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ConfigCheckTM is a free utility that rapidly assesses the security of VMware ESX 3.5 hypervisor configurations compared to the VMware Infrastructure 3 Security Hardening guidelines. Developed by Tripwire in cooperation with VMware, Tripwire ConfigCheck ensures ESX environments are properly configured—offering immediate insight into unintentional vulnerabilities in virtual environments—and provides the necessary steps towards full remediation when they are not.

Peter Rudolf over at mightycare-solutions released another great (freeware) Tool from Mightycare Solutions to display the logical Partitions of all virtual Maschines on VMware ESX 3.x or Virtual Center 2.x . The Tool can display how many Gigabyte the Customer can save when he decrease the logical partition to a size the VM really need.

RVTools is a small .NET 2.0 application which uses the VI SDK  to display  the version of the installed VMware tools. It also shows if the tools are upgradeable. The button "Upgrade VMware Tools" starts an UpgradeTools_Task for every selected VM. If you think this is useful information please download the application, try it and let me know by mail what you think about it.

The 37migrations plugin was developed in conjunction with 37migrations.com. It increments your VMotion count on the 37migrations server every time a migration event occurs.

Allows third-party applications to be launched from within the VI 2.5 client using an existing, authenticated session cookie.

KeySniffer is an example of how VI 2.5 client plugins can be abused. This plugin sniffs all key strokes that occur within the VI 2.5 client and outputs them to C:\viclientkeystrokes.txt.

Adds an SSH-enabled tab named 'Console' when a host system is selected.

Allows for RDP from VMWare Virtual Infrastructure client right click menu

A groundbreaking disaster recovery solution for VMware Infrastructure 3 that combines backup and replication in one product. Veeam Backup is the first solution that combines backup and replication in a single product for fast recovery of your VMware ESX Servers. Backup is easy – recovery can be hard. But with Veeam Backup, fast recovery is easier than you ever thought possible. Backup and Replication in one - Now, with Veeam Backup, organizations can benefit from a unified solution for both backup and replication to protect mission-critical virtual machines from both hardware and software failure.
 

Add Port Groups is a VI 2.5 client plugin that enables the ability to create many port groups at once on many ESX hosts and many virtual switches.

SVMotion is a VI 2.5 client plugin (the FIRST released, third-party plugin in fact) that extends the client's functionality by providing an integrated, graphical tool that can be used to invoke storage VMotion (SVMotion) operations. This plugin is not supported by VMware. In fact, the plugin is not anywhere close to supported by VMware because it is the result of a two-week dive into the inner-workings of the VI client libraries with popular reflection tools (reverse-engineering). l o s t c r e a t i o n s is working on a white paper that describes how to build VI plugins.

Volkmar Uhlig has written a nice application called VMware Serial Line Gateway. You can use this tool to debug software running in a virtual machine using the virtual COM port. The VMware Serial Line Gateway redirects the serial traffic to your host OS where you can catch the communication.

Change auditing is an important process for controlling the management of your virtual environment, to limit unauthorized changes and errors in VI3 inventory. Erroneous and unauthorized changes usually occur every day in organizations in which many IT professionals manage different aspects of virtual infrastructure. Such changes can cause failures and outages in your virtual infrastructure. NetWrix Change Reporter for VMware Infrastructure 3 audits all changes and enforces controlled change management processes across your virtual environment. This freeware tool sends a daily report pointing to every change made to your ESX servers, folders, clusters, resource pools, virtual machines, and their hardware (*), including previous and current ("before" and "after") configuration values.

MCS VMStatus application reads a list of Virtual Machines from VMware ESX-Server 3.5 or VMware Virtual Center 2.5 and displays the Status of the VMware Tools version and time sync. With a single click you can change the Sync Guest option with the Host.

Monét - Monét (as in "Count de...") stands for "Monitors Events and Tasks" and monitors an ESX or VirtualCenter? server, recording tasks to standard out, a syslog server, or a Windows event log server. This application teaches several important VI3 SDK concepts: creating property filters, waiting on updates, and creating multi-threaded VI3 SDK utilities. Monét comes in a variety of flavors; it is currently implemented using Microsoft .NET with C# 2.0, the VI Perl Toolkit, and Java.

This program is develloped for patching VMWare ESX hostservers because updating an ESX server is not easy and very time consuming. Using ESXEasyPatch is very easy. Just add your ESX servers (ip-number or hostname) and ESXEasyPatch will check if and how many pathes are available and not installed on your ESX server.  Just select de patches you want to apply to your ESX servers and press \"Patch Selected Server\". ESXEasyPatch downloads the selected patches and put your ESX server in maitenance mode. After this, your ESX server will automaticly be patched by ESXEasyPatch. If a reboot is required, ESXEasyPatch will reboot your ESX server.

VMjuggler is an application Richard wrote to use during demonstrations. The program is quite simple, it connects to VirtualCenter 2.x and you can select a VM and 2 hosts. After selecting this you can start the juggler and the VM will be moves every 10 seconds between the hosts. The fun thing to do of course is while this is going on with the virtual machine is to run parallel a load generation program against your VM to see how much it is impacted. It also keeps a counter to see how many vmotions have been taking place.

The eG Monitor for VMware infrastructures (the eG VM MonitorTM), part of the eG Enterprise Suite, is a comprehensive solution for monitoring and managing all aspects of virtual hosts and guests, whether the infrastructure is used to support server or desktop applications. Coupled with the ability of the eG Enterprise Suite to monitor over 80 applications, including Citrix, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, and others, the eG VM Monitor – with its patent-pending In-N-Out MonitoringTM technology -- provides a comprehensive end-to-end solution for monitoring and managing the performance of virtual IT infrastructures.

If you're using VMware ESX extensively but haven't deployed a chargeback tool, or at minimum a system for monitoring resource consumption and available capacity, you will lack valuable ammunition come budget time. Usage measurements can justify infrastructure expansion, help recover costs, even transform IT into a profit center. The VKernel Capacity and Chargeback Virtual Appliance is ESX-specific software that reports on capacity and resource consumption. It also provides chargeback totals based on a user-defined unit cost for four core metering sources: CPU, RAM, storage and network usage. An unlimited number of custom fields are available for monitoring cooling costs, administrative services, software licensing or whatever else you can dream up. VKernel says the product can handle as many as 300 hosts, so there's definitely room to breathe.

V-Ployment enables users to configure and rapidly deploy ESX Server builds to a consistent standard, whilst drastically cutting down effort, time and cost when provisioning or building additional servers. How Is V-Ployment Used? V-Ployment simplifies the build and configuration process of VMware's ESX Server (VI3), saving time and effort. It also reduces the skill level required to produce consistent ESX server builds and provides template examples containing over 5 years of VMware awarded best practice. V-Ployment is a fast, consistent and easy-to-use tool that allows you to deploy and configure VMware ESX 3.x servers rapidly in your environment. It is a .NET2 Windows application that processes configuration information from a formatted CSV file (supplied by Repton) and outputs the specified ESX host build scripts into a configured ESX boot image file (.iso).

vRanger Pro (formerly esxRanger Professional) - provides image-level hot backups of either entire virtual machines or differentials - simply and easily while virtual machines continue running.

vCharter (formerly esxCharter) - provides a top-down view of performance for the entire virtual infrastructure in a drill-down display that shows each level - beginning with the container and then through to the host level as well as all virtual machines.

vReplicator (formerly esxReplicator)- supports replication of entire virtual machines including configuration settings, OS patches and the application itself as well as the data and all other OS-level changes.

vMigrator (formerly esxMigrator) - migrates virtual machines to new platforms while keeping the source virtual machines intact and unmodified, allowing them to be used even as the virtual machines are ported to new production servers.

vOptimizer (formerly Invirtus VM Optimizer) - reduces a virtual machine's virtual hard drive to the smallest size possible and optimizes guest operating systems for maximum performance and portability.

vConverter (formerly Invirtus Enterprise VM Converter) - significantly reduces the time and effort spent converting physical and virtual servers to VMware, Microsoft or Virtual Iron virtual machines.

vPackager (formerly Invirtus Libra) - provides a virtualization collaboration solution via virtual appliances by extending and optimizing the use of VMware Snapshot and Microsoft Differencing Disk technologies.

vEssentials (formerly esxEssentials) – a powerful bundle package consisting of vRanger, vReplicator and vCharter for organizations looking to enhance disaster recovery and simplify the overall management of virtual infrastructures.

With the Virtual Machine MKS Client you can logon to your Virtual Center server and take over the console of your virtual machines. In the menu bar you will see a list with all your virtual machines.  You can also power off en power on your virtual machines. The menu bar contains a  combobox which you can use to search trough a large list of virtual machines. All items in the menu bar can be hidden for the end user. When you provide a preselected virtual machine in the registry the user will be automatically connect to it.

SnapHunter, from Xtravirt, is a free ESX3 Service Console utility which can report back on the Snaphot status of VM's from multiple ESX Servers.  Its features include: identify VM's which contain snapshots, show size, date and name of snapshot, optionally commit snapshots, email reporting and scheduling.

This stunning pack contains 70 individual handcrafted Visio objects to represent VMware VI3 environments.  They can also be snapped together in a modular way to create over 30 more.  There are Presentation and Printing Enhanced objects to suit any type of presentation or documentation.VI3 Visio Action Pack I combines amazing design with great versitility and practicality.  These exquisitely designed objects can be used in numerous ways only limited by your imagination.  There are also some sample templates to help get you going.  This pack is designed to work with Microsoft Visio 2003 and 2007 only.