VMware Health Analyzer 5 download, install and usage steps

This article is a step by step guide to download, install and usage of VMware Health Analyzer 5

If you are looking for the older version of VMware Health Analyzer, i.e. vSphere Analyzer 3, refer to “VMwareHealth Check Analyzer – ThinApp”

The previous version comes as ThinApp and OVF versions but the new one comes in JAVA and OVF versions.

This new version of VMware Health Analyzer 5.0.3.1 has capability to analyze the VMware Horizon View 5.1 and earlier environments.

VMware Health Analyzer System Requirements:

·         You can run this vSphere health analyzer on Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Server 2003/2008, Windows Vista, Windows 7, or Mac.

·         Another option is, import and power on the OVF file containing the VMware HealthAnalyzer virtual appliance using the VMware vSphere Client™ (4.0 or later), VMware Workstation™ (9 or later), or VMware Fusion® (5 or later).

·         To run the analysis report, Read-Only privileges for all objects  on vCenter required

VMware Health Analyzer 5.0.3.1 download location: Login to Partner Central and navigate to Home > Sales > Services Software Solutions - VMware HealthAnalyzer (supports both Desktop & Virtualization Health Check services). – The latest version is: VHA-5.0.3.1-build-2180699-App

VMware Health Analyzer download is available only for VMware partners and employees.

1.       After download, extract the downloaded media and run “HealthAnalyzer.jar”

2.       When I first run on my Windows 7 laptop, I had the following error.  “Error while starting up” When I click on log files, found error message as “Error: Could not create the Java Virtual Machine.  Error: A fatal exception has occurred. Program will exit.”

Error occurred during initialization of VM Could not reserve enough space for object heap

3.       After updating Java version from Java 7 Update 2 to latest Java Version (It’s Java 8 Update 25 at the time of writing this article), issue resolved.

4.       Then on starting screen of Health Analyzer, select “New Folder” and name it accordingly

5.       Then create a new project.

6.       Select project type from of the following options. In my example, I have selected vSphere (5.x)- Service Kit R1.1

·         View (5.1 and earlier) - Service Kit R2.0

·         vSphere(4.x) - Service Kit R6.3

·         vSphere (5.x)- Service Kit R1.1

7.       And fill remaining fields accordingly.

8.       After creating project, enter VMware vCenter info as per below screen and select Next

9.       In the following screen, you can see all discovered hosts/ clusters

10.   When you click next, analysis starts.

11.   After analysis, you can see vSphere health check summary which contains number of data centres, clusters, ESXi servers, virtual machines and datastores

12.   Select Open to see the report and from here you can export data to excel spreadsheet

13.   Click on Project guide to for the detailed project guide.

This report gives enough info to play around and produce customer facing documentation with VMware health check report with best practices. (Technical Document Review Check List)

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