Freeware

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.

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.

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.

VP's example of an application to allow you to revert multiple snapshots from an ESX host at the same time + source code. Just Added Version 2 - a little effort in this version + some error checking VMware Snapshot reverter 2.

Created by Qui Hong (The Developer), Chris Huss and Mike Laverick (Value-add and Documentation). Ultimate-P2V (fix-vmscsi) is a free plug-in that allows you to clone a physical machine to virtual machine - and perform the neccessary “system reconfiguration� required to make it bootable. Without this tool or a commerical P2V tool the virtual machine would just give a “blue screen of death�

The current build of the Ultimate Deployment Appliance adds VMWare ESX deployment to the OS-list. Furthermore A few live CD's are added (Damn Small Linux, Recovery Is Possible, GParted) and lots of other small features.  Mike Laverick has helped with the development of a kickstart builder for VMWare 3.0.x and has suggested some other useful features (like binding a template to a MAC address, a local repository for ISO files, based on a SCSI disk, VMWare Tools).

vdf+ - VMware ESX Server df utility based on vdf VMWare© utility. It's a perl script procedure to show mounted device including VMFS formatted device.