Earlier today the crack team over at VMware Labs released a new Fling or app. The Labs team creates these pet projects and releases them to the community to offer creative solutions for admins to use.

VMware Labs presents PyvCO – Python bindings for VMware Orchestrator.

This module helps in integration of vCO in a Python environment as well as a useful testing environment. Some of the uses are:

• Communicate with vSphere 4.1 vCO using SOAP interface.
• Provide a consistent API for synchronous and asynchronous applications (Twisted is supported)
• Create, delete a file or a directory in guest
• Write tests targeting vCO.
• Provide enough information to extend vmw.vco in such a way that above use cases remain consistent.

Be one of the first one to try, rate and comment – http://labs.vmware.com/flings/pyvco

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status for 2012 & 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design

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Looks like the engineers at VMware are not slowing down with the cool toys they keep releasing via VMware Labs. These are usually side projects for them that are very helpful to the community. This one I can see a lot of possibilities for. The ability to copy files to and from a VM guest could save time. Also being able to run scripts and affected processes from outside the VM.

vCenter Orchestrator(vCO) supports extended functionality using plug-ins. This VIX plug-in allows users to automate virtual machine operations within guest operating systems as vCO Javascript objects and methods to create workflows to run operations within a Windows/Linux Guest. Some of the sample workflow provide the following functionality:

• Check for a file or a directory in guest
• Copy file from guest to vCO and from vCO to guest
• Create, delete a file or a directory in guest
• List directory content
• List, stop processes in guest
• Run a program or script in guest

You can download it from the following link – http://labs.vmware.com/flings/vix-vco .

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status for 2012 & 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design

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The VGC is probably my personal favorite from VMware Labs so far. It is a simple but powerful utility with some cool features you don’t get with the standard vSphere client.  I wrote about VMware guest console in the past covering its basic features that you can read here. Listed below are the latest features to be added or updated to this little Gem. You can have a look at VMware labs and download VGC for yourself here.

1. Performance & Scalability -
   1. VM retrieval is enhanced to discover VMs in much lesser time.
   2. VGC can manage up to 315 Powered On VMs on all connected servers. Number of VMs retrieved from a server will be limited once this limit is reached.
2. Support for 64 bit Windows has been added.
3. Remote Console feature has been extended to work with VMs hosted on vCenter.
4. Workspace files created with this version of VGC will be encrypted. However, workspace files created using earlier versions are not compatible with this release.
5. VM Templates are differentiated from regular VMs.
6. Workspace files can now be loaded in VGC by double clicking the .vgc files.

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status for 2012 & 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design

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The latest release from the VMware Labs team is Ops panel. It’s a pretty simple idea that adds a list of virtual machines located on a host and provides some basic power related functions. You can access this from the default web page of the ESX host. You can see a short video on this release on the Labs site.

The Operations Panel is a script tool, which runs on the client browser and extends the default ESX server web page with a short list of all available virtual machines. It gives the user the ability to perform simple power operations (start, stop, suspend, resume). Easily accessible user interface for some of the most common operations on an ESX host, available directly from the ESX home page.

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status for 2012 & 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design

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