Eric Sloof

The VIB Author tool allows ESXi administrator to create custom VIBs at the Community Supported level. VIB stands for vSphere Installation Bundle and is a way of packaging programs that run on ESXi hosts. The custom VIBs can then be used in house, or made available to a wider audience. 

Key Features

• Create VIBs using custom VIB descriptor files and custom payload files
• Sign and verify a VIB
• Extract and display VIB information
• Publish the VIB as an offline depot ZIP file

VIB Author is Community Supported, meaning that the VIB has not gone through testing and approval by VMware or by VMware partners and, as such, may cause performance or stability problems and have security vulnerabilities. 

RVTools is a windows .NET 2.0 application which uses the VI SDK to display information about your virtual machines and ESX hosts. Interacting with VirtualCenter 2.5, ESX Server 3.5, ESX Server 3i, ESX Server 4i, VirtualCenter 4.0, ESX Server 4.0, VirtualCenter 4.1, ESX Server 4.1, VirtualCenter 5.0, VirtualCenter Appliance or ESX Server 5.0. RVTools is able to list information about VMs, CPU, Memory, Disks, Partitions, Network, Floppy drives, CD drives, Snapshots, VMware tools, ESX hosts, HBAs, Nics, Switches, Ports, Distributed Switches, Distributed Ports, Service consoles, VM Kernels, Datastores and health checks. With RVTools you can disconnect the cd-rom or floppy drives from the virtual machines and RVTools is able to update the VMware Tools installed inside each virtual machine to the latest version.

Version 3.4 (September, 2012) 

• Overall performance improvements and better end user experience 
• VI SDK reference changed from 4.0 to 5.0 
• Added reference to Log4net (Apache Logging Framework) for debugging purpose 
• Fixed a SSO problem 
• CSV export trailing separator removed to fix PowerShell read problem 
• On vDisk tabpage new fields: Eagerly Scrub and Write Through 
• On vHost tabpage new field: vRAM = total amount of virtual RAM allocated to all running VMs 
• On vHost tabpage new fields: Used memory by VMs, Swapped memory by VMs and Ballooned memory by VMs 
• Bugfix: Snapshot size was displayed as zero when smaller than 1 MB 
• Added a new preferences screen. Here you can disable / enable some performance killers. By default they are disabled 
  
  

VMware Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) enhances the scope of VMware vSphere vMotion by making VMware ESXi hosts with different CPU technologies compatible for vMotion. It does this by making available a common CPU feature set through the use of a baseline. With a baseline in place for older processors, application performance becomes important. Do the applications running in the virtual machines with an older CPU presented perform as well as they do on virtual machines that have access to feature sets available in newer generation processors? In this paper, VMware will quantify the performance impact of EVC mode on a diverse set of applications.

VMware has studied workloads from database, Java, multimedia, and encryption categories and report the results. Test results show that almost all workloads perform well even when the virtual machine presents an EVC mode that corresponds to an older processor generation. The EVC mode setting had varying impact on workload performance based on the ESXi hosts’ CPU instruction set features made available and their relevance to the workloads. One workload, AES-Encryption, didn’t fare as well due to a dependence on special-purpose instruction sets only available in younger processor generations.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMware-vSphere-EVC-Perf.pdf

VMware vCloud Director enables users to build a private cloud–based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering within their organization. By providing a secure, on-demand ability for end users to deploy workloads, companies can realize a level of agility previously thought impossible.

Resource design for vCloud Director involves examining requirements to determine how best to partition and organize resources. With the commoditization of infrastructure resources, the ability to scale them becomes increasingly important. When designing for vCloud Director, keep in mind that the ultimate consumers of the product are the end users of the system.

Taking a top-down approach to vCloud Director design necessitates an understanding of the new abstractions introduced in the vCloud API and how they map to traditional VMware vSphere® objects. This paper was developed to provide additional insight and information as to how vCloud Director allocation models relate to vSphere resource management. The paper written by Frank Denneman and Chris Colotti reviews and discusses various design considerations and operational procedures.

VKernel is running a "Free VM Tool" competition. Those who come up with the BEST ideas for free tool features—functionality that is good enough to build into their free tools—win cool hi-tech gadgetry.