Eric Sloof - NTPRO.NL

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