Big Brother Really Is Watching

VMware ESX4 and the new vCenter server both offer a lot of new SDK properties and methods. One of the new methods is CreateScreenshot_Task which is part of the ManagedObjectReference:VirtualMachine. This method creates a screenshot of the virtual machine console, the image is saved as a portable network graphics (.png) file in the virtual machine folder. This features is normally used by HA Virtual Machine Monitoring. The Virtual Machine Monitoring feature uses the heartbeat information that VMware Tools captures as a proxy for guest operating system availability. This allows VMware HA automatically to reset or restart individual virtual machines that have lost their ability to heartbeat. Before resetting or restarting the Virtual Machine the vCenter server creates a snapshot of a possible BSOD. I created a PowerShell script which initiates and copies the screenshots of 9 Virtual Machines. The screenshots are presented in a user interface constructed with Sapien's free PrimalForms. The PowerShell code is still rough and can be improved dramatically.

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Cool stuff Eric, these new features are really useful!

#1 Duncan (Homepage) on 2009-05-04 15:04 (Reply)

Very nice and a terrific example of a WinForm PowerShell script. I can tell from your code you're running an early version of Primalforms. There should be an update you can download that fixes a few bugs and might add a few controls.

#2 Jeffery Hicks on 2009-05-04 15:59 (Reply)

Thanks for the heads up Jeffery, I added a link to http://www.primaltools.com

#2.1 Eric Sloof on 2009-05-04 16:14 (Reply)

Very nice and useful script Eric!

#3 Hany Michael (Homepage) on 2009-05-04 16:15 (Reply)

Sincerely great work here, however, I'm trying to think of how/where this can be useful. Anyone care to add some in the trenches scenarios? Jas

#4 Jason Boche (Homepage) on 2009-05-04 17:15 (Reply)

One of my customers had a power today, actually the 3d in the last 4 weeks.. Due to this power outage their SAN had a failure.. Causing the VM's to loose their disks (do you already see the domino effect?) End result was that there were about 100 VM's indicating that the OS could not be found.. The way to resolve this was a reset of the VM. Therefore I'm looking at powerCLI options to scan for VM's with this error and then reset or report them.

#4.1 Ray (Homepage) on 2010-12-08 15:36 (Reply)

Thanks for this tip. But how can we use this powershell in our poduction farm? I think that this tools could be very great to use, but how can we use that? Thanks

#5 Loga on 2009-05-07 09:39 (Reply)

Hi Eric, it's a really nice tool

BTW i just found today that it's possible on ESX 3.5 with the vmrun command of the VIX API (captureScreen option)

#6 NiTRo (Homepage) on 2009-05-08 18:30 (Reply)

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NTPRO.NL - Eric Sloof

Monday, 4 May 2009

Big Brother Really Is Watching

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