanks again,
-Tony
Not really vmware solution but we've implemented Grafana and Influxdb (all free) and i've used a basic "config template" to pull service metrics from VM's critical VM's etc. This includes autostart windows services. It will involve a little bit of work but is well worth the time investment in my opinion - you can create dashboards to allow for an overview of the health of the environment as well as create alerts which can be email, slack etc to notify you when a service has stopped or any other metric for that matter including, cpu disk etc. We use it quite a lot for SQL instances, mid tier applications, AIX even down to DC environmental monitoring.
Below is a quick screen grab of just a part of the dashboard we created (unfortunately the rest has server names etc so can't be shared)
Again this isn't really a vmware solution but it does solve the "quick view of whats up" problem we had where we had a team of people checking services each morning. This is live and should a service go down the status changes in real time which is handy as previous attempts relied on a scheduled email of status which although useful in some ways was very limited in being responsive outside of the scheduled email time.
Hope this helps