VMware PowerCLI 4.0 released
I came back from a week’s holiday this morning to find that VMware PowerCLI 4.0 has been released as the successor to VI Toolkit 1.5. The jump from 1.5 to 4.0 is for version number consolidation, rather than being than indicitive of major changes.
They have however fixed one of the bugs that’s been annoying me, which is the inability to change drives to non-persistent, so I’ll need to revisit some of my old scripts from v1.0 and check that they still work.
You can download it from the community page. I’ll follow up with more information when I get a chance to investigate it fully.
VMware’s vSphere 4 Cheat Sheet
VMware’s vSphere 4 PDF cheat sheet from boche.net.
“VMware supports 4x more guest operating systems than Microsoft. In fact, VMware supports more versions of Windows than Microsoft.”
pwned!
Storage vMotion from the GUI
While I’m a big fan of the command-line, there are times when you just want to be able to do something from the GUI.
Storage vMotion is usually only available using the rCLI Appliance but this VI plug-in allows you to do this task from the context menu in VIC, simply install, restart VIC if necessary, then get moving those VMs.
An option to move more than one VM at a time would be nice, and you still can’t move non-persistent machines; but it’s still easier than connecting to the rCLI.
VMware Tools vulnerabilities
Virtual Foundry’s article on hardening the VMX file to prevent VMware Tools vulnerabilities made me a little bit nervous, but after reading it. Most of the guests on our farm are single user, non-persistent machines, and therefore even if a user is capable of causing damage, the effects are limited.
The article is still pretty interesting, although in most cases I think the vulnerabilities are academic, and only worth taking precautions against in the most demanding of environments.
VMware vCenter server preview video
Video from vCritical showing installation and GUI on the new vCenter.
vSphere PowerCLI.
While speaking to a gentleman from VMware last year, I gently chided Citrix for their grand-renaming, and made comment that at least VMware didn’t succumb to this modern plague of replacing perfectly good names with ones formed from pure marketing-fluff. It was shortly after this that VMware announced the change from Virtual Infrastructure to vSphere.
Alongside this well publicised change; VMware Toolkit (for Windows) is now called vSphere PowerCLI.
I sometimes wonder if all this random capitalisation is part of some great scheme to prevent the world’s pinky fingers from atrophy by having them constantly reach for the Shift key.
There’s also a Twitter account, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Virtualization EcoShell
I’ve started looking at the recently released beta of Vizioncore’s Virtualization EcoShell, which is a VMware tailored version of PowerGUI.
Both are GUI front-ends for (among other things) VMware’s Powershell based VI Toolkit, which I’ve talked about before.
I never got the full benefit from PowerGui, as by the time I’d realised there was more to it than the (very good) script editor, I’d already developed a lot of the scripts I needed – scripts which PowerGui would have been able to generate for me a lot more quickly (c’est la vie).
EcoShell has the ability to export some nice looking reports (although the Visio based vDiagram functionality still doesn’t work for me).
There’s more information on EcoShell over at Virtua-Al.
Hal Rottenberg’s book available for pre-order
Hal Rottenberg’s book Managing VMWare Infrastructure with Windows PowerShell is now available for pre-order.
I’m a big fan of Hal‘s; he’s helped me out a few times on the VMware VI Toolkit forums. Sadly shipping to the UK is over $76, meaning that I’ll have to either wait for a digital copy, or see if a local publisher/distributer takes it up.
VMware VCenter Remote Access
Remotely accessing ESX Guests on an (emulated) portable device. If only I could convince work to get me a BlackBerry it would free me from my desk.
The only problem being; I’m not entirely sure where I would go instead.
Site reorganisation
I’ve been doing some reorganisation of the neise.co.uk domain space.
The original site www.neise.co.uk is now a shared site for the whole family; and will be being worked on shortly. There are now three new subdomains, ben.neise.co.uk (which you’re looking at just now), lorna.neise.co.uk and roslin.neise.co.uk.
This blog will be used for noting interesting things that I come across during my work; mostly useful VMware PowerCLI scripts that I find or write, and links to interesting articles.
This is the first time I’ve used WordPress, so bear with me as I try to get the CSS to display code nicely.
