Entries from Eric Sloof

Everyone who’s interested in the vCenter Mobile Access Technology can download a free technology preview and try it out. Williem Lam (@lamw) has dropped his findings on Twitter and reveals the first screenshots from his iPhone. 

Here’s the welcome message from Srinivas Krishnamurti, the Product Manager:

We're very excited to announce that we are ahead of schedule so we are releasing the VMware vCenter Mobile Access technology preview bits now. You can download the bits by clicking on the Download button under the Getting Started section. The documentation is actually an easy read so we encourage you to skim through it as you download the product bits.

One of my students installed the virtual appliance (thanks Arwin), I recorded a one minute Jing demo.

Continue reading "VMware Mobile Access Technology Preview now..." »

With great pleasure I took notice of the fact that I’m still in the high ranks of Eric Siebert’s New Weblog Top 20. NTPRO.NL went one place up and is staying at the third place. In June 2007 I was the first blogger who wrote about the start-up of VMware-land. Since then Eric collected an immense number of links to all kinds of information related to VMware. He recently added the VMware Launchpad to his website, so you can quickly access any of the blogs from his site. At VMworld in Las Vegas I had the pleasure to meet Eric in person, he was one of the speakers at the Vmtn Community Experts Panel. While I was attending this session I recorded the introduction on video.

After posting an article how to Extending the VI Client with the Twitter Plug-in, John Troyer commented, asking me if I can envision a practical use for this? Maybe if the other servers are using the Twitter API to report alerts?

In the Alarm Settings dialog box, you can use the Actions tab to specify actions taken when the alarm is triggered. My first thought was, let’s create a PowerShell script, but passing the alarm parameters to a batch file and a PowerShell script isn’t that easy.

After some searching I finally found TwitCon, it’s a Twitter updater that uses no external programs or libraries and has no graphical user interface. It's written to be compliable on any platform and give you a quick, easy, and small way to update your Twitter status in a flash.

You can pass parameters to the twitter.exe from the vCenter Server, in this example I have chosen {targetName} and {alarmName} as the most appropriate.

C:\twitter\twitter.exe username password {targetName} {alarmName}

Other parameters that can be passed to twitter.exe are:

{eventDescription}
{targetName}
{alarmName}
{triggeringSummary}
{declaringSummary}
{oldStatus}
{newStatus}
{target}

Now I can scedule my goodmoring twitter message just before Duncan Epping wakes up. :-)

Nick MacKechnie, Senior Technical Account Manager at Microsoft New Zealand, had a few queries over the last few weeks from customers asking for resources on Powershell and where to start. Here’s some free resources he has found. (via @michelroth)

The upcoming version of VMware vCenter contains a great new feature called Datastore Performance Charts. The datastore charts contain information about disk usage for datastores.

• Space in GB - The Space in GB chart displays memory data counters for datastores.
• Space Utilization By File Type - The Space Utilization by File Type chart displays disk usage for the datastore. It displays real-time statistics only.
• Space Utilization by Virtual Machine - The Space Utilization by Virtual Machine chart displays disk usage in the datastore. This chart displays real-time statistics only.

These charts are located in the Home view of the Datastore Performance tab.

 

VMware is offering a new View training, this 3 day hands-on training course builds your skills in the VMware View suite of products: VMware View Manager, VMware View Composer, and VMware ThinApp. The VMware View: Install, Configure, Manage is the successor of the VMD2 course.

In the upcoming version of VMware vCenter, you don’t have to use the remote CLI to initiate a storage vMotion migration anymore. You also don’t have to download the Andrew Kutz plug-in, because the storage vMotion migration feature has become part in the VI-Client.

Migration with Storage vMotion allows you to move a virtual machine’s storage without any interruption in the availability of the virtual machine. You can use Storage vMotion to move virtual machines off of a storage device to allow maintenance or reconfiguration of the storage device without virtual machine downtime. You can also use Storage vMotion to manually redistribute virtual machines or virtual disks to different storage volumes to balance capacity or improve performance.

In the upcoming version of VMware ESX, the are a lot of new methods available in the SDK. One of the new methods is CreateScreenshot_Task which is part of the ManagedObjectReference:VirtualMachine. This method creates a screenshot of the virtual machine console, the image is saved as a portable network graphics (.png) file in the virtual machine folder. I created a little PowerShell script to initiate the screenshot.

Get-PSSnapin -registered | Add-PSSnapin -passthru -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
$Server = Connect-VIServer -Server 192.168.178.250 -User Administrator -Password vmware
$vm = Get-VM -name "DC.NTPRO.LOCAL"
$vmView = $vm | Get-View
$vmView.CreateScreenshot_Task()

In the upcoming version of VMware ESX, the virtual machines are running on a different virtual motherboard. This new motherboard is based on the Intel 82440BX and provides signifently higher virtual machine maximums. I created a new virtual machine and added 10 virtual NICS to it. In the screenshot you can see the guest OS displaying the 10 NICS.

 

The following table contains configuration maximums related to virtual machines in the new version.

Continue reading "New Virtual Machine Maximums" »

VMware vCenter Mobile Access allows you to monitor and manage VMware Infrastructure from your mobile phone with an interface that is optimized for such devices. Specifically, it allows you to search for virtual machines in your data center, migrate virtual machines from one host to another using VMotion, execute recovery plans using VMware Site Recovery Manager, access Scheduled Tasks, Alarms and Events, and much more...