I’ve been neglecting the site recently due to the day job commitments, so I’m going to make the effort and get a few articles up over the next few days.
I was trawling my igoogle feeds as I do every lunchtime and came across an article by Duncan Epping over at www.yellow-bricks.com on a tool called RVTools written by Rob de Veij.
In essence it’s a .NET 2.0 application that utilises the VI SDK to display information on your virtual machines. You can access ESX 3.x directly or connect to VirtualCenter 2.x and list information on your VMs such as CPU, Memory, disks, nics, cd-rom, floppy drives, snapshots and vmware tools.
I gave it a quick go this lunchtime and am very impressed, it provides a good deal of information and the snapshot, vmware tools and CD-Rom tabs are worth their weight in gold. I’ve always been frustrated when trying to locate which VM is currently connected to an ISO image that I want to move or delete, this tool was perfect for this problem. I found that quite a few of my colleagues aren’t the best at disconnecting CD-Roms and I can include myself in that group as I always forget. Nice to have a tool that simplifies the process.
Click the link to download a copy of V2.1 of RVTools
New Products, VMware
management tools, virtual center
I booked myself the MCTS exam 70-652 for Windows 2008 virtualisation configuration and have been looking around for some decent training material. There’s some good stuff on Microsoft’s website which is free and can be found here. Some other e-learning that’s not to expensive but nothing beats actually using the software and playing with it to understand what’s going on.
So I built myself a Windows Hyper-V Server (The bare metal version) and then went looking for the Management Console add-in. Now you think it would be quite easy to find, I followed the link in the getting started guide for it and it lead me back to downloading Hyper-V Server. After about 10 minutes of searching and a number of broken links from various Microsoft blogs I eventually found what I was looking for. You can download it from the link below, I hope that saved someone else 10 minutes of their life.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952627
Hyper-V, Microsoft
hyper-v, hyper-v server 2008, management tools, windows 2008
Duncan Epping over at Yellow Bricks has done a great review of Bluebear Kodiak which I blogged about last week. The general impression is that it looks nice but is obviously still in Beta and therefore lacks a number of features that would most likely make the final version. Interestingly someone has commented on the article indicating that because Bluebear Kodiak uses the SDK it’s limited to read only operations with the free version of ESX 3.5i. If that is the case that could be bad news for what I saw as one of it’s main uses, centralised management without having to invest in Virtual Center.
You can read the full review by following this link.
New Products
bluebear, ESX management, kodiak, management tools
Just been having a little look at a product called Kodiak by a company called BlueBear
http://www.bluebearllc.net/
It’s a hypervisor-agnostic, cross platform virtualisation management tool which currently supports ESX but they have plans to support Citrix XenServer very soon and Windows Hyper V in due course. The best thing about it is its going to be free.
This could be very good for small businesses looking to get into virtualisation without inccuring the usual costs. a couple of ESX 3.5i servers and BlueBear Kodiak and you’ve got yourself a nice little setup. Graphically it looks stunning and they appear to be suggesting that it will be a lot faster and more fluid than the clunky virtual center interface we’ve all come to know and … well love, only because there is no alternative.
You can see some screenshots at the link below
http://www.bluebearllc.net/kodiak/screenshots/
I’ve put my name down for a beta key as I’d like to look at it a bit more in depth, when / if I get it and have had a look I’ll post back to give some feedback.
New Products
bluebear, ESX management, management tools
