Good look at free "VM Monitor" Windows utility by SolarWinds, works with ESXi 5.5 and 6.0

Update Nov 08 2015 - New article now up, with new screenshots under Windows 10:

- Free SolarWinds VM Monitor works nicely on Windows 10 to monitor your VMware ESX 3.5 right through ESXi 6.0 Update 1a

Original article below

Today, I came across an article from #1 VMware blogger Duncan Epping of yellow-bricks.com fame, that pointed me to Chris Colotti's also excellent blog at chriscolotti.us. The specific article that caught my attention was about this small (8MB) Windows utility, intended to be left running in your system tray, perfect for monitoring a single ESX host, such as my vZilla.

Here's his full article, help out by visiting his site with the download link:
chriscolotti.us/vmware/free-vm-monitor-tool-from-solarwinds

See also my accompanying video below, a dive into the product's installation and functions. It appears to only use about 59MB of RAM, and CPU utilization never seems to rise above 0%. As far as my new VMs, well, you can see, at a glance, that I've wildly over-provisioned memory: time to prune back the vCenter Appliance and vZilla RAM assigments quite a bit, or tune the settings to not turn to red quite so early.

In the coming days, I'll avoid reboots of my workstation, to watch for signs of application misbehavior over time, such as resource utilization growth (signs of a memory leak), CPU spikes, etc.

Looks promising so far, free for use with one ESX/ESXi host. What do you think? (comment below open to all)

Aug 29 2013 Update

Here's an update from the folks at SolarWinds, as far as official ESXi 5.5 support:
thwack.solarwinds.com/message/211194#211194

The take home message is that it still works!
(with one minor issue that can be worked around)

Oct 29 2015

I have verified that SolarWinds VM Monitor version 1.1.0 still works fine with the latest versions of VMware's Hypervisor, including ESXi 6.0 Update 1a Build 3073146. Beware, if you set an invalid userid/password, ESXi will clam up and act strange on you. Somebody knocking on the door with invalid credentials, over and over, is apt to do that. Learned that one the hard way ;-)

New article now up, with new screenshots under Windows 10:

• Free SolarWinds VM Monitor works nicely on Windows 10 to monitor your VMware ESX 3.5 right through ESXi 6.0 Update 1a

See also

• SolarWinds VM Monitor Help System

• FREE TOOLS: VM MONITOR 1.1.0.81 AND ESXI 5.5
  SolarWinds Thwack Community

• AN OPEN LETTER TO SOLARWINDS CUSTOMERS, PARTNERS AND IT COMMUNITY FROM: KEVIN B. THOMPSON, CEO, SOLARWINDS, INC.
  SolarWinds Thwack Community
  Excerpt:

  Last week, SolarWinds announced that it entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by leading private equity technology investment firms Silver Lake Partners and Thoma Bravo, LLC.

  Becoming a private company simply means that we can better fulfill our mission to provide superior, purpose-built products that make IT and DevOps professionals’ jobs easier across the globe. This transaction is good for SolarWinds, our customers, employees and partners because we now have more freedom and flexibility to make the necessary R&D investments that allow us to extend our value in networking, storage, virtualization, database, and security.

  SolarWinds was created by IT pros for IT pros. Our dedication to offering affordable products that are easy to use and deliver value to your business is core to who we are as a company. This commitment is what has made SolarWinds a great company since 1999, and we believe this acquisition will help us serve you even better going forward.