Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Desktop

VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion – 50% Off, couple days left…

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Just a couple of days left:

You didn’t pay attention during Cyber Monday and forgot to order your copy of VMware Fusion and/or VMware Workstation? Well here’s your chance to pick it up with a 50% discount, keep in mind that there are only a few days left to pick it up with this holiday reduction coupon!

This is a special discount for “Friends and Family” from VMware. In order to receive the reduction coupon just drop me an email on duncan [@] yellow-bricks.com, or send me a Direct Message on Twitter. And if your not on Twitter by now, start checking it out.

Scripts, scripts, scripts… come and get them!

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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.

VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion – 50% Off

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You didn’t pay attention during Cyber Monday and forgot to order your copy of VMware Fusion and/or VMware Workstation? Well here’s your chance to pick it up with a 50% discount.

This is a special discount for “Friends and Family” from VMware. In order to receive the reduction coupon you’ll need to add me on twitter and send me a direct message, or send me a pm on the VMTN Forums.

Contact me, go to the store and pick up Fusion or Workstation, 50% off even your wife would agree that this is money well spent. 😉

Zero-out all vm’s from just one script!

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I’ve been thinking for a while about this. How can I zero-out all my vm’s with just one schedule. I don’t want to manually add a schedule every single time I roll out a VM, I want a central point for administering this.

Today I noticed the blog on using the VIX API. The VIX API can be used for all sorts of things, including copying files to all your VM’s or installing MSI on your VM’s. (Check the blog article for a complete list of supported operations for the VMRUN command.)

If you can install MSI’s then you can also run a simple vbs script:

vmrun -T virtualcenter01 -h https://virtualcenter01.yellow-bricks.local/sdk -u root -p yell0wbricks -gu user -gp userpw runProgramInGuest "[storage1] Windows/Windows.vmx" c:\windows\system32\sdelfrag.vbs

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to test it myself, but it should work just fine. If anyone is able to test it please let me know.

Thanks Carter!

Online compatibility guide

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VMware’s John Troyer revealed on Twitter a couple of hours ago a “search-able hardware compatibility guide” for VMware ESX and VMware View:

This online Hardware Compatibility Guide web application was released on December 10, 2008. To learn more about benefits and usage of this tool, please see “Help on Searching”.

This online Hardware Compatibility Guide replaces the former Hardware Compatibility Guides for systems, I/O devices, and SAN arrays for ESX 3.0 and greater versions, as well as VMware View Client. For compatibility guides of other VMware products or earlier ESX releases and VMware View Client, please use the “Other Documents” tab.

Check it out.

I would love to see some additions, for instance “supported path policy” for Storage. (MRU/Fixed) (The MRU/Fixed is actually there but you have to click on the model and then details before you see it.) But also supported versions of Software Agents for the Service Console would be a real welcome! It’s a big step forward again, and according to John they are still working on it and it will evolve over the next months.