Eric Sloof

The latest follow up to the well received VI3 PatchDownloader tool is now a command line executable meaning that it can be scripted and scheduled as a routine task. Additional functionality means that it is now easier than ever to keep up to date with VMware® ESX patches.

Scott Herold, Ron Oglesby, and Mike Laverick have finally gotten to a point where they are extremely close to having all first draft writing of the new VI3: Advanced Technical Design Guide completed.  They are anticipating that this will be completed and off to editors towards the end of the first week of July.

http://www.vi3book.com/

The project to disconnect all the CD’s from all the VM’s with one click of a button is finished so I thought it’s time for a new project. Let’s build a VDI connection broker with an embedded console for the XP VM’s. The first thing I needed to do is figure out how I could embed a console view into my VB application. After some searching in the VMware forums I ended up with one or two posts that weren’t much of a help. I decided to take a closer look at the console that is used in web access.  When you logon to web access and select a VM, you can get a console in your Internet Explorer. Let’s find out what happens in the background. Log on to Web Access : https://vcserver/ui

Richard Garsthagen over at Run-Virtual.com released another killer app. VCplus is program that adds functionality to your Virtual Center environment! It allows you to see what the actual disk usage is within your Virtual Machines, Easily see if a Virtual Machine has a snapshot and what the size of the snapshot files are and it allows you to sync the VM’s DNS name to the Display Name.

During the TSX event in Nice there was a lot of speculation about new features in the next version of VMware ESX server. Mike Laverick  managed squeeze some comments out of Yu-Shen Ng.  And the past few weeks more and more news leaked out. Let’s take a look at the rumors and the facts. The release date of version ESX 3.1 will be around the end of October 2007. In this new version there will be better redundancy for iSCSI. Data replication in the kernel and filtering by third party apps will be possible. Besides authentication with AD, LDAP is going to be supported. When you logon to WebAcces there will be more possibility’s like creation of VM’s and controlling the resource pools and clusters. Different CPU family type’s within the Intel brand and connected internal switches are going to be supported in combination with VMotion. And last but not least VCB file level back-up for Linux VM’s.

Today Bouke Groenescheij over at Jumé discovered the comfort of using iGoogle. He tells us that you can create your own cool looking start page with all the feeds you like. He is very interested in the Virtualization feeds so he gathered the best feeds around for you to cut and paste in iGoogle or just click on the 'add to Google' button.

A few weeks ago I started building my first Visual Basic 2005 application. What I wanted to do is talk to the VMware Virtual Center API. I published a PDF document that describes how to connect to this API and I released some code fragments. In this process Robert Baumstark helped me a lot with great tips and suggestions. He even shared the source code  of his viclient.dll which can be used to get properties from VM’s  and logon to the Virtual Center server. After a lot of late hours of coding I finally can release the vmCDConnected application. What’s so special about this application ? Well it scans all the Virtual Machines and shows if they have a CD connected to it. After scanning the VM’s you can disconnect all the CD’s with a click of  a button. Why do we need it ? Imagine you have a DRS cluster with 80 VM’s, when one of those VM’s is connected to a CD it will stay on the same ESX server because V-Motion doesn’t work in combination with a connected CD. During beta release of this application some people reported a failure message after login in. I tested this application during several VI-3 Install and Configure classes I delivered but never have seen that error myself. When you encounter problems please report them. I'm also open to suggestions that might be implemented in the next version.

Download : http://www.ntpro.nl/software/VMCDConnected.zip

Manfred Meier a Web- and System-Administrator from Switzerland has written the ESX Console Manger utility that can do the following. List Virtual Machines and Virtual Disk information with the location and size of the files and directories (also for unregistered Virtual Machines). Rename Virtual Disks of registered Virtual Machines. Kill Virtual Machine Process (if the VM can't be powered off). List All Virtual Disk Flatfiles on a Datastore with size and modification date. And view Logfiles on the ESX Host. He also publishes lots of other VMware tips and tricks on his website ESXGuide.

Peter van den Bosch from PQR created a features comparisons matrix of virtualization migration products.   This matrix compares the features of the industries most popular virtualization migration products. The focus of the differences between the products is the remigration possibilities. The products often offer more then migration possibilities, disaster recovery and backup on remote sites are among those extra options.