Tools - 55

This week I’m delivering the famous VMware Install and Configure course at XTG in the Netherlands. At the end of the third day it’s time for VMotion. Three ESX servers are added to one Virtual Center server  and the students have the task to make all their virtual machines VMotion compatible. I took this opportunity to upload the Replicate Technologies Datacenter Analyzer virtual appliances.  After uploading I converted the Probe appliance to a template and used the Internet Explorer to logon to the RDA Controller virtual machine. Just had to configure the Virtual Center server address and  user credentials, after that you’re ready to go. Update your analyses and kick off the probe deployment and the possible errors in your environment are presented at the Dashboard.  In my classroom there  was an issue with one of the virtual machines. This machine functions as a router and is booted from a floppy. Besides that it’s connected to an internal only virtual switch. Definitely some show stoppers for VMotion. One of the virtual machines had CPU affinity, RDA didn’t report the affinity setting, I posted a feature request at the forum. In the screen dumps you can see my findings. To conclude: easy setup, fast results, RDA rocks.

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.

Last Friday Rich Miller informed me about the upcoming release of the Replicate Datacenter Analyzer. Rich joined Replicate Technologies as its CEO in October 2007. Together with Ken Novak and Rich Pelavin, the company's co-founders, he is directing RT's efforts to deliver a new class of management technology for the networks that support virtual machine environments.

The past few weeks at Replicate Technologies have been a combination of intense concentration and confident, regular progress.  It's a real tribute to the team and the  development process that everything has been showing up on time, and with the highest quality.  We can now state categorically that we have a product.  We're quite pleased with the outcome.  The first-customer-ship (FCS) version of the Replicate Datacenter Analyzer (RDA 1.0) arrived on schedule.  The new website is up, and includes the first of a set of short webcasts to provide introductions and tutorials.  We've instituted an "early access" program, limited to a modest set of users, in order to test out our back office and support processes. Based on our experience so far, we should be in full commercial availability as scheduled next week.

Replicate Datacenter Analyzer enables a new mode of datacenter management – Predictive Fault management. By taking advantage of the dynamic nature and malleability of virtualization, Replicate Datacenter Analyzer instruments and ana¬lyzes the behavior of the entire unified datacenter. Instead of waiting for failures and then scrambling to restore service, with RDA datacenter administrators can proactively discover errors in the datacenter and resolve them on a schedule of their own choosing. Once identified, RDA’s prescriptive guidance makes fixing potential future faults quick and easy. Watch how you can use RDA to quickly find latent configuration problems in your datacenter.  Utilizing our advanced discovery, RDA maps out your entire topology, identifying issues that prevent VMotion and DRS in advance, while providing you detailed diganostic drill-downs so you can quickly remediate any issues.

Get up and running in under 30 min from start to finish.  Deployed as a virtual appliance, getting RDA installed and running is fast and easy.  With built-in automated probe provisioning, discovery, and analysis, you can start getting results almost immediatly.  RDA's intuitive AJAX UI works with all major browsers, and includes all the guidance you need to start using RDA.

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The newly released ESX 3.5 U3 adds support for the VMDK Recovery tool, a script intended to help you recover VMFS/vmdk data stores from accidental deletion of VMFS/vmdk data store or physical disk corruption. For more information, see VMDK Recovery Tool (ESX 3.5 Update 3) (KB 1007243).

To use the tool:

Log in to the service console and enter the vmfs-undelete command. Select option [b]. This lists all the virtual machines registered on your host.

Either select [99] to back up a vmdk blocklist of all the virtual machines, or select a number from the virtual machine list to back up a specific virtual machine.

After the buzz about the release of VMware's documentation for VirtualCenter plug-in's, Xtravirt took a look to see what they could do. Their first little endeavour was to make the Platespin Forge appliance a little friendlier. Who wants to have to look in to all these different interfaces anyway? So they wrote a little plugin to add the Platespin Forge management screen into VirtualCenter and also added a button to the toolstrip for easy access.

Xtravirt is also a big fan of the Pano Logic VDI hardware client, and decided to write a plugin to provide direct access to management functions from VMware VirtualCenter. They added a context sensitive menu to the Pano Logic broker VM. There's a recorded video available on Xtravirt’s website of us using the plug-in live. As you can see it works quite well.

Sapien Technologies is pleased to announce that the free GUI builder tool for PowerShell is now available for download. PrimalForms is a free GUI builder tool for PowerShell users. It edits and stores Windows Forms in a native XML format and generates PowerShell code on demand. Head on over to http://www.primaltools.com/freetools to get it. (Registrations with a valid email address is required). The tool works with PowerShell V1 and the current V2 CTP. Jeffery Hicks created some samples that are included with the installer. If you have questions, comments or suggestions, please head over to the free tools section in their support forum. Via Alan Renouf.