I was just pointed out to this amazing topic on the VMTN Forums by William Lam and Tuan Duong. These guys created a whole bunch of scripts and decided to share them with the rest of the world:
My colleague (Tuan Duong) and I (William Lam) have been working on a virtualization/VDI deployment project over the last six months. The result of this work is a set of scripts that assist in provisioning and managing the server and lab environment for the Residential Networking Services (ResNet) at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
We took the approach of developing scripts that would be free in nature to support a variety of offerings that currently exist in the enterprise space. One such tool that we would like to share with the VMware community is our Linked Clones script that was developed at the beginning of the summer of 2008. This script functions similarly to the View Composer component in the recent release of VMware View 3 but with relatively relaxed requirements.
A description and more details of the Linked Clones script can be found at:
http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9020
Another script that complements the Linked Clone’s script is our custom management script “*my-vmware-cmd*” which can be found at:
http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9061
An example of our implementation of these scripts can be found at:
http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9201
We also have other scripts and resources that have been consolidated onto a webpage and would like to share it:
http://www.engineering.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/
We hope that the community finds some of these scripts to be useful in aiding VI administrators to manage their virtual infrastructure and look forward to any feedback that is provided.
Thanks
William lamw and Tuan tlduong
Check these scripts out if you’re looking for a linked clone solution on a non View Composer environment. Their website also contains a bunch of scripts, tips and tricks. One that really stands out is the RDM script, believe me this is a must have for your toolkit:
Download: rdm.sh – 11/03/08
Compatiable with: ESX 3.5+ and ESXi
This script is used to locate all virtual machines that have an RDM mapping and provides the VMs Name, Hard Disk label shown on the VIC/VC, Datastore, LUN UUID, HBA/LUN, Compatibility Mode (Phys/Virt), DiskMode and Capacity.