Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Tools

New version of ESX Healthcheck script

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Long before people ever heard about the VI Toolkit the ESX Healthcheck ruled the earth. The ESX Healthcheck script used the esxcfg-* commands in the Service Console and dumped all the info into a html file.

Today a new version of ESX Healthcheck has been released(0.30) after two years of silence. It has taken them a long time but it’s worth it in my opinion. Anders is looking for people that want to help out developing the script, so if you are interested leave Anders a comment on his blog.

Bluebear Kodiak, what’s up?

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I still receive a lot of beta invitation requests while it has been really quiet around Bluebear Kodiak over the last couple of months. (I did a (p)review a while back) I just received an email that a brand new version of the Kodiak beta is about to be released. I already received the Air file but haven’t been able to test it yet. But Matt Miller of Bluebear uploaded a demo video just which shows some of the new features and I must say it really looks slick.

If you are still looking for an invite, I received another 50 and it’s on a first come first serves base. Just click here for an invitation.

(update: the invites don’t seem to be working, I will ask Bluebear to fix it asap.)

Minor Update: RVTools 2.5.1

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It’s just a minor update this time from Rob de Veij: RVTools 2.5.1

Version 2.5.1 (April 15, 2009) Bug fix! Better exception handling on the vDisk and vNetwork tab pages. With the help from Alan Civita this problem is now solved! Thanks again Alan.

Cool tool update: RVTools 2.5

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Rob de Veij has done it again….  a brand new version of RVTools, 2.5!

Here are the new features of this release:

  • The installation file now understands how to upgrade without the need to uninstall the previous version first.
  • The documentation file is now also deployed to the program directory.You can start the Adobe reader from the RVTools “help” menu.
  • New fields on vInfo tab: Network #1 to Network #4
  • New fields on vDisk tab: Level, Shares, SCSI Controller, Unit id and vmdk path name. I’m now using the “config.hardware” information to fill this tab page. In the previous versions of the program I was using the guest information which have a strong dependency with the VMware tools.
  • New fields on vNetwork tab: Adapter type and Mac Address type.I’m now using the “config.hardware” information to fill this tab page. In the previous versions of the program I was using the guest information which have a strong dependency with the VMware tools.
  • New field on vHost tab: Number of VMs per core
  • New tab! vHealth. Displays health check messages.There are 8 possible “Health Check” messages:
    1. VM has a CDROM device connected!
    2. VM has a Floppy device connected!
    3. VM has an active snapshot!
    4. VMware tools are out of date, not running or not installed!
    5. On disk xx is yy% disk space available! The threshold value is zz%
    6. On datastore xx is yy% disk space available! The threshold value is zz%
    7. There are xx VMs active per core on this host. The threshold value is zz%
    8. There are xx VMs active on this datastore. The threshold value is zz%
  • You can set your “own” health check threshold values in the “Health Check Properties” form.

Hytrust, virtualization under control

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A few weeks ago I had a conference call with an unknown company, well at least for me it was still unknown. Eric Chiu contacted me if he, and his team, could demonstrate their new product.

HyTrust‘s product is an appliance. Not only virtual but also physical. But as a virtualization consultant of course the virtual appliance is what interested me the most. The HT appliance ensures host security and authentication compliancy. It’s not only a single point of management for security and authentication but it’s also a single point of authentication. This may sound weird but the HT appliance acts as a authentication/security proxy. This makes for instance configuring active directory based authentication a matter of seconds. Or what about giving a specific group of people the permissions to run a specific command or deny them the permissions to run the command.

I really liked what HyTrust demoed and I think it’s a very useful tool for those who need to enforce security policies / audit hosts and vCenter / extensive logging.

I can try to explain what the HT appliance exactly does, but it’s a lot easier to just check this youtube demo of the appliance:

You can find more info here: