Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vcenter

VMware vCenter Mobile Access & Virtual Appliances

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VMware just announced that there’s a new technology preview coming up, vCenter Mobile Access. For a demo/preview go to the VMTN Blog section: vCenter Mobile Access.

Introducing VMware vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA).  vCMA allows you to monitor and manage VMware Infrastructure from your mobile phone with an interface that is optimized for such devices. Specifically, it allows you to:

  • Search for virtual machines in your data center
  • Migrate virtual machines from one host to another using vMotion
  • Execute recovery plans using VMware Site Recovery Manager
  • Access Scheduled Tasks, Alarms and Events
  • And much more…

vCMA will be delivered as a Virtual Appliance which makes installing a matter of minutes. Talking about Virtual Appliances, VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace has been completely overhauled. There’s a complete “what’s new” section to be found here, be sure to look into it and start exploring the endless posibilities of this virtual world. I personally use it to explore new Operating Systems and virtual router / firewall appliances!

Minor Update: RVTools 2.4.1

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Rob de Veij just uploaded a minor update of RVTools, version 2.4.1. Make sure you download it and replace the 2.4 version I blogged about just three days ago.

The new filter throws an exception when there are ESX hosts which do not belong to any cluster. With the help from Mario Vinet this problem is now solved! Thanks again Mario.

Cool tool update: RVTools 2.4

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Another update again by Rob de Veij, RVTools 2.4. This release includes a new feature, filtering. Rob also revealed that the upcoming version will contain health checks. Here are the changes:

Version 2.4 (March 2009)

  • On the vDatastore tab you can now see which hosts are connected to the datastore.
  • The data on the vInfo, vCpu, vMemory, vDisk, vFloppy, vCD, vSnapshot and vTools tab pages can now be filtered.

Now head over to Rob’s website and download the new version!

Powershell and importing .CSV files

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I’ve been playing around with powershell yesterday. We needed to create over 100 VM’s and there’s no point in doing that all by hand. The customer provided us with a .csv file that contained specific info on these VM’s. It took me a while to figure out how to read the info.csv file and how to actually use it. But as always it’s actually fairly simple and that’s why I decided to write it down:

Before we even start, the CSV should be formatted as follows:

vmname,cluster
VM001,HA-DRS-Yellow-Bricks

Read the complete csv file into a variable:

$csv_info = Import-Csv c:\scripts\info.csv

For every line in the csv variable do something:

foreach ($line in $csv_info) {
write-host " This is virtual machine $($line.vmname) on cluster $($line.cluster)"
}

This line would print something like this:

This is virtual machine VM001 on cluster HA-DRS-Yellow-Bricks

As you noticed in the example above we used $line.vmname to get the name of the VM printed and $line.cluster for the cluster name, cool huh! BTW, Alan’s quick reference guide really helped me out!

VMware VI3 Implementation and Administration by Eric Siebert

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vI just finished reading a brand new book titled “VMware VI3 Implementation and Administration” by Eric Siebert. I was pleasantly surprised by the in depth information that the book contains. The book is based on ESX(i) /vCenter 3.5 U3 and discusses every aspect of implementing and administering your virtual environment including troubleshooting, installation, backup and monitoring.  What ATDG is for 3.0.x this book will be for 3.5 in my opinion!

Eric’s writing style made the book an easy read and the enormous amount of examples, tips and hints make this book a must have for the toolkit of every VI Admin! In other words, pre-order it now!