EAT - VMware Cloud Director Environment Assessment Tool

EAT – VMware Cloud Director Environment Assessment Tool

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As we look ahead to the continued evolution of our multi-tenant cloud platform, understanding how VMware Cloud Director (VCD) is used in the field has never been more important. VMware Cloud Director Environment Assessment Tool (EAT) — a lightweight, on-demand script to help VCD cloud providers and enterprise customers gain visibility into their VCD deployments while contributing data to shape future platform enhancements.

What is the VCD Environment Assessment Tool?

EAT is a diagnostic tool that collects environment-specific metadata from a VCD instance. It will help you:

  • Review the deployment scope, including:
    • Number of organizations, PVDCs, OrgVDCs and networks
  • Understand function usage patterns
  • Identify complex vApp designs (eg large vApps with multiple networks or nested components)

This tool was created to support both providers and VMware product teams in gaining better visibility into how VCD is being used across the ecosystem.

What does he collect?

EAT only collects structural metadata about your deployment. This includes:

  • Counts of tenants (organizations), VDCs, networks, and edge gateways
  • Indications of feature usage (eg if vApp leases, storage profiles or affinity rules are in use)
  • Compilation of the most complex vApps for scaling benchmarking
  • System versioning and configuration indicators

The output is a human-readable Excel report that allows you to:

  • Please review all collected data before sharing
  • Delete or edit anything you want to keep private

There is no telemetry or automatic recording involved. You stay in control of what you feel.

Which VCD versions are supported?

EAT supports data collection from VCD 10.4.x, 10.5.x and 10.6.x deployments.

How to share a message

Once done, send an email to the address VCDEAT.PDL@Broadcom.com. You will then receive a unique secure link to upload the file.
This helps us compile real-world data to guide the direction of the platform and ensure we prioritize the features you rely on the most.

How to download?

You can download the VMware Cloud Director Environment Assessment Tool from the following link (under Drivers and Tools section).

How to use the EAT tool

Step 1: Download and unzip

  • Download the file: vcd-assessment-tool-1.0-release.zip
  • Upload it and extract it to one of your VMware Cloud Director (VCD) cells.

Step 2: Run the script

  • Go to the extracted folder – vcd-assessment-tool-1.0
  • Run the script by running: ./eat.sh

Step 3: Find the message

  • The message will be generated in the following directory:
    /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer/
  • Inside you will find a folder named with the current date and time
  • Locate the file named: evaluation reports-.zipper (The default location would be /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer/
    This ZIP contains an Excel report and other metadata

Step 4: Review and share the message

Optional parameters

The tool also supports command line arguments. For example:

  • –vcd-url VCD API endpoint
  • –username or -u VCD API username
  • –-password or -p VCD API password
  • –output-dir or -d output directory to store zip, xlsx, json files (default = /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer/)
  • –interactive or –i interactive mode (true/false)

You can see all available options by running: ./eat.sh – help

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