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Monday, November 10. 2008
Jainoxi's SRM with LeftHand VSA
Jainoxi (Joep Piscaer) an active member of the Dutch VMUG also created a home setup of VMware’s Site Recovery Manager. He used the LeftHand Networks Virtual SAN appliance as a storage solution. You can find a complete how to at his new weblog Virtuallifestyle.nl.
As a demo/test I wanted to build a complete SRM setup with both sites being protected. This requires two SRM installations and configurations and two replicated LUN’s. Since I am rather limited in available hardware at the moment, I needed to run every component in a virtual Machine on a single laptop. Luckily, LeftHand Networks has a virtual SAN appliance, which actually is supported by VMware SRM. This way, I can use a supported SAN, and still use ony one laptop. All used software (VMware ESX, vCenter, LeftHand VSA and Microsoft SQL Server Express 2005) are available for free (or as evaluation software).
Check out the new VMware Communities Homepage
Meet online with virtualization experts who use the technology every day. Share your experiences to gain exposure and strengthen your relationship with the community and VMware.
http://communities.vmware.com/home.jspa
Robert Dell'Immagine, Community Director about the new homepage.
It's a single place to find the latest content from VMware Communities, VMworld.com, GoVirtual.org (the academic portal), and VIOPS (the operations portal). A homepage to monitor your activity (be sure you're logged in). A place to find the top community experts This page will replace the Communities tab.
They rolled it out and continue to update and tune it based on your feedback.
Sunday, November 9. 2008
Creating a PowerShell GUI with PrimalForms
In this article I’ll give you a short demo how easy it is to create a PowerShell user interface with the free PrimalForms from Sapien. At the 4th of November Sapien released their first public version of PrimalForms. Jeffery Hicks over at Sapien reports :
I hope you are as excited about the release of PrimalForms as I am. In the past creating a Windows form in PowerShell was a very tedious task and one I rarely used except for the most simplest of forms. No more. The free PrimalForms tool lets me create a very rich Windows form using a WYSIWYG editor. I can export the form to a file, add my PowerShell code and call it a day.
First download PrimalForms at Sapien’s the free tools section. After installing, you just create a wonderful user interface and copy the PowerShell script code to your clipboard.
In this example I created a button and a multiline text field. I copied my code to the PowerGui script editor and added a few lines of my own code. The following two lines are added to the top of the script.
Get-PSSnapin -registered | Add-PSSnapin -passthru -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
$Server = Connect-VIServer -Server 192.168.75.128 -User root -Password vmware
When you walk through the script you’ll see the sections where you can add your own code. In this example I added the following code under the button.
#Provide Custom Code for events specified in PrimalForms.
$button1_OnClick=
{
#TODO: Place custom script here
$textBox1.text = Get-VM
}
And here’s the result.
Replicate Technologies | My RDA Dashboard
One of my weekend projects :-) is the evaluation of Replica Technologies Datacenter Analyzer. Yesterday evening I downloaded the Probe and RDA virtual appliances. This morning I started with importing the 2 virtual appliances into Virtual Center. I had to convert the Probe to a template and configure the RDA server. Everything went pretty straight forward. After a while I started my first analyses. To my great surprise RDA immediately confronted me with some faulty configured VM’s and Switches. Oren Teich is following me on Twitter and posted this tweet.
Have >10 people in the wild trying out RDA, including @scott_lowe, @depping, @esloof, & @matt_carpenter. I'm surprisingly nervous! about 10 hours ago from web.
Let’s wait and see what the others think about this new product, I’m very positive. When you click the thumbnail you will get a screen dump from my RDA Dashboard.
Saturday, November 8. 2008
Enabling the VI Toolkit Extensions
The PowerShell sessions at the VMworld were a big hit, VMware even had to upgrade the session rooms because of the high reservation numbers. Carter Chanklin, Product Manager at VMware's End User Enablement, recently started a new initiative, the VI toolkit extensions.
I'm really excited about the VI Toolkit Extensions as a way for us to make the common problems we see on our forums really easy to do. Just today, a user wanted to find all files on his datastores that contain the word "delta" (which can indicate a snapshot that hasn't been cleaned up properly). As it turns out, with the extensions this is just a one-liner. The art of PowerShell really seems to be the art of the one-liner and with the extensions there are already a lot of great one-liners you can use.
Here’s a short “how to” use the extensions:
Upgrade to Windows PowerShell 2.0 Community Technology Preview (CTP2).
Download Download the VI Toolkit (for Windows) 1.0.
Download the viToolkitExtension.psm1 module at Codeplex and place it somewhere on your local disk (I placed mine in c:\temp).
Start gPowerShell.exe (new in PowerShell 2.0) and paste the following code in the bottom window.
Add-Module "C:\Temp\viToolkitExtensions.psm1"
Get-PSSnapin -registered | Add-PSSnapin -passthru -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
$Server = Connect-VIServer -Server 192.168.75.128 -User root -Password vmware
get-TkeOrphanedVmdk
When you take a look at the contents of the psm1 file there’s an interesting section : Half-baked stuff | New-OpenfilerIscsi.