Eric Sloof - NTPRO.NL

VMM offers administrators remote monitoring and support - browser-based management that works on a wide variety of mobile devices.  Developed by virtualization infrastructure expert Andrew Kutz, VMM offers:

- Monitor and manage on the go
- Monitor multiple host and VM performance stats (CPU, Memory)
- Understand datacenter health Mobile

- Monitor Host and VM Performance Statistics (CPU, Memory)
- Control VMs and Take Action on the Go (start, stop, pause, reset, disable network)
- Optimized for Mobile Devices (Apple iPhone, Blackberry, Google Android and Windows Mobile Devices)

The VMM beta is available to the entire VI admin universe today. If you’re willing to provide Hyper9 with a little feedback, send me an e-mail. The first 15 responders will get 50% off pricing on the already low pricing, automatic entry into Win a Mobile Device contest and a limited edition Hyper9 T-shirt.

In this economy, who wouldn’t like to win a free trip to VMworld 2009 in San Francisco? Tell Veeam why you love them and get a chance to win a free full pass to VMworld 2009 or Flip video camera!

How to participate

Between now and June 15,

Create a video about any Veeam product you love. See Contest Rules for details. Send a link to your video at video@veeam.com

This is a demo video of the $99.95 MicroClient TC. The MicroClient TC is a 300 Mhz ARM 9 based thin client that comes with the complete Quick RDP software that automatically boots into a Windows Terminal Session on a Windows 2003 or 2008 server. It can also be used with Windows XP hosted on a VMware server. Wouldn’t it be great if the VMware View Client is supported on this device?

The PowerShell Talk is the official site of “Managing Virtual Infrastructures with PowerShell”. A talk and presentation given by Cody Bunch and Patrick Ancillotti at the 2009 Virtualization Congress. This site contains all code and slides, as well as videos of the demos, and ongoing information and resources covered in the presentation. Slide 29 is referring to The VMware Blue Screen Detector and Ivo's Powershell Healthcheck script.

Managing VMware Infrastructure with Windows PowerShell: TFM is here! Hal's much-anticipated VMware is book is ready, just in time for VMware's release of their new version!  In "Managing VMware Infrastructure with Windows PowerShell," you will learn how to perform everything from simple ad-hoc reporting at the command-line ("are any of my virtual machines powered off?") to complex scripts to automate a massive deployment of hundreds of virtual machines. Simple, yet powerful; concise, yet robust; you will enjoy using this new language to solve your old problems using less code than you thought possible.

Check out Becoming a PowerCLI expert just got easier and cheaper… for a 10% discount.

How to reduce your storage footprint with VMware vSphere 4 and EMC Storage.

Duncan Epping became one of the first VMware Certified Design Experts, congrats to Duncan.

The news was already published on twitter by my friend @stevie_chambers anyway so half of you already know… During the VMware vSummit award dinner I was awarded the VCDX certification. I’m officially a VCDX and I’m number 007! I’m really excited about this as you can imagine!

That’s what I want to know, I’ve downloaded Microsoft’s newest version of Windows 2008, and installed it in a vSphere virtual machine. This virtual machine contains 4 virtual CPU’s and 4 gigabytes of memory.

Windows Server 2008 R2 also holds the much-anticipated update to Microsoft’s virtualization technology, Hyper-V™. The new Hyper-V™ was designed to augment both existing virtual machine management as well as to address specific IT challenges, especially around server migration. Hyper-V™ is an enabling technology for one of Windows Server 2008 R2’s marquee features, Live Migration. With Hyper-V version 1.0, Windows Server 2008 was capable of Quick Migration, which could move VMs between physical hosts with only a few seconds of down-time. Still, those few seconds were enough to cause difficulties in certain scenarios, especially those including client connections to VM-hosted servers. With Live Migration, moves between physical targets happen in milliseconds, which means migration operations become invisible to connected users.

One problem, I haven’t figured out yet how to install the VMware tools.

Update from fellow vExpert Jase McCarty : Howto: Install VMware Tools on Windows 2008 Server Core

VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage

This hands-on training course explores installation, configuration, and management of VMware® vSphere™, which consists of VMware ESXi/ESX™ and VMware vCenter™ Server. Upon completion of this course, you can take the examination to become a VMware Certified Professional. The course is based on ESXi 4.0, ESX 4.0, and vCenter Server 4.0.

The Windows 7 Release Candidate is broadly available for download today. You don't need to rush to get the RC. The RC will be available at least through July 2009 and Microsoft is not limiting the number of product keys, so you have plenty of time. So.... let’s get it right away. Here are the options I’ve chosen:

• The Vista guest operating system.
• I added a virtual network adaptor (VMXNET 3)
• Memory 4 Gigabyte
• 2 CPU’s
• Upgraded the virtual VGA card to 128 MB for the Media Player
• VMware tools install went smooth

I recently posted an article about capturing screenshots of virtual machines. The PowerShell code is based on VMware’s PowerCLI and the VI Toolkit Extensions. The user interface was created with Sapien’s free PrimalForms. I received a lot of comments asking me if this script could be of any practical use in a production environment, and I must admit I had some thoughts about it too. This morning I received a real cool PowerShell script from Carter Shanklin, VMware’s Product Manager, End User Enablement. His script is able to run a screenshot through OCR and extract anything interesting from it.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) extracts text and layout information from document images. With the help of Microsoft Office Document Imaging Library (MODI), which is contained in the Office 2003 and 2007 package, you can easily integrate OCR functionality into your own applications. In combination with the MODI Document Viewer control, you will have complete OCR support with only a few lines of code.

In the image you see the "Virtual Machine Blue Screen Detector" in action, first it captures a screenshot of a virtual machine. Secondly it uses the Toolkit Extensions to copy it to the local drive. When the PNG image is saved on the local drive, it’s converted to TIFF. The TIFF image will be used to extract the text using OCR.

Now, how can we create a blue screen? We could use this utility, “StartBlueScreen.exe” just as it sounds, allows you to crash the Windows operating system by initiating a Blue Screen of Death according to 5 parameters that you specify from command-line. StartBlueScreen.exe loads a very small device driver named NirSoftBlueScreenDriver.sys that calls the crash API function of Windows Kernel (KeBugCheckEx) with the 5 crash parameters that you specify in the command-line.

You can get your copy of the Virtual Machine Blue Screen Detector here.

Update : Luc Dekens (@LucD22) Great script, nice how it brings different features together. Now could you make it read out the BSOD ? Sure Luc, here you go.

Vizioncore's vControl is a multi-hypervisor virtual machine (VM) management tool that provides self-service provisioning, multi-VM control and task-based automation to reduce VM administration costs and improve consistency. vControl lets VM consumers build and deploy VMs for themselves, while providing administrators and datacenter managers with a single interface for task-based administration of VMs. Supporting VMware ESX/ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and Sun Solaris Zones, and featuring out-of-the-box automation workflows, vControl offers users the power to dramatically reduce time wasted on unnecessary repetitive tasks across multiple platforms and to help reduce common administrative errors.

Key features of vControl include:

• Self-Service Provisioning
• Multi-VM Control
• Task Automation
• Task-Based High Availability (HA)
• Virtual Infrastructure Discovery