Tools - 27

PortBox PL: Serial to Ethernet device server

RS-232/485 serial line - Ethernet converter on TCP/IP and UDP/IP protocol. Built-in virtual serial port support, the remote port can be mapped as for example COM1 in VM using the HW VSP utility. 9-bit support extension, wide support of RS-485 question-answer communication support.A typical application is access a remote technology controlled over RS-232 of RS-485, or serial port prolonging via the Ethernet network.

http://www.hw-group.com/products/converter/index_en.html

Moxa NPort 5100A

The NPort 5100A device servers are designed to make serial devices network-ready in an instant and give your VM direct access to serial devices. The NPort 5100A device servers are ultra lean, ruggedized, and user friendly, making simple and reliable serial to Ethernet solutions possible.

http://www.moxa.com/product/NPort_5100A.htm

Art Berman, CEO over at StarWind has some exiting offers for VMware certified professionals, including the opportunity to be a guest speaker in one of their weekly iSCSI SAN webinars (where you can pick the topic) and to earn referral cash rewards. StarWind Software supports the community of Microsoft & VMware certified professionals by providing free NFR (not for resale) licenses of StarWind iSCSI SAN software to individuals with an MCP/MVP/VCP status.

As a guest speaker, you can talk about any topic related to iSCSI and StarWind SAN products, such as virtual servers & server management, desktop virtualization, disaster recovery, backups, etc., the limit is your imagination. They can arrange a live webinar or recorded webcast - whatever you prefer. Take a look at some of their previous webinars prepared by your fellow IT professionals. I’ve recently recorded a video for StarWind regarding "StarWind iSCSI multipathing with Round Robin and esxcli".

This webcast covers the benefits and features of StarWind iSCSI multipathing with Round Robin and esxcli. It also explains the operations you need to complete to create and format the datastore in the way your ESX server can create virtual machines on it and show how the esxcli command can be used for PSA (pluggable storage architecture) management and explain how to use the vSphere Client to manage the PSA, the associated native multipathing plug-in (NMP).

As an MCP/MVP/VCP you probably requested your free NFR key to give demos to your customers and colleagues or for educational use. Some of your students, colleagues or event attendees may be keen to order commercial version of our products.You can earn up to 25% off MSRP for any deal you bring StarWind - all deals are registered to your name, protecting you for your efforts. Please contact their sales department to learn how you can earn from your hard work already invested with StarWind's iSCSI SAN software.

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/offers-for-professionals-newsletter

The Virtual Audio Cable (VAC) software implements an idea of a physical interconnection cable applied to Windows audio applications. Like traditional audio devices (CD Player, FM receiver, equalizer, amplifier etc.) are connected by the electric (analog or digital) cables, Windows audio applications can be connected together by the Virtual Cables created by the VAC.

VAC has a Windows WDM/KS virtual device driver that creates a set of virtual audio devices named Virtual Cables. Each cable has a pair of audio ports, input and output. These ports are internally connected within each cable so all digital audio data sent (played) to the output port by "source" application are implicitly transferred to the input port and can be retrieved (recorded) by another (destination) application.

A Virtual Cable is similar to an ordinary audio adapter (a sound card) with its input and output externally connected between each other. Since a real adapter usually has a DAC (digital-to-analog converter) and ADC (analog-to-digital converter) in its signal path, an unneeded double digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital conversions are performed in case of such connection. Only rare and/or expensive adapters have a digital input and output that can be connected to transfer a signal clearly. VAC does such transfer itself, without any additional audio hardware.

Each port of each Virtual Cable is multi-client, allowing multiple applications to open the port at the same time. In the WDM/KS terms, it means each cable pin can be instantiated several times. All sounds (audio streams) coming to the playback port are mixed together, and each client connected to the recording port will get an individual copy of a signal via its recording/capture stream. Mixing and distributing are performed on the cable basis only, different cables are completely independent from each other.

As a WDM/KS filter driver, VAC represents a lowest-level audio layer that can be effectively used by any upper-level layer (KS-aware applications, DirectSound and MME subsystems, ASIO wrappers and so on). A small utility, Audio Repeater, is included into the package to perform various useful tasks.

Zenoss has announced that it is now offering a free ZenPack for monitoring the performance of VMware ESX/ESXi servers. Similar to the Unix "Top" command, this ZenPack uses the VMware resxtop command to aggregate and alert on performance metrics in a single graphical view in order to provide administrators an expanded and deeper VMware ESX/ESXi monitoring experience. With this ZenPack, Zenoss is the first to enable proactive VMware management using esxtop.

VMware’s esxtop is a very powerful VMware administrator’s tool used to obtain a snapshot of the current server state.  It not only provides metrics but give you visibility to issues such as disk latency, CPU contentions, memory over commits, etc. VMware administrators have until now used esxtop at the command line to access host server performance metrics.

Virtualization administrators, while enjoying the power of the esxtop command, have been looking for enhancements to help simplify and improve performance troubleshooting. Currently the command must be executed through the command line interface and provides no capability for reporting or alerting. Historical data analysis and graphing requires users to manually redirect data to a file for further offline analysis and charting.

The new ZenPack for esxtop enables the following:

• Performance metrics from ESX and ESXi servers are automatically captured, graphed, displayed, and continually updated in one graphical interface.
• Users can set thresholds and exception alerting based on performance metrics and events as they occur.
• Historical data is saved for in-depth root cause analysis.  

“As we have been working with organizations to provide deep VMware monitoring capabilities, we saw some of our customers and community members using the esxtop command. Unfortunately, this tool was somewhat hidden and only available for power users.  We are combining the strength and ease of use of Zenoss with the esxtop command to provide a simpler monitoring capability for VMware ESX environments,” said Simon Jakesch, Engineer at Zenoss. “With this free ZenPack, users can easily identify performance problems in their ESX and ESXi environment, and immediately take steps to resolve the issues before they affect the business. This capability will save administrator time and increase accessibility to a very powerful performance tool.”

ZenPacks are software extensions to Zenoss. The ZenPack for esxtop is free. For more information on how to download the ZenPack, visit the Zenoss blog. For a complete list of all the ZenPacks that are available, please visit: http://community.zenoss.org/community/zenpacks.

Remote Desktop Manager is a small application used to manage all your remote connections and virtual machines. Add, edit, delete, shared, organize and find your remote connection quickly. Compatible with Microsoft Remote Desktop, Terminal Services, VNC, LogMeIn, Team Viewer, Ftp, SSH, Telnet, Dameware, X Window, VMware, Virtual PC, PC Anywhere, Hyper-V, Citrix, Radmin, Microsoft Remote Assistance, Sun Virtual Box and more...

http://www.remotedesktopmanager.com/

The VIX Java Toolkit allows Java developers to take advantage of VMware VIX API. This is a powerful API that allows for performing in-guest operations on VMs running with vSphere, Workstation, Server and Player.
Give it a whirl, rate and leave your comments at - http://labs.vmware.com/flings/vix-java-toolkit .

The VIX Java Toolkit allows Java developers to take advantage of the VMware VIX API. This is a powerful API that allows for performing in-guest operations on VMs running with vSphere, Workstation, Server, and Player. Java developers who are writing code with the vSphere/VI APIs will find this particularly useful as the vSphere API does not currently provide any functionality for interacting with the guest operating system. In addition, this is helpful for software testing as well as systems administration.

Features

• Provides Java wrapper for the VIX API
• Provides VIX objects and utility code to reduce complexities of using the VIX API