The Heinz Story II

About a year ago I wrote a posting about the nworks MP Simulator. An awesome tool in order to demonstrate the real power of the nworks Veeam MP without requiring a real VMware environment, since all monitoring data is simulated. Even the Reports are available and fully operational!

For some days now this tool got an update so it works with the latest version of the nWorks MP (version 5.7, fully compatible and certified for VMware vSphere 5.x) AND with OM12 (RC).

Spoiler Alert
The nworks MP Simulator doesn’t contain ALL the features of the real nWorks Veeam MP therefore it’s NOT a substitute for a real demo, evaluation deployment, or POC. Taken directly from the guide (included with the download of the msi file containing the nWorks MP Simulator): ‘…The key feature of nworksDEMO is that it can show nworks MP functionality when there are no VMware servers to use as a monitoring data source. If a real VMware deployment exists, then a demo of the full nworks product is recommended…’

The file (containing the nworksDEMO with the two MP files and the related guide) can be downloaded from here. One needs to provide some basic information and the download can be started.

For OM12 RC users: take note of the last paragraph on page 6. A certain View requires modification because of a bug present in OM12 RC.

Some screenshots, taken from my OM12 environment:

The nWorks Veeam MP in the Monitoring pane:

As one can see, there is a LOT of information to be found all about the monitored VMware environment.

vCenter Topology Diagram View:

A good Diagram View, showing the VMware topology and its health state.

vCenter Dashboard:

Some (faked!) Alerts are coming in. Nice!

And the Reports are present as well:

I counted 27(!) Reports. For the nWorks Veeam MP version 5.7 many of those Reports are rewritten from the ground up in order to deliver better performance and more relevant information.

Conclusion:
Veeam is a company with a rock solid reputation when it comes to delivering high quality software with added value. With this FREE demo they use the same approach and deliver a tool which should be present in every SCOM/OM12 lab environment. So whenever you have such an environment but aren’t running this software go get it, install it and be amazed. Of course, the real stuff is even better :).