New VMware Powerpack for PowerGUI

 

On the PowerGUI website is a new version off VMware PowerPack released.

A PowerPack extends the PowerGUI with a set of folders, nodes, links and actions that allow you to manage VMware Infrastructure. With the PowerPack no Powershell knowledge is needed.

The new version has the following new enhancements and supported features:

December 19, 2008 (2.0.0)
– reorganized the PowerPack structure to facilitate easier management of multiple hosts and to allow users to retrieve objects from one or more of the hosts they are managing whether they are already connected or not
– added support for browsing the VMware Inventory hierarchy (includes Hosts and Clusters, Virtual Machines and Templates, Networks and Datastores), including being able to browse directly into the file system on the datastores
– added many new links and actions
– exposed many more VMware Infrastructure objects through topological views and through integration in the hierarchy
– improved the performance of many nodes, links and actions
– added single sign-on support (note that connecting to multiple hosts using the same username but different passwords is currently not supported, but we are working on that and will provide support for this soon)
– tested management against Virtual Center 2.0, ESX 3.0x and 3.5, ESXi 3.5 and Virtual Server 2.0 (note: management of Virtual Center 2.0 requires version 1.0 of the VMware VI Toolkit)
– and more!

Supported features:
• Management of multiple VMware Virtual Center, ESX, ESXi and VMware Server hosts when using the VMware VI Toolkit 1.0 release
• Management of multiple VMware Virtual Center, ESX and ESXi hosts when using the VMware VI Toolkit 1.5 release
• Single sign-on to multiple hosts using the same credentials
• Ability to browse through inventory hierarchies on Virtual Center
• Ability to view topological data for any managed server
• Management of datacenters, clusters, resource pools, hosts, folders, virtual machines, templates, snapshots, networks, datastores, files, tasks and log files

 

Some screenshots:

 

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More information can be found on the PowerGUI site.

New VMware ESX whitebox

A couple of weeks ago my desktop PC died, so my girlfriend could not read there e-mail. I decide to turn my OLD VMware ESX test server into a Microsoft Vista workstation and buy a new whitebox. After searching the internet and comparing components, I found the following configuration:

  • – CoolerMaster Centurion 590 mini tower
  • – CoolerMaster Real Power 520W modular Power supply
  • – Asus P5BP-E/4L (with 4 onboard NICS)
  • – Intel Core 2 Quad 6600 Processor Boxed
  • – Kingston 8GB 800MHz DDR2 memory
  • – Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB

I had already a LSI Megaraid SATA-4 RAID controller. The whitebox is very quiet. It’s installed with VMware ESX 3i. It performs very good with a couple of VMs.  I will benchmark it soon.

Healthcheck Powershell script on number six!

The Healthcheck Powershell script I wrote for the VMware Powershell scripting contest is on 6th position on the “Top 10 Powershell scripts that VMware administrators should use” from Eric Siebert. Eric is the administrator of  the site VMware-land.com that has the largest VMware link collection on the web.

I was today at the Dutch VMUG event and attended  the presentation  from Eric Sloof “Managing VI3 with Powershell“.  I saw in his presentation that I was on the 6th place. Cool. I think Eric’s presentation was was the best session of the day.

Read the entire article here.

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