A client was asking me if it was possible to install the VMware tools inside VM’s without having to reboot them right after. I knew it was possible and went looking for a way on doing so. During the search I found several scripts made by people which looked good (some out of date), but for most of them you had to made slight adjustments to the script to make them work for your own environment. The client wasn’t really looking for a script to maintain so I continued the search.

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I recently bought a new server for my home lab, or at least, it was the start of my home lab. After my ESX host crashed two years ago I didn’t took the time to rebuild it.

As I started to rebuild every single VM on my host I quickly became somewhat irritated by the fact that I had to switch to the vSphere client to mount an ISO and then back to my RDP session to do the installation.

I thought to myself “This should be easier. Why isn’t there a tool that can list the ISO’s on the datastores and give you the choice to mount one of them?”.

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Luc Dekens and Alan Renouf did a great presentation on PowerCLI.

PowerCLI is based on PowerShell. PowerShell is designed by Microsoft with the SysAdmin in mind. It’s the universal language for Windows data centers.

Most of the time GUI interfaces are single purpose and rigid. PowerShell is the glue between your infrastructure. Microsoft makes it as a requirement for new application releases that it will work with PowerShell like SQL Server, Exchange, IIS7, SCOM and more. Commands (called cmdlets) are pretty easy to remember because they are in the verb-noun format (for example get-host)

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This morning we had a meeting with Vizioncore/Quest. Danny Claproth and Jan-Willem Koppers informed us on their complete range of vProducts.

Vizioncore offers a wide range of products which add additional features or deliver VMware-like features. I’ve not had very much time to test their products yet but I knew most of them by name and function. After attending Danny’s presentation I will definitely make time to check out their neat products.

The ones I will definitely check out are vFoglight, vOptimizer, vConverter and of course Virtualization EcoShell.

vFoglight
From what I saw vFoglight is a brilliant virtualization management solution which delivers performance-, capacity- and cost monitoring to improve resource utilization, recover costs and quickly find bottlenecks in your infrastructure.

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This morning I received a tweet from Duncan Epping, Duncan works at VMware Benelux and is the owner of Yellow-Bricks.com. In the community it was a public secret that Duncan was in the USA to defend his case to become one of the fist VCDX (VMware Certified Design Expert) certified professionals worldwide. And this morning he twittered that he had received his VCDX award at the VMware Award dinner last night.

So Duncan, from the crew of VMGuru.nl, congratulations!

Duncan is the 7th VCDX professional worldwide and what a cool number to have, VCDX007.
From now on you can pick up the phone saying, ‘this is Epping, Duncan Epping‘

Duncan, congrats and enjoy!

We already reported on this and even made a video of Scott Herold’s demo at VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes, the Virtualization EcoShell Initiative, VESI for short.The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative is a new Vizioncore-sponsored community initiative being led by virtualization expert and author Scott Herold. The goal of The VESI community is to further enhance the administrative experience of virtual infrastructures with automation using Windows PowerShell.

Now Scott Herold announced the release date, April 15th. This is the date that THE “Power Toolkit” for virtualization administration will be generally available 100% free of charge.

You can get more information or download the tool at TheVESI.org or visit VMGuru.com

Yesterday Scott Herold gave us a demo of VESI, a free VI toolkit from Vizioncore based on PowerShell. With this toolkit it is very easy to automate task in your virtual infrastructure without any knowledge of powershell. Just browse the tool, select the desired actions and build a powershell script. The free toolkit will be available at the end of March and can be downloaded at the VESI website.

At the booth of Vizioncore Scott Herold gave a presentation and demonstration about the Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI).

The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI) is a new Vizioncore-sponsored community initiative being led by virtualization expert and author Scott Herold. The goal of The VESI community is to further enhance the administrative experience of virtual infrastructures with automation using Windows PowerShell through an extensible freeware toolkit called Virtualization EcoShell, scheduled for beta release end of March 2009.

Be sure to visit TheVESI.org today to find out more about the initative aned upcoming freeware product Virtualization EcoShell!

Later on today we will post a the video of one of the presentations Scott did.

VMware recently introduced the new and improved VI Toolkit, version 1.5

VI Toolkit (for Windows) is a command-line and scripting tool built on Windows PowerShell. It provides more than 150 cmdlets for managing and automating your VMware Infrastructure. You can download now this new version from : http://www.vmware.com/downloads/download.do?downloadGroup=VI-WT-15

For the release notes you can visit:

http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/windowstoolkit/wintk15/windowstoolkit15-200901-releasenotes.html

Last year I started to write a small program in Perl to document the virtual infrastructures we encounter at client locations.
But since it’s all PowerShell it was time to start to write the same thing in PowerShell.

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If you’re interested in automating your virtual environment you should check out this link. It containts a list of frequently asked questions about PowerShell combined with VMware.

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-4210

One of the problems that most people have with virtualizing vCenter is that they don’t know where the vCenter VM is when there are problems.

There’s a fairly easy way to counter this problem.

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I must  be a workaholic. I was browsing my laptop for some movie and I came across a folder with all kinds of plugins for VirtualCenter. Things like addPortgroup and other stuff.

Although it’s very handy to use those plugins I like to be able to these kind of things from the commandline, so I started some PowerShell script (here is where the workaholic starts) to create portgroups on all your VMware hosts that are known by VirtualCenter.

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I’m from the pre-WIMP era, like in pre Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointers. There wasn’t anything like a graphical user interface. Even when they emerged like Norton Commander and PC Tools I still did most of my work from the commandline. Stuff like 4DOS enriched my life so I could get the most out of the commandline.

I still try to do most of my stuff from commandline. I’m very happy that companies like Microsoft see that there are more people that want to do their stuff from that commandline. Hence PowerShell. PowerShell can do some great tricks like doing an action on all servers in your infrastructure with one line of code.
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