Eric Sloof

Alex Bakman over at VKernel announced the release of SearchMyVM, a free “Google-like” search utility to help you quickly find information within rapidly expanding VMware ESX environments. As dynamic virtual environments continue to rapidly grow in size and scope, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to find even the most basic information within VMware infrastructures. SearchMyVM instantly deploys exactly like each one of VKernel’s virtual appliances. With a “Google-like” search interface, you can find virtual machines, hosts, clusters, storage, resource pools, files, snapshots, VMware tools, applications and configuration information. Over 75 different types of attributes are fully indexed and available for you to search.

icomasoft® VI PowerScripter (currently beta 1) is the first and absolutely unique VMware VI Client plug-in for a tight integration of user-defined PowerShell scripts into the object repository of VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5.

This plug-in delivers some predefined scripts for common admin tasks and is capable of handling hundreds of custom scripts for direct usage from a dynamically generated context menu within VI Client (for connections to VirtualCenter, ESX 3.5 or ESX 3i).

Thanks to its absolute flexibility, this powerful software is a “must” for professional users looking to administrate the virtual infrastructure in compliance with business-aligned functions in a simple and yet most effective manner.

There's a bug when upgrading from ESX 3.0 to ESX 3.5. This bug has to do with Lunmasking. When performing the following mask command:

/adv/Disk/MaskLUNs =
vmhba2:1:19,20,36,37,38,39,40,41,48,49,50,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96;vmhba2:2:19,20,36,37,38,39,40,41,48,49,50,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96;vmhba4:1:19,20,36,37,38,39,40,41,48,49,50,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96;vmhba4:2:19,20,36,37,38,39,40,41,48,49,50,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96;"

This should mask all the luns, what you effectively get is:

/adv/Disk/MaskLUNs =
"vmhba2:1:19,20,36,37,38,39,40,41,48,49,50,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96;vmhba2:2:19,20,36,37,38,39,40,41,48,49,50,89,90,91,92,93,94,9

This means there is a restriction in the amount of characters that can be set in 3.5 for masking luns.