Part 2: Bluebear’s Kodiak, what’s all the fuss about…

Posted by Duncan Epping in October 20th, 2008

Three weeks ago i wrote an article on Bluebear’s Kodiak. I guess the main conclusion was “great potential, not enough working features at the moment”.

Well, Bluebear’s engineers have been busy lately and added some additional features as you probably read in my previous post. The key message in that post clearly is “Configuration of all standard VM resources is available, e.g. Memory Size, CPU allocation/shares, virtual disks, virtual NICs, and removable devices”. In other words, this is the beginning… If they keep adding features in this pace then they probably have an alternative to VirtualCenter within 6 to 12 months.

So most of you probably want to see some screenshots of what to expect from the new version, I created screenshots of the VM config screens and one of the console screen with a new menu:

I don’t have any invites left, sorry about that…

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1. Hany said,

October 20th, 2008 at 23:20

Sweet!
this is going to rock and roll very soon i guess… the graphics looks stuning by the way!
Any one has any invites please share one with me ( hramzy {AT} gmail.com, i can’t wait to see this monitoring my VI3 platform !

thanks a lot

2. TJ said,

October 20th, 2008 at 23:32

I am still having problems with certificates. I’ve tried installing the certs for my VCs (2) multiple times and still have that popping up. How did you manage to get around that?

Hany, you should have just received an invite.

3. TJ said,

October 20th, 2008 at 23:35

Nevermind, it looks like you’re using Linux (Ubuntu I’m guessing?). Windows XP still pops up the cert issues. I’ll give Linux a try.

4. C Stewart said,

October 20th, 2008 at 23:37

I was also still having problems with the certificates in windows and following a lot of work refreshing SSL certificates, etc I ended up giving up. Duncan appears to be using Ubuntu which if I remember correctly was how he got round the issue.

I tell you what demand has been massive for the bluebear invites, even now people are still asking me if i have any left. This will be huge when they finally get it finished off, so far it’s looking really sweet.

Keep up the good work you crazy bears!!

5. Matthew Reed said,

October 20th, 2008 at 23:51

Can someone please send me an invite or beta of this software as I have been bugging BlueBear for months now.

6. Dictator Bear said,

October 20th, 2008 at 23:55

TJ – we have a newly improved work-around for the certificate bug in AIR and it’s been verified for both XP and Vista

Basically, when installing your self-signed certificates, make sure to manually select the ‘Trusted Root Certification Authorities’ store.

Click my title to see the full step-by-step tutorial in our support wiki

7. Len Jacobs said,

October 21st, 2008 at 01:17

If there are additional beta licenses, I too am interested in an invite:
ljacobs mandala-designs.com

8. Gabrie van Zanten said,

October 21st, 2008 at 08:57

About the certificates… when you installed ESX next next finish, then your esx has the localhost.localdomain in its certificates. You will never get that to work !!! Neither with BlueBear’s work around of importing the cert as cert-authority.

You will have to change your certs on the ESX host.

9. C Stewart said,

October 21st, 2008 at 13:59

Gabrie is perfectly correct. I wrote about this when I was working on getting bluebear working previously. Click on my title to go to the article, it contains full instructions on how to regenerate SSL certificates on an ESX 3.5i server and also contains a link that BlueBear kindly sent me when I was having certificate issues.

10. C Stewart said,

October 21st, 2008 at 14:10

Here’s one that might catch a lot of people out on the windows certificate issue. You must connect through bluebear kodiak with the FQDN of the server as that’s what the certificate relates to, the shortname cannot be used.

11. C Stewart said,

October 21st, 2008 at 14:12