Eric Sloof

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

Continue reading "The launch of vControl" »

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.

 

 

Improved large-scale management is possible with vCenter Server since it is designed from the ground up to handle the largest IT environments. A single instance of vCenter Server 4.0 manages up to 300 hosts and 3000 virtual machines and with Linked Mode you can manage up to 1,000 hosts and 10,000 virtual machines across 10 vCenter Server instances. VMware HA and DRS clusters can support up to 32 hosts. All vCenter Server instances in a linked‐mode group can access a common view of the global data. The vSphere Client connects to other vCenter Servers using the connection information retrieved from ADAM.

With Linked mode it’s possible to create global role definitions, searches for inventory items across multiple vCenter Server instances, and a license model across multiple vCenter Servers.

From April 28 to July 7, 2009, watch the video clues from the vzGirls - released every Tuesday and Thursday - and complete the entry form in its entirety. Download your official entry form here. There will be 15 winners that will each receive an iPod touch.