If anyone needs an invite, Bluebear gave me 50 again.. So just drop me an email, or leave a comment with your email and I’ll make sure you’ll be able to beta test this new version!

I don’t have any invites left… Sorry, you’ll guys need to help eachother out!

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…

Kodiak 0.0.2 will be out in a few hours! I’m currently preparing my VM’s to check it out! And I will post a couple of screenshots tonight! For those that never heard of Kodiak(by Bluebear) before, read this blog entry, in short it’s a cross platform application with which you will be able to manage multiple hypervisors and management applications! The new features look promising!

Taken from the release notes:

New functionality:
We have added support for configuring existing virtual machines. All the expected functions are available. Configuration for a Virtual Machine is accessible via the configure button attached to a given VM object on the screen (Inspector Panels / Map)

Configuration of all standard resources is available, e.g. Memory Size, CPU allocation/shares, virtual disks, virtual NICs, and removable devices.

Usage Notes

1. Virtual disks are of the “preallocated/thick” type, support for all disk types will be available in the next release.
2. ‘Host-device-backed’ virtual devices (e.g. floppy/cdrom/raw) are not supported, but will be available in a future release.
3. ‘Remote-backed’ virtual devices (e.g. floppy/cdrom/ISO images on the client) are not supported, but will be available in a future release.
4. VMs must be powered off for configuration. While it is possible to reconfigure a running VM, it may result in a host fault that will cause your changes to be discarded.
5. If you make changes to a VM that you don’t want to commit, simply close the configure window and the changes will be discarded, (or hit the discard button).
6. Support for VM Creation will be available in the next release.

Known Issues

• Untrusted certificates on windows may cause an authorization dialog to continually appear. The certificate must be added to the local store, please see this page for a work-around.

• License keycodes are case sensitive, please ensure you enter them exactly.

• VirtualCenter is not yet fully supported. While it might work, functionality is not guaranteed to give predictable results. We are currently adapting Kodiak’s back-end data model to more effectively handle VirtualCenter’s data structures.

Here you go, the new and improved version of RVTools. A while back Rob de Veij wrote an app called RVTools, what it did basically was check the VMware Tools version and status of each VM in a datacenter and report this in a nice GUI.

Rob probably had some spare time on his hands cause he added a lot of usefull tabs to his tool!

 

VM’s

The “VM’s” tab displays for each virtual machine the power state, Boot Time, number of cpu’s, cpu reservation, amount of memory, memory reservation, number of nics, configuration path, notes, ESX host name and operating system name.

Disk

The “Disk” tab displays for each virtual machine the virtual disks, total disk capacity, total free disk capacity, percentage free disk capacity, notes, ESX host name and operating system name.

Network

The “Network” tab displays for each virtual machine the virtual nics, powerstate, id, network name, connected value, Mac Address, IP Address, notes, ESX host name and operating system name.

CD

The “CD” tab displays for each virtual machine CD-Rom information like VM powerstate, label, connected value, startup value, summary, notes, ESX host name and operating system name. It’s possible to disconnect the CD-Rom from this screen.

Floppy

The “Floppy” tab displays for each virtual machine the floppy information like VM powerstate, label, connected value, startup value, summary, notes, ESX host name and operating system name. It’s possible to disconnect the Floppy from this screen.

VM Tools

Interacting with VirtualCenter 2.x or ESX 3.x, RVTools is able to list the current version of the VMware Tools installed inside each virtual machine. and update them to the latest version. Within the RVTools GUI, you can select and upgrade multiple hosts by clicking “Upgrade VMware Tools”. Within VirtualCenter, you’ll see an Upgrade VMware Tools task for each VM selected.

So visit Rob’s website and download this tool it’s definitely worth it, and provide Rob with feedback so he can make this tools even better.

I will start with the first few request:

1. Memory Limit of VM would be nice to know.
2. Snapshot
3. Warning levels for VM’s with for instance connected CD’s, Snapshots, Memory Limit lower than assigned Memory, Freedisk space below 10% etc….

There’s a new blog in town and it’s called VCritical! The blog is by Eric Gray a VMware employee and he describes his jobrole as follows: “virtualization management in general, VMware as well as competitors”.

Anyway, he’s been at it for about a month and posted some cool blogs already, so add him to your favorites or RSS reader. Start with reading the following posts:

• iSCSI configuration: VMware ESXi vs. Microsoft Hyper-V
• Hey boss, where do you want these virtual machines?

As most of you know I work for VMware which means I receive a huge amount of email and documents with excellent technical info. Some I can’t blog about but some I can. Last week I received this VMware HA implementations notes document by Seva Semouchin. Seva is a Technical Account Manager based in Germany!

This document deals about VMware HA clusters and all the advanced options you have with the use cases for these options. And that’s what makes this document very useful, the use cases! So everyone dealing with HA clusters should definitely read this document. Thanks Seva for letting me distribute it, and thanks for a great document!

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.6.2 so if you notice anything weird going on here… let me know.