Products - 3

Carter Shanklin, Product Manager for VMware specializing in APIs and SDKs has written an excellent article about running PowerShell from the VI Client with  icomasoft PowerScripter. While I was looking at his screen dumps, I noticed a Plugin I didn’t see before. The plugintoys.chat VMware viClientScripts was available in his Plugin Manager. It didn’t take me that long to discover another great article from Charter describing this new Plugin.

One nice thing about the plug-in architecture we've released is how easy it is to do web-based mashups. This thread shows you how to insert a chat window into your VirtualCenter client that makes it possible for everyone who manages an instance of VirtualCenter to chat to each other in real-time. This is all made really simple using Meebo Rooms. In this demo I've created a Meebo room devoted to VI Client Plug-ins, but you could just as easily create your own room specific to your team.

Based on his XML file I created my own XML file just to see if it works, and it did. When you want to integrate you own webpage into the VI Client just edit the XML file and copy it to the Plugins directory.

C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Plugins\NTPRO.NL

<scriptConfiguration version="1.0.0">
 <key>NTPRO.NL</key>
 <description>Eric Sloof's website</description>
  <view parent="Inventory.Global">
   <title locale="en">NTPRO.NL</title>
   <url>http://www.ntpro.nl</url>
  </view>
  <view parent="Inventory.Datacenter">
   <title locale="en">NTPRO.NL</title>
   <url>http://www.ntpro.nl</url>
  </view>
  <view parent="Inventory.VirtualMachine">
   <title locale="en">NTPRO.NL</title>
   <url>http://www.ntpro.nl</url>
  </view>
  <view parent="Inventory.Cluster">
   <title locale="en">NTPRO.NL</title>
   <url>http://www.ntpro.nl</url>
  </view>
  <view parent="Inventory.HostSystem">
   <title locale="en">NTPRO.NL</title>
   <url>http://www.ntpro.nl</url>
  </view>
  <view parent="Inventory.ResourcePool">
   <title locale="en">NTPRO.NL</title>
   <url>http://www.ntpro.nl</url>
  </view>

This Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator recalculates all your resource pools. Depending on the number of virtual machines per resource pool, the number of reservations for memory and CPU is automatically lifted after running the Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator. The script also respects the existing individual virtual machine reservations and adds those value’s to the total RP sum.

When a virtual machine doesn’t have a reservation, the virtual machine memory is used to calculate the Resource Pool reservation. When the $MemFactor is 2, the virtual machine memory is divided by 2. This means a Virtual machine with 1024 MB lifts the Resource Pool reservation with 512 MB. The $CPUFactor is multiplied by the number of CPU’s. This means a virtual machine with 2 CPU ‘s will create a lift of 1024 MHz on the Resource Pool.

This script can present a GUI to the end user or can be run interactive from the PS command line. If no arguments are specified, the GUI starts. If a resource pool is passed as an argument, this resource pool will be processed without the GUI.

Admin Guide

Demo Movie

DRPC-Script.ps1

First of all I would like to thank Robert Baumstark. He is the one who has build the VIClient.dll and helped me tremendously. I created a new version of the Virtual Machine MKS Client, this version has better sizing, very handy when working on a small desktop with large virtual machines. Another new thing is the title bar, it displays the status and name of the controlled virtual machine. You can download the new version here.

Then about the contest, Richard Garthagen joined in so we can expect a MKS tool on run-virtual this summer. Bouke Groenescheij was behaving very strange yesterday. He wouldn’t talk to me and suddenly claimed a new domain name and made an announcement about vvi-world ? I suspect someone has put something in his tea here at Ahrend ;-). I took a peek at his KVM-Tool and it’s impressive. His tool allows you to open multiple console sessions and logs on to an ESX server directly.
What to expect in the future, well I like the multiple screen option so I’m going to build a tear off button. Besides that Dee made a comment and suggested to allow the virtual machine to be connected to the local CD drive on the client. Any other suggestions are welcome.

Continue reading "Virtual Machine MKS Client v1.2" »

A few weeks ago I started building my first Visual Basic 2005 application. What I wanted to do is talk to the VMware Virtual Center API. I published a PDF document that describes how to connect to this API and I released some code fragments. In this process Robert Baumstark helped me a lot with great tips and suggestions. He even shared the source code  of his viclient.dll which can be used to get properties from VM’s  and logon to the Virtual Center server. After a lot of late hours of coding I finally can release the vmCDConnected application. What’s so special about this application ? Well it scans all the Virtual Machines and shows if they have a CD connected to it. After scanning the VM’s you can disconnect all the CD’s with a click of  a button. Why do we need it ? Imagine you have a DRS cluster with 80 VM’s, when one of those VM’s is connected to a CD it will stay on the same ESX server because V-Motion doesn’t work in combination with a connected CD. During beta release of this application some people reported a failure message after login in. I tested this application during several VI-3 Install and Configure classes I delivered but never have seen that error myself. When you encounter problems please report them. I'm also open to suggestions that might be implemented in the next version.

Download : http://www.ntpro.nl/software/VMCDConnected.zip