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The vmClient is a lightweight tool which enables you to control the power of your virtual machines, it’s also capable of presenting the MKS console of your virtual machines. Before you can use the vmClient, you have to install the vSphere client on the same system. After starting the vmClient, you can logon to your vCenter server or individual ESX4 or ESX4i host. A list with available virtual machines will be presented after choosing the Virtual Machines menu item, you can also easily identify the power state of the virtual machines. Grey is powered off, green is powered on, yellow is suspended and red indicates that the virtual machine has an alarm. When you’re working in an RDP session there’s a menu item which can generate a Ctrl-Alt-Del in the guest OS instead of pressing Ctrl-Alt-Ins. The vmClient can run without borders in borderless mode. The menu bar has an option to search for virtual machines, just type in the first characters of your virtual machine name and the list will be filtered. 

The number of virtual machines can be too high to fit in the “Virtual Machine” menu item so I’ve added an extra option to disable this menu and use the search menu instead. The option to customize the user interface of the vmClient can be done by changing a few registry settings. You’re able to show or hide menu items using this hive.

 HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VB and VBA Program Settings\NTPRO.NL\vmClient

You can also pre-select a default virtual machine in this hive. There are two recorded demo sessions available, one which show a walkthrough and a second which shows how to convert the vmClient into a VDI client. The trail version is limited to a maximum number of 50 virtual machines and shows a splash screen with my picture in it. The registered version can be bought online and has no virtual machine limit, you can also get rid of the splash screen. :-) The Buy Now link is available in the help menu. If you have any ideas or suggestions on improving the vmClient or you’ve found a bug, you know where to reach me. Have fun with it.

How to convert the vmClient into a VDI client

A general walkthrough

The vmClient 4.0 can be downloaded from this location: http://vmclient.nl/

I’ve been busy with coding the past few days. I’ve successfully completed my Microsoft Partnership admission and received a  subscription to their developer network. Now I’ve access to all the developer tools an operating systems you can dream of. My coding project has to do with a project I started a few years ago, I’ve written a little cool tool called the Virtual Machine MKS Client. Eventually it ended up in some sort of a contest with Bouke Groenescheij and Richard Garsthagen when Bouke and I did a freelance job at Ahrend, we had some real fun and long channel walks. Since the training business is a bit sloppy this month I’m trying to revive the tool and make it vSphere compatible. I started with converting it to Visual Studio 2008 and had to rebuild some DLL’s. I endured some real challenges with VMware’s new activeX (VNC) object but finally I got it to work.  Here’s a Jing movie with a sneak preview, it will take at least another week to make the beta publicly available.

http://www.screencast.com/users/esloof/folders/Jing/media/dcf472ed-d268-4ffb-94d4-20ebc3f44de0