vSphere Compliance Checker on ESXi 5

At a customer’s site towards the end of a deployment, we decided to see what this new fan-dangled vSphere Compliance Checker could do. We ran it against an ESXi 4.1U1 host and it spit out some nice colors and information. The quick and dirty of it is that it was easy to install, easy to use, and provided useful information. So I decided to run it against my ESXi 5 hosts in a test lab and write up a quickie post.

The installation is straight forward. I installed it on a Windows 7 box, but it can be installed on Server 2003 and 2008 servers, too. It’s a regular Next-Next-Finish Windows installation.

You’ll notice that it’s a Java-based program and automatically detects the Java installation directory. In a highly managed (read probably mucked up) domain, you may not get the desktop shortcut you asked for during the installation or the Start menu shortcut in the VMware folder. You’ll need local admin privileges to install and run the vSphere Compliance Checker and if neither shortcut appears after what appears to be a successful installation, you’ll want to navigate to the Compliance Checker’s installation directory and look for a file called vmcc.jar. Run this file with local admin privileges and you’ll run the program.

In my test lab anyways, I did receive the desktop shortcut.

It’s a straight forward interface. Simply input vCenter’s IP or hostname and login credentials and click Assess Compliance.

You’ll get a nice progress bar like the one seen below. Give it a minute or two to scan and you’ll get back a colorful report which will…

…hey! Wait a minute! What is this? I’m trying to run an assessment and it wants me to run an assessment to get the results. Huh…

Well, apparently, I didn’t read the not so fine print that said this first release of the Compliance Checker is for ESX/ESXi 4.1 hosts. Nothing was said about later versions. Looking at the results directory, “C:\Users\mike\AppData\Local\VMware Compliance Checker for vSphere\log”, I found the log that says it plain as day:

Unsupported host version (5.0.0). Target host version must be 4.1.

So there you have it. The 4.1 Compliance Checker does not support newer versions. Who would’ve guessed?

Google