Posted by Brian on Mar 22, 2010 in Certification, VMware | 0 comments
If you are a VCDX holder there is now a place on VMware.com to let people verify your certification. This should help weed out the people who might by lying about their status. This will go a long way to keeping this elite Certification at the forefront of Virtualization. You can see some summaries of the more widely known holders and a list of other VCDX’s on VMware’s site here.
Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.
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Posted by Brian on Mar 21, 2010 in Labs, Tools, VMware | 0 comments
I’ve been taking some time when it’s available to play with some of the great tools available from the VMware Labs site that launched recently. The Labs site offers tools developed by talented people that are not yet ready for general release but are very good programs. The latest one that I tried was the VMware Guest Console. Not knowing what it was going to be since there are a few others like this from 3rd party developers already.
The VGC as it’s also known has been a pleasant surprise. It’s way more than just a remote control application. I have broken down some of the biggest features below along with screen shots. Some of my favorite features so far are the ability to open a putty session to the ESX host, Open the VM console or RDP session to the VM from the application. You can also use file explorer to see the local drives on the VM and Task Manager of the VM to see what processes are running. You can download the VGC application here.
Once you have connected to a ESX host or vCenter server you will get many of the standard options for a host or virtual machine. You work with snapshots of a Virtual Machine such as Create, Go To or Remove a Snapshot. There are also the standard VMware power related tools to allow for power on/off, reset and suspend of a Virtual Machine. You also have the option to upgrade the tools in the guest machine.
Lets take a look at the guest console options. You have a few options related to the Terminal and Console buttons depending on if you are selecting a Host or Guest machine. You can see from the picture below that if you choose the console selection from menu while selecting a Guest machine you will get the VM console of that guest. From there you can use the Device menu to connect to a Floppy or CD image and see details about the network adapters. Along the bottom of the screen you also have icons giving you feed back about what devices are connected to this guest machine. You can launch a RDP session by clicking the Terminal button while selecting a Windows guest machine.
Next up would be the ability to look into the Guest machine and work with Task Manager. Once you have authenticated with the Guest machine you will be able to access the Task Manager to see and interact with the process running on the machine. For this I used a Windows guest machine and was able to End a process or End a similar process by right clicking on an item. If you use the Applications menu from the menu at the top you can also select the “New Task” selection to execute a application in the Guest Machine. There is also an option to Save Processes Details which will export to a .CSV file. The file will give you a listing of the processes running at the time of the capture into a file.
Next up would be the File Explorer section. From this section you will be able to browse the local drives of the Guest Machine much like using Windows Explorer. From here you can choose to download a file or folder and also be able to upload files to the Guest. This could be very handy in uploading something that you need to while connected to the console.
There are a few other basic features of the application that are very similar to working with guests and the host from the vSphere client or vCenter server so I did not cover them here. One nice thing was the ability to click on a host then the Virtual Machine tab and you get the following view that shows things like Guest name, IP Address, Uptime, OS Type, Authenticated user and some basic virtual hardware information.
So if any of these features sound appealing to you I would highly suggest that you give the VGC a test run and see how it might help you in your daily work. Remember you can download it from the VMware Labs.
Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.
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Posted by Brian on Mar 19, 2010 in Troubleshooting, VMware | 0 comments
I hope that most of you have been using or at least tried this script at some point. The script was created by William Lam and is now more user customizable. There is a big list of updates and improvments to this version a few are listed below. To see an example of what the report looks like head over here. The report gives you a ton of information on the status of your Hosts and Virtual Machine status. Be sure to thank William for such a great product and working hard to update it, you can follow William on twitter at @lamw. To download the script head over to VMware communities here.
- New Report is now completely modular in which categories to display via a configuration file
- New Ability to specify specific ESX/ESXi host to query
- New Ability to specify specific Virtual Mchines to query
- New vCenter HA Advanced Runtime information
- New vCenter HA Configuration (primary/secondary and node states)
- New vCenter HA Advanced Configurations
- New vCenter DRS Advanced Runtime information
- New ESX/ESXi IP/HOSTNAME of vCenter Management IP
- New ESX/ESXi Newly improved Hardware and System Health Stuats information
- New ESX/ESXi Advanced Configurations
- New ESX/ESXi NUMA information
- New VM UUID,Bootime,Resource Statistics, Fault Tolerance, Thin provisioned and NPIV information
Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.
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Posted by Brian on Mar 18, 2010 in Hyper-V, Microsoft | 0 comments
In typical Microsoft fashion they are changing their stance on a very popular feature that Hyper-V could not support yet. Dynamic memory or memory over commit will be coming soon to Hyper-V. You can read the MS release here. It talks about the requests from clients to be able to achieve higher density of VM’s on servers.
- Use physical memory as efficiently and dynamically as possible without impacting performance. Customers investing in virtualization hosts are purchasing systems with larger memory configurations (32 GB, 64 GB, 128 GB and more) and want to fully utilize this system asset. At the same time, they’re purchasing this memory to provide superior performance and to avoid paging.
- Provide consistent performance and scalability. One frequent comment from virtualization users is that they don’t want a feature with a performance cliff or inconsistent, variable performance. That’s makes it more difficult to manage and increases TCO.
Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.
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Posted by Brian on Mar 17, 2010 in ThinApp, VMware | 0 comments
With the release of ThinApp 4.5 the wishes of many VMware lovers have been answered. This update provides support for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. With this release VMware is providing a Relink utility that will allow you to update existing packages to be able to run on Windows 7. As always VMware recommends that you capture your application on the oldest OS that you plan on using, for many with will be Windows XP.
Relink can be run against existing ThinApp packages in either .exe or .msi format and automatically upgrades them use the latest and greatest version of the ThinApp runtime and package format. Relink accepts wildcard filenames and can work in recursive mode to upgrade all packages located under some parent directory. Relink is very handy if you have packages without associated projects and you want to upgrade them to support Windows 7.
Other new features include faster installing .msi files, support for .msi files as large as 2 GB and the ability to use the system swap file to reduce disk I/O. You can read up on all the rest of the details on the ThinApp Blog.
Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.
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