Eric Sloof

With the latest addition of Schley Andrew Kutz the VMware tools repository vm4all.com has reached 60 entries. Vm4all.com has nearly 2000 unique visitors a day and is linked by 280 websites.

Add Port Groups is a VI 2.5 client plug-in that enables the ability to create many port groups at once on many ESX hosts and many virtual switches.

Andrew Kutz has released the source code of his tool that can be used to create a VI 2.5 plug-in. Andrew has been professionally involved in the technology sector for 12 years. For the last seven of them he has worked with the latest technologies while employed by the University of Texas at Austin. Three years ago, Andrew started his own consulting firm and development house, l o s t c r e a t i o n s. He is also a founding member of the Austin VMware Users' Group (VMUG). His current pet development project is SVMotion plug-in.

LeftHand's Virtual SAN Appliance for VMware ESX is the industry's first full-featured, virtual iSCSI SAN. Powered by the SAN/iQ software platform, a Virtual SAN for VMware converts unused storage internal to VI3 servers into a clustered iSCSI SAN, providing all of the SAN services necessary for storage provisioning, data protection, management and availability in demanding datacenter environments. The solution offers scalable capacity and performance along with advanced data availability via network RAID and multi-site SAN capabilities.

I have written a few articles about VMware and the PowerShell command let’s and at the VMworld 2008 EUROPE in Cannes you can explore the  PowerShell interfaces for VMware Infrastructure in the Automating VMware with PowerShell: Hands-On Lab. But the downside of PowerShell is that there isn’t a nice user interface. Wouldn’t it be great to use the PowerShell .net library’s and connect to your Virtual Centre server with Visual Basic Express 2008. It isn’t documented but I have found a way to connect to VC using the following code :

Public Class Form1

Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click

        Dim Config As New VMware.VimAutomation.Client20.VimClient

        Config.ConnectivityService.Login("https", "VC.NTPRO.LOCAL", "443", "Admin", "vmware")

        MsgBox(Config.ConnectivityService.IsConnected)

        MsgBox(Config.ConnectivityService.GetApiInfo.ApiVersion)

    End Sub

End Class

If everything goes well you will receive two message boxes, the first one will tell you “True�? so you’re connected and the second one will display “2.5�?, this is the version of the API. The remainder of the code is up to you, please let me know if you can stop and start a VM. The beta version of the VI3 Windows Toolkit will be launched in March.

Pearson was kind enough to send me a review copy of the Vmware ESX Server in the Enterprise book. This book is written by Edward Haletky and all I can say is that he really did a great job. Since some of the information in his book is based on VI3 (ESX 3.0) I asked him how the readers are going to be updated to the ESX 3.5 version. I received his answer a few minutes later and at this moment he is working on the Errata. You can find it online at his website. John Troyer conducted an interview with Edward last week which can be found here.

Frane Borozan over at physical2virtual.backup created process for backing-up physical servers into virtual machines using VMware converter and VMware server. The whole process is described on the www.p2vbackup.com website. This process only uses free tools and scripts written by Frane. VMware importer will be used for importing data into virtual machines, and VMware server will be used for managing data imported into virtual machines.

I asked Frane why he created the website ?

" I created the website to help system administrators implementing backup and disaster system because backup is a very important segment of every network infrastructure. As our bosses always want the best and the most cheap solution the only way to do this right is to choose virtualization and virtual servers for backup cause in the start they are giving us big savings in one way or another. "

SVMotion is a VI 2.5 client plugin (the FIRST released, third-party plugin in fact) that extends the client's functionality by providing an integrated, graphical tool that can be used to invoke storage VMotion (SVMotion) operations. This plugin is not supported by VMware. In fact, the plugin is not anywhere close to supported by VMware because it is the result of a two-week dive into the inner-workings of the VI client libraries with popular reflection tools (reverse-engineering). l o s t c r e a t i o n s is working on a white paper that describes how to build VI plugins. Read more about SVMotion and download it here.

The official statement  from CA about VMware integration is : “Enhanced VMware integration provides increased levels of data protection and backup efficiency within virtual environments�?. But what does it mean?  Well, in the latest release of ARCserve, CA is boosting its support of the VMware virtualization platform. ARCserve r12 provides a feature that enables physical-to-virtual server restore. That means that during a disaster recovery scenario, an enterprise can initiate bare-metal recovery of physical server backups to VMware virtual servers.

Vizioncore announced vConverter, the fastest, easiest and most reliable tool for performing physical to virtual (P2V) and virtual to virtual (V2V) machine conversions. Customers working with VMware, Microsoft, XenServer or Virtual Iron environments can use vConverter to significantly simplify, automate and accelerate the machine to machine conversion process, maximize system availability and eliminate any potential impact on physical systems.  As customers increasingly look to standardize on virtual infrastructures, the reliability and performance of conversion tools are critical factors in ensuring that migration projects are as non-disruptive and require as few man-hours as possible. Server consolidation initiatives often allow only a few hours at weekends in order to perform conversions, so a fast, reliable tool that automates many of the manual pre- and post-migration tasks is critical to achieving maximum successful P2V conversions per time window.

Ron McKelvey (or ronzo) over at PHD Technologies disclosed a new feature of the esXpress backup software.  So far the name is EAR (esXpress Advanced Replication). If you have a better suggestion for naming conventions, they're all EARs ;-) Right now esXpress has Simple Replication which can be defined as automatically restoring backups. The more you backup a VM, the more it can be auto restored. Consider Host A, it backs up to your FTP, all VMs once a day, and some VMs more often. Host B can check that FTP for new backups, then restore them. This is currently a DELTA restore, which means if the VMDK is 40 GB, then a new 40 GB VMDK will be created and the backup restored. Simple Replication is basically just a Mass Restore that runs automatically.  They’re now getting ready to release the EAR in Beta format.  Right now backups are in a Full/Delta methology.  As time goes on, the Delta backups get bigger, because they are based on the Full. An EAR backup is just the incremental block level changes done from the last backup. Whether you are making a FULL or a DELTA, an EAR archive is also extracted with just the incremental changes from the last backup. This EAR archive can be send to another NET target (NET only for now).

In the above example, In the above example, I setup Host B to do EAR restores this time. It will search the FTP, find the backup and restore it.  If the VMDK does not exist already on the host, then the DELTA backup will be restored, thus creating the VMDK.  Then each replicated restore after that will just need to take the EAR file and drop it on top of the replicated VMDK. Host B has been setup to do EAR restores this time.  It will search the FTP, find the backup and restore it.  If the VMDK does not exist already on the host, then the DELTA backup will be restored, thus creating the VMDK.  Then each replicated restore after that will just need to take the EAR file and drop it on top of the replicated VMDK. If your Host B is across a WAN, this works even better, as only the incremental changes need to ever be sent.  You can seed Host B by bring the Delta/Full backups physically over and restoring them. Then when you enable the EAR restores, the .ear archives will be applied one by one, bring it up to date (or not as you configure it).

This means that if you backup VMs more often you can replicate them more often. Because this is basically built into the backup engine, it is just another process, much like FLBs. Every time you backup a VM with Delta or a Full, it will also make an EAR file. If the replication gets badly out of syncs, just the previous Delta need be restored, then the EAR files will flow again. And since the replication is based on Delta and EAR files, it is easy to restore a copy of any VMDK from any point in time.  This is just the start, the plan will get more complex.  Imagine, Doing monthly Full’s, Weekly Delta, and Daily Incremental’s, if you so choose.