Control multiple VC’s with vCenter Administrator Portal Server.
One of the things mentioned at the UK VMware user group was the freely available VMware appliance that can manage multiple Virtual Centers from the same pain of glass, for those of you looking for the link check here:
Icomasoft have released two great plugins, well worth a download….
Rescan Plugin
icomasoft® provides you a simple VMware VI Client plugin (Virt
ualCenter and ESX Host support) for automating the Rescan/Refresh SAN Task of VMware ESX Hosts.
Just right-click on a Host or Group object (Cluster, DataCenter) and choose rescan – done.
Don´t need to script a rescan process or even manually rescan all your hosts. That´s the best way for not getting into trouble with missing Datastore mappings because of a forgotten Rescan – and losing virtual machines because of a host downtime within a HA Cluster.
Powershell Plugin
icomasoft® VI PowerScripter is the first and absolutely unique VMware VI Client plug-in for a tight integration of user-defined PowerShell scripts into the object repository of VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5.
This software delivers predefined functions for common admin tasks and is capable of handling hundreds of custom scripts for direct usage from a dynamically generated context menu within VI Client (for connections to VirtualCenter, ESX 3.5 or ESX 3i).
Thanks to its absolute flexibility, this powerful software is a “must” for professional users looking to administrate the virtual infrastructure in compliance with business-aligned functions in a simple and yet most effective manner.
Looks like ESX Update 3 will be released soon, hopefully without the trial period too.
http://www.vinternals.com/2008/10/esx-35-update-3-release-imminent.html
Now this looks useful, Im forever seeing slight misconfiguration on many of the contracts I work on and as we know this can cause upset for things like HA, DRS and VMotion. Veeam Configurator should eliminate these issues applying a standard set of configuration to the servers and reducing the potential for misconfiguration issues.
Plus it saves you time configuring the hosts, which I’m all for !
Discover, manage and enforce your ESX servers’ configuration from a single interface
Setting up and properly configuring your ESX servers isn’t difficult. But over time, things can change. How do you know which ESX servers are still configured as intended, and which have “drifted”? Veeam Configurator helps to ensure that your ESX server configuration complies with corporate policies and standards across your entire VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3).
With Veeam Configurator, you can quickly and easily discover the current settings for all your ESX hosts, review and adjust the captured configuration sets as needed, and use that information to define your baseline configuration templates. These templates can then be applied to groups of ESX servers simultaneously, allowing you to centrally manage the configuration of all the ESX servers in your environment.
You can think of Veeam Configurator as essentially a “group policy” for your ESX servers. Similarly to Windows Group Policy, Veeam configuration templates allow you to take complete control of your ESX servers, making sure that existing servers are fully compliant with your corporate standards, and simplifying the provisioning of new ESX servers.
We have been able to run ESX and ESXi in VMware workstation for a while now, I find it particularly useful for testing and for the odd demonstration.
If you are unsure how to do this I came across a nice article today which includes a step by step video on how to configure this useful feature…
http://www.petri.co.il/running-vmware-esx-and-esxi-in-workstation-on-your-desktop-pc.htm
It reads…
In the following new video, I demonstrate, step by step, how you can run VMware ESX Server 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 inside VMware Workstation 6.5. This is also shown in my Train Signal VMware ESX Server video training course.
While you wouldn’t run ESX in Workstation for a production server, running ESX in Workstation is an excellent way to test and demonstrate ESX Server (and the entire VMware Virtual Infrastructure suite) on a single PC. Think about it – what if you had a single PC with 2 ESX Servers, an iSCSI virtual SAN, and a Windows Server running Virtual Center. With that, you would have “VMware Infrastructure in a box” and be able to run powerful features like VMotion, SVMotion, VMHA, and Update Manager, all on a single PC.
OK, until now I have had respect for Microsoft, I have just read this article and a few others and I have to say, that’s completely below the belt, they are resulting to nasty underhand tactics to try and steal the virtualisation market.
Just proves that they cant do it with there software which is more comparable to VMware workstation than VI.
I cant wait for VI4 to come out and really kick some butt.
Rant over !
I would be interested in what your thoughts are on this subject.
Looks like VI4 is on the horizon and coming soon, there is a beta out there at the moment for a select few, some new features include:
Read more information here
