Over the past few weeks, a number of VMware-related tools have been released. All of these tools are third-party tools written by avid VMware fans or ISVs, and as far as I am aware all of these tools are available at no cost.
- First up is VMX Extras, a tool for editing the VMX files used by VMware Fusion (VMware’s Mac OS X product). While you certainly can edit these files with a text editor (and I’m sure many of you have in the past), this makes it a bit easier. In addition, there are some preconfigured options available as well for stuff like a BIOS delay (to make accessing the BIOS of a VM easier), enabling paravirt-ops (for guests that support it, currently only Ubuntu 7.0.4 and derivatives), and some others.
- Next is VCplus, a tool released by Richard Garsthagen of run-virtual.com. Richard has a number of tools available on his site, including VMotion Info (for helping to determine CPU compatibility for VMotion), VM Time (for checking for time differences between guest and host), and the Virtual MAC Tool (for assigning fixed MAC addresses to ESX/VirtualCenter guests). VCplus extends the functionality of VirtualCenter to include information such as disk usage inside the VM and if a VM has a snapshot (and if so, the size of the snapshot disk), and allows you to sync the DNS name of the VM to the display name. More functionality is planned, so this is one to keep your eyes on.
- Russian company Veeam has been pushing out the VMware-related utilities, and the latest is one called EsxDiag. I was unable to find a link to the product on Veeam’s website; I was alerted to EsxDiag via virtualization.info and there is a link there to the application download.
- Eric Sloof has released a beta version of his VMware MKS Client, which is a remote console application for VMs. I haven’t tried this one yet, but it sounds like it might be handy.
I’d love to hear feedback from anyone actually using some of these tools already in their environments. I have a few customers who could really use some of the functionality offered by some of these tools, but wouldn’t want to recommend them until I get some feedback on real-world usage.
Tags: Virtualization, VMware
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I spend more time doings implementations and migrations then I do operations on VMware and I can’t live without ITQ VLan and Portgroup Manager (http://www.run-virtual.com/?page_id=160). Certainly beats setting up (literally hundreds) of portgroups by hand!
Also has the ability to send SSH commands to all hosts too which I use a lot for validation of configurations (i.e. check all hosts have the same settings).
Dave
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For the past year or so we’ve been using VMware Server for server sandboxing and simplified management. We’ve got a battery of PowerShell scripts that handle the business of generating VMs (MAC assignment, image deployment, etc). Just recently we added VirtualCenter 1.4 to the system, which will probably render half our scripts redundant.
A few months ago we decided to set up a small VM computing cloud for doing automated UI tests, and VirtualCloud (http://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualcloud) is the result. It’s not yet finished, and probably won’t move into Beta for another week or two (we’re a small company so I’m currently the only one working on it) but it will hopefully become a smaller-scale, low-cost alternative to VMware Virtual Labs.
The .NET-to-VIM-service component is almost complete and I should have most of the remaining bugs worked out by the end of the week.Alex,
Bluewire Technologies -
Alex,
Sounds interesting–keep me posted on the progress. Thanks!
BTW, you can reach me via e-mail using scott dot lowe at scottlowe dot org.
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I downloaded MKS client and trying to use it but it is in black blank screen. I am looking for a VI client that would be helpful.
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VMware’s virtualization technology has become the industry standard for virtualization in the enterprise. More and more people are writing software based on the SDK and created a lot of little handy tools. On the other side there are some larger company’s who also created all kinds of applications to support VMware ESX server and Virtual Center. The vm4all.com website provides a complete list of all these tools and applications.
Regards,
Eric Sloof
Ps. Zaid, if I can help you please let me know.
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Great tools. I am going to install VCPlus and check it out tonight. I’ll post my findings. I’d be very interested in hearing more about what others are doing with ESX guest backups. I have been using ESX Ranger from visioncore but just today installed esXpress.
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I recently attended a 5 day extreme boot camp with LiveAmmo. It was fantastic, the instructor was very knowledgeable and thorough. I definitely recommend this to anyone interested in obtaining VMware capability. Here is the link http://virtualization.liveammo.com
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