Entries by Eric Sloof

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.