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The newly released vmClient 4.1 is vSphere 4.1 compatible. The vmClient is a lightweight tool which enables you to control the power of your virtual machines, it’s also capable of presenting the MKS console of your virtual machines. Before you can use the vmClient, you have to install the vSphere client on the same system. After starting the vmClient, you can logon to your vCenter server or individual ESX4.1 or ESX4.1i host. A list with available virtual machines will be presented after choosing the Virtual Machines menu item, you can also easily identify the power state of the virtual machines. Grey is powered off, green is powered on, yellow is suspended and red indicates that the virtual machine has an alarm. When you’re working in an RDP session there’s a menu item which can generate a Ctrl-Alt-Del in the guest OS instead of pressing Ctrl-Alt-Ins. The vmClient can run without borders in borderless mode. The menu bar has an option to search for virtual machines, just type in the first characters of your virtual machine name and the list will be filtered. 

The number of virtual machines can be too high to fit in the “Virtual Machine” menu item so I’ve added an extra option to disable this menu and use the search menu instead. The option to customize the user interface of the vmClient can be done by changing a few menu settings. You’re able to show or hide menu items using the quick start configuration icon.

You can also pre-select a default virtual machine in these settings. There are two recorded demo sessions available, one which show a walkthrough and a second which shows how to convert the vmClient into a VDI client. The trail version is limited to a maximum number of 50 virtual machines and shows a splash screen with my picture in it. The registered version can be bought online for € 25,00  and has no virtual machine limit, you can not get rid of the splash screen. :-) The Buy Now link is available in the help menu. If you have any ideas or suggestions on improving the vmClient or you’ve found a bug, you know where to reach me. Have fun with it.

How to convert the vmClient into a VDI client

A general walkthrough

The vmClient 4.0 can be downloaded from this location: http://vmclient.nl/

Recently I’ve added a few new features to the vmClient which enables you to customize the visibility of menus. Because all those new settings could only be changed be editing the registry, I’ve decided to add a configuration dialog. When the vmClient is running, there’s a notification icon visible near your Windows clock in the right lower corner. You have to double click the icon in order to change te vmClient configuration settings. Within the config dialog, there’s an option to enable or disable auto logon and the preferred virtual machine setting. There’s also a tab for configuring your favourites and show or hide individual menu items. The cool feature in this release is... hide all menus, use auto logon and configure a preselected VM and voila there’s you lightweight VDI client.

The download is available at http://vmClient.nl

The vmClient is a lightweight tool which enables you to control the power of your virtual machines, it’s also capable of presenting the MKS console of your virtual machines. Before you can use the vmClient, you have to install the vSphere client on the same system. After starting the vmClient, you can logon to your vCenter server or individual ESX4 or ESX4i host. A list with available virtual machines will be presented after choosing the Virtual Machines menu item, you can also easily identify the power state of the virtual machines. Grey is powered off, green is powered on, yellow is suspended and red indicates that the virtual machine has an alarm. When you’re working in an RDP session there’s a menu item which can generate a Ctrl-Alt-Del in the guest OS instead of pressing Ctrl-Alt-Ins. The vmClient can run without borders in borderless mode. The menu bar has an option to search for virtual machines, just type in the first characters of your virtual machine name and the list will be filtered. 

The number of virtual machines can be too high to fit in the “Virtual Machine” menu item so I’ve added an extra option to disable this menu and use the search menu instead. The option to customize the user interface of the vmClient can be done by changing a few registry settings. You’re able to show or hide menu items using this hive.

 HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VB and VBA Program Settings\NTPRO.NL\vmClient

You can also pre-select a default virtual machine in this hive. There are two recorded demo sessions available, one which show a walkthrough and a second which shows how to convert the vmClient into a VDI client. The trail version is limited to a maximum number of 50 virtual machines and shows a splash screen with my picture in it. The registered version can be bought online and has no virtual machine limit, you can also get rid of the splash screen. :-) The Buy Now link is available in the help menu. If you have any ideas or suggestions on improving the vmClient or you’ve found a bug, you know where to reach me. Have fun with it.

How to convert the vmClient into a VDI client

A general walkthrough

The vmClient 4.0 can be downloaded from this location: http://vmclient.nl/

I’ve been busy with coding the past few days. I’ve successfully completed my Microsoft Partnership admission and received a  subscription to their developer network. Now I’ve access to all the developer tools an operating systems you can dream of. My coding project has to do with a project I started a few years ago, I’ve written a little cool tool called the Virtual Machine MKS Client. Eventually it ended up in some sort of a contest with Bouke Groenescheij and Richard Garsthagen when Bouke and I did a freelance job at Ahrend, we had some real fun and long channel walks. Since the training business is a bit sloppy this month I’m trying to revive the tool and make it vSphere compatible. I started with converting it to Visual Studio 2008 and had to rebuild some DLL’s. I endured some real challenges with VMware’s new activeX (VNC) object but finally I got it to work.  Here’s a Jing movie with a sneak preview, it will take at least another week to make the beta publicly available.

http://www.screencast.com/users/esloof/folders/Jing/media/dcf472ed-d268-4ffb-94d4-20ebc3f44de0

When you’re running a Virtual Machine in a production environment and want to perform some tests on it but don’t have enough time or space on your Datastores to create a full hot clone, there’s an alternative.

vSphere 4.0 supports linked virtual machines, which are two or more virtual machines that share storage. Linked virtual machines support efficient sharing of duplicated data. In its simplest form, shared storage is achieved through the use of delta disk backings. A delta disk backing is a virtual disk file that sits on top of a standard virtual disk backing file. Each time the guest operating system on a virtual machine writes to disk, the data is written to the delta disk.

Each time the guest operating system on a virtual machine reads from disk, the virtual machine first targets the disk block in the delta disk. If the data is not on the delta disk, the virtual machine looks for them on the base disk.

Linked virtual machines can be created from a snapshot or from the current running point. After you create a virtual machine, they share the base disk backing and each virtual machine has its own delta disk backing. You can have up to eight virtual machines in a linked virtual machine group. The virtual machines in the group cannot be part of a VMware HA cluster.

Hal Rottenberg is the author of the New-LinkedClone.ps1 PowerShell script, it’s adapted from a technique published originally by Keshav Attrey. Also see William Lam's Perl script and Leo's manual version for ESX 3.5 but I believe, back in 2007 I was one of the first to discover this technique.

I’ve made some little modifications in Hal’s script and added it as a Script Action to the Virtualization EcoShell by clicking “Add new item” in the actions menu on the right side of the EcoShell console. This enables you to specify a script performing the Action. When you click an Action, objects currently selected in the grid are piped into the script. The LinkedClones Script Action is part of the newest version (1.08) of the NTPRO.NL PowerPack, you can get a copy here. The screen shot shows you how it works.

Update: Alan Renouf has emailed me a link to an interesting knowledge base article regarding Virtual machines from a single disk chain may only run on 8 hosts (VMFS).

I’ve created a new Virtualization EcoShell PowerPack with only one Script Node and it’s called “CPUID System Information“ which shows the VMHost CPU Info.  The inspiration for building this new PowerPack came from VMware’s evangelist Richard Garsthagen who has built the well known Visual Basic Application, VMware CPU Host Info.  “CPUID System Information” is completely based on PowerShell and VMware’s PowerCLI. The script is able to show you which features (CPUIDs) are available on your ESX server’s CPUs. Besides checking VMotion compatibility it also shows you:

• Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC) levels which simplifies VMotion compatibility issues across CPU generations. EVC automatically configures server CPUs with Intel FlexMigration or AMD-V Extended Migration technologies to be compatible with older servers.
• All the important CPU features like: VMX, MONITOR/MWAIT , SSE3, SSSE3 ,SSE4.1 ,SSE4.2 ,CMPXCHG8B ,CMPXCHG16B ,NX/XD ,Long mode support ,RDTSCP ,3DNow! ,3DNow! Extensions ,FFXSR ,Prefetch instructions.

I’ve three versions available for download.

The first one can be used as a PowerPack in the Virtualization EcoShell.

     http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/uploads/NTPRO.NL.powerpack