Eric Sloof

Quest plans on launching a pretty significant update to our PowerGUI PowerPack for VMware.  There are four key features as a part of this update:

• Dynamic Nodes – This allow users to navigate their VMware PowerShell management as if they were using VirtualCenter.

• Support for a broader range of VMware VI Toolkit Cmdlets.

• Integration with the VMware SDK for advanced actions not yet supported by the VMware VI Toolkit.

• Support for the upcoming VMware VI Toolkit 1.5 release.

I attended the VMware Communities Roundtable yesterday evening and had a chat with John Troyer about the huge success of the Dutch VMUG event. I wasn’t the only one online. You can also listen to discussions about VMware Mobile and the “Read Only” SDK in the ESX 3i free versions.

Guys like esiebert7625, jasonboche, jonowings, knudt, rick_vmwaretips, sbeaver, alanrenouf, bscheitel,   deason_uk, depping, GabesVirtualWorld.com, Maish_SK, Rod Haywood (rodos), stumchugh,  Svenh , astorrs, MatthewJohnson and Scott Lowe were also participating in the discussions. John announced the enrolment date of the new VMware Virtualization Professional Program “VVP”. It’s going to happen by the end of this week, the first VVP’ers will be nominated in January.

When you’re locked out of your vCenter Server because someone has assigned the “Read-Only” role to the “Domain Users” group and has set the permissions at the highest level, you’re in deep trouble. You can log on to vCenter but can’t change anything because your Administrator account is also a “Domain User”.  There are several ways to fix this problem. First of all never use default Windows groups to create VC roles. Second there’s an easy way and a hard way.

The easy way is to shutdown VC and disable authorization checks by adding:

<security>
       <enabled>false</enabled>
</security>

within the <config> tags of vpxd.cfg. Start VC and remove the permission, then shut it down and turn security back on again by removing these tags.

The hard way is to open the VC SQL database and open the table : VPX_ACCESS, then add another row :

ID: 1
Principal : Administrators
Role_ID : -1
ENTITY_ID : 1
FLAG : 3

Afterwards you need to restart the vCenter Server services. Credits to Koen Warson and Phil Cohen.

When you were one of the attendees at the Dutch VMUG event 2008, you may have noticed a nice blond girl walking around with a huge camera. Like Viktor she’s a professional photographer, only she’s much better looking :-) Well she uploaded the photo’s and Viktor is about to launch a new part of the Dutch VMUG website where you can view them.

Maurizio Carli is responsible for strategic planning, business operations and management of key functions for the region, including sales, channels, services and marketing. He will report directly to Carl Eschenbach, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations, for VMware.

In the past Carli was EMEA Enterprise Managing director at Google, SVP/GM EMEA at Business Objects and VP Software Group IBM EMEA at IBM.

I just visited the VMware Online Virtualization Forum, looks cool and contains a lot of info, you can even chat with the Product Managers.

Tuesday, December 16th, 8:00 am - 5:00pm PST

Don't miss this opportunity to:

Network with VMware product experts, customers, partners and other IT Professionals. Attend 30-minute presentations and get the latest info on VMware solutions, products and industry trends. Access real-time information from industry leaders without the hassle or expense of travel. Create a multi-media resource kit, including white papers, videos and podcasts.

Vkernel just released our Capacity Analyzer 3.0.  In addition to showing you bottlenecks in hosts, clusters, and resource pools, they can now show you bottlenecks in VMs -- both inside and outside of VMs. Even small environments have hundreds of VMs, causing ongoing monitoring and finding problems in each individual VM to be very time consuming. Capacity Analyzer 3.0 sorts through them to show you the most problematic VMs first, so you can quickly see which VMs are having current performance problems. With predictive analytics, they also identify which VMs will have performance problems and when, so that you can take necessary proactive measures.

Hugo Peeters is is on the loose again ! :-) Read more at PeetersOnline.nl

Although I spend quite some time in the Powershell Command Line Interface, the main tool for managing the Virtual Infrastructure remains the VI Client. So wouldn’t it be great if we could somehow show the results of our Powershell VI Toolkit scripts inside the VI Client? Well, we can! Let’s take a closer look at Custom Fields / Custom Attributes. If you select either a VMHost (ESX Server) or a VM in the VI Client and open the Summary tab, you will see the Annotations section in the bottom left. When you click Edit, I’m sure you have used the Notes section to enter Descriptions. But have you ever used the Attributes section? Here you can manually add and remove custom attributes and their values. Go ahead and create one. Then select a cluster or datacenter and click the Hosts or Virtual Machines tab. You will notice you can display your custom attribute in this table view, just like all the other properties of your VMs / Hosts. Pretty sweet!

I’ve finally met Hugo after I delivered my VMUG presentation last Friday and he’s a really bright guy. I think with this script he created a real competitor for Richard’s VC-Plus.

Compellent has expanded its industry-leading storage management to multiply the time and money saving benefits across the enterprise with a Windows PowerShell–based command set. The Storage Center Command Set for Windows Powershell, streamlines system management, volume administration, Data Instant Replay™ management and advanced storage features using more than 60 new cmdlets. Via the PowerScripting Podcast.

The Virtualfuture.info team  attended the Dutch VMUG event and brought their video camera with them. Their video’s are appearing online and I’m glad that they picked my session. The roles are different this time, I’ve recorded a dozen of sessions in the past, but this was the first time a blogger is bootlegging my session. They recorded the complete 45 minutes and did a great job. I know how much time it takes to record, convert, edit and upload a video. The image links to their post.  The guys running Virtualfuture.info are Sven Huisman, Matthijs Haverink, Johan Van Zanten and Wouter Heije. When you see someone recording a session in Cannes, it could be one of them.