PowerShell v2 CTP3 makes it pretty easy to connect to a web service. VMware Lab Manager has a really good web service interface, so even though there are no Lab Manager cmdlets it's still pretty easy to use PowerShell to automate Lab Manager. Here's an example:

(If the code below shows up twice, please ignore the second copy. Sorry!)

The complete reference to the Lab Manager API is also online. Also, be sure to download

Here's a video showing it in action.

Managing VMware Lab Manager with PowerShell CTP3

A nice new resource for the VI Toolkit:

In addition to being available on poshcode, I’m going to start putting all my demos on my Skydrive folder for easy access. If you ever need some ideas or a quick demo to convince your coworkers they should be using the VI Toolkit, it’s a great place to look. If you’re interested, add it to your RSS reader and stay tuned for some great updates.

 I've been seeing lots of chatter about Site Recovery Manager lately. Books, videos, all sorts of good stuff. Tomas Ten Dam is doing a great job of covering a lot of these as well as doing yeoman's work on his SRM in a Box project; check out his blog for more.

But today I want to call your attention to some new proven practices on the still stealth-mode VI:OPS site. Please take a look and feel free to comment or rate them.

Here are some of the recent docs there: VI:OPS: Community: Availability.

• Steps to setup FalconStor NSS Virtual Appliances for VMware Site Recovery Manager              
• Steps To Create a 2-Site SRM Demo Environment on a Laptop        
• Steps to setup LeftHand Networks VSA for VMware Site Recovery Manager     Steps to setup EMC Celerra (iSCSI) for VMware Site Recovery Manager
• Steps to setup EMC Clariions for VMware Site Recovery Manager        
• Steps to setup NetApp arrays for VMware Site Recovery Manager

As VMware's Greg Lato says, SRM "is the Easy Button for data center level disaster recovery."

View Composer enables the use of linked clones with View Manager in order to reduce the amount of storage needed per VM. It does this by coping the parent VM + snapshot into a protected VM or entity. This VM is protected so it can’t be deleted in vCenter to ensure an admin doesn’t accidentally delete the VM which users may be referencing.

The correct way to manage these protected VM’s isn’t within vCenter, it’s in View Manager. When a linked clone enabled pool is created, recomposed, or deleted this updates the protected entity accordingly. In some cases it may be necessary to manually unprotect and remove the protected entity in vCenter. SVICONFIG.EXE is included with View Composer to assist with this. Located under “C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View Composer\SviConfig.exe” this command will unprotect any View Composer related protected entity.

Here is how to unprotect the host folder and any entities it may contain:

1. On the vCenter/View Composer server launch Start –> Run –> CMD
2. Browse to “C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View Composer”
3. Type the command below replacing the default information with specific information for your environment.
“SviConfig -operation=UnprotectEntity -VcUrl=https://my.vc/sdk -Username=User1 -Password=123 -InventoryPath="/My Datacenter/vm/MyReplicaFolder" -Recursive=True”

If this is successful it will return a confirmation of any entities unprotected. Now it will be possible to use vCenter to delete the newly unprotected entity.

We're back with the first podcast of the year in our weekly series the VMware Community Roundtable. For the VCR series, we gather a set of community leaders for our panel and welcome everyone to join in live to call in or just chat. We had an outstanding set of attendees for our hour of conversation today. This week was podcast #30 and we had an open agenda.

As always, listen via the widget on the right or by downloading the mp3. More info. We are available on iTunes. Here are some of the topics we covered:

• Eric Siebert's Open Letter to VMware (QA, naming, pricing, and more)
• VMware finally releases product pages for the new products, announced at VMworld, that will be relased in 2009.
• paid subscriptions available for VMworld.com 
• vRanger Pro supports ESXi. Quest Software's Scott Herold, who was on the podcast, did some marketing, but only when I pushed him.
• we declare 2009 to be the year of automation
  • Getting Started with PowerShell and PowerGUI in your Virtual Infrastructure from Scott Herold @ VMGuru
  • Add Custom Fields to VI Client with Powershell (Samples) from Hugo Peeters
  • Head over to the VI Toolkit (for Windows) blog or just Google Powershell VMware for more.
  • One of the new products mentioned above Rod Haywood just blogged about after our podcast: Get ready for vCenter Orchestrator. We never really got to Orchestrator during the chat, however.
• then we talked cloud
  • The maturity model for cloud computing - 2009, the year of automation from Rod Haywood
  • Cloud computing explanation that anyone can understand nice video from GoGrid's Michael Sheehan
  • Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying Amazon, a tale of future historical perspective on security from Michael Mucha
  • This just in: James Urquhart: The biggest cloud computing issue of 2009 is trust
• VMware User Groups
  • main VMUG page
  • VMware User Groups from Jason Boche
  • Roger Lund wants to start his own VMUG in St Cloud, Minn. Contact him if you're interested. If you don't have a local group, first talk to VMware, and then if there isn't a close one, start checking out other technology user groups, talk to local IT consultants, see what kind of activity you can stir up.
• increasing vMotion performance by increasing the number you do at once from Simon Long in Boche's blog. Kudos for this cowboy tip from all the podcast attendees.
• Why you shouldn’t restore VMware ESX from a backup by Edward Haletky. Again, lots of agreement from the crowd. See also:
  • ESX Deployment Appliance and an update on EDA v0.85, articles from Duncan Epping about an appliance by Herco van Brug
  • statelesx
  • host profiles demo video, announced at VMworld 2008
• new VMware COO Tod Nielsen
• our VMware community acknowledgment program, which may be called VMware Virtual Professional, or perhaps something else entirely, is still simmering on the burner, more soon.

And a disclaimer: I'm always speaking only for myself on these podcasts, not for VMware. Or as Rod Haywood says: "as John is in marketing, nothing he says can really be taken to mean anything real. :-)"

Please feel free to join in the fun next week, Wednesday @ noon PST / 3pm EST / 8pm GMT.

Eight new ESX configurations have been approved by Microsoft for support under the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). The new configs allow up to 64 GB memory in any virtual machine. This is an increase from the previous 4 GB limit, and will be useful to customers deploying Exchange Server, SQL Server, or any memory-intensive application. All future SVVP configs will be listed at our product’s maximum memory limit.

Under SVVP, any customer will be supported by Microsoft when running any of a long list of Microsoft products on VMware. Any version of Windows back to Windows Server 2000 SP4 is also supported, including all OS roles such as Active Directory, File Services, etc.

Two nice new resources from us are now available in the VMware Communities: one on esxtop statstics, and the other on VMFS best practices. (See all the community documents here.) I do not know if these will show up in our white paper directory at some point. Hmm, Rod may be right -- there are many places to find technical resources at VMware, and we need to make sure people can find what they need. I will do some asking about internally. Hat tips to Tom and Arne for pointng them out.

Documentation on Esxtop | PlanetVM.

Scott Drummond[s] of VMware has just created a document of the forums that details the Esxtop command, you can find it here Interpreting esxtop Statistics this looks like a detailed piece of work that somebody has needed to do for a while

VMware: VMFS Best Practices « ICT-Freak.nl.

This paper gives a technology overview of VMFS, including a discussion of features and their benefits. The paper highlights how VMFS capabilities enable greater scalability and decreased management overhead. It also provides best practices and architectural considerations for deployment of VMFS. You can download the whitepaper over here: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9276

Last week when I wrote about what Tools generally does and mentioned that it enabled 3D acceleration, someone asked a natural question: What makes 3D acceleration in a virtual machine so hard? Why can't the guest directly control the graphics card?

To answer this requires a bit of explanation. One key thing to keep in mind is that the host OS has control of the hardware. We are subject to the limitations and bugs of the host drivers, just like any other OS X program. As an example, if a host application or kernel extension won't release a USB device, you won't be able to use it in a virtual machine. As another example, updating the version of OS X on the host (and therefore the graphics drivers) can fix rendering bugs in guest 3D.

As I mentioned before, most hardware expects to be controlled by exactly one OS. The OS is sort of like a traffic cop, deciding when to draw things on screen, write things to disk, and so on. Suppose a device has a resource of a certain size. This happens all the time - maybe RAM for the system, a ring buffer for a network card, video RAM for a graphics card, or almost anything. OSes assume they're the ultimate arbiters of the system (because normally they are), and want to use as much resources as possible (unused resources are wasted resources).

Thought experiment time: what if two OSes could try to control a resource at the same time? Keep in mind the guest and host don't really know about each other - the guest can't see what the host is doing, and (without trickery like Tools), the host can't figure out what the guest is doing. Say the host uses up half the video RAM -- managing windows, playing that movie trailer you have open, and so on. Along comes the guest and wants to use all the video RAM for a game in the guest. What happens? In the worst case, the host and guest will scribble over each other (thinking they're in full control) and you'll end up with garbage on the screen, if not a full kernel panic.

In addition to the OSes interfering with each other, a related problem is the devices themselves. Again, in a normal system, there's only one OS, so they expect to only be receiving commands from one source which knows what it's doing. Devices can have state (e.g. one command can be affected by previous commands), and as long as there's only one OS that knows what it's doing, things are fine. However, throw in another OS that has no idea of the first one's state (or vice versa) and things will rapidly break as the device's idea of the state and the OSes idea of the state diverge.

Hopefully you can see why multiple OSes can't control the same device at the same time -- too many cooks spoil the broth.

At this point, there are two natural questions: What if the OSes and devices got smarter? What if the OSes were not trying to control the same device, e.g. what about multiple graphics cards, say on a Mac Pro or one of the new MacBook Pros? I'll address these questions in future posts.

As a big “thank you” to the Mac faithful making the trek to San Francisco for the Macworld Expo, the VMware Fusion team is hosting a user meetup at the Thirsty Bear just down the street from Moscone Center (map). 

The event starts at 5:30 and runs till 8:00 (or they kick us out!).

We’ll be supplying the appetizers, the Fusion team, the laptop and bumper stickers, and venue.  All you need to do is supply your smiling face and any of the libations you might want to partake in (we spend our budget on engineering!)

You can see more information here.

It’s been a big year for us since the last Macworld, as summed up nicely in this blog post by Pat Lee, Fusion’s former product manager, and VMware’s consumer products lead.

So come on our and celebrate with us!

And then stop by our booth on the show floor all throughout this week to learn more about Fusion, or just say hi.

Who: VMware Fusion users, fans, and friends.
What: Pre-Macworld VMware Fusion User Meetup
Where: Thirsty Bear Restaurant, 661 Howard, SF, CA (map)
When: 5:30-8:00 PM, Monday, January 5th, 2008
Why: Because you’re a friend of Fusion, and want to come hang out with the team!

One really great idea the organizers of Virtualization Congress 2009 had was to hold open voting for the sessions that would be presented.

Looking through the proposals, one of the early leaders is Automating VMware Virtual Infrastructure with PowerShell. If you're going to attend Virtualization Congress 2009 this is a great way to pick up some tips and techniques that will help you get the most out of your Virtual Infrastructure.

Brian Roy published a fun video blog today with some tips for how to do really easy web application development using VMware Fusion on your Mac.

Brian is a web developer, and he does a lot of development using PHP, which ultimately runs in a LAMP stack.  In his case, a lot of his work runs in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

Brian uses VMware Fusion as a way to have a virtual machine instance of Fedora (which is what Amazon runs in its EC2 cloud) on his Mac, in which VM he has created a shared folder that points out onto his Mac, where his PHP and HTML code resides.

Brian likes to code using the text editor Smultron, on his Mac, and so when he saves off what he’s doing in Smultron somewhere in his Mac Documents folder, he can immediately pop over to his Fedora VM on Fusion, and test run that code over the shared folder.

That is to say, Apache, running in that Fedora VM, can execute that PHP code, via the shared folder, which looks out onto Brian’s Mac.

You can watch Brian’s video below, and below that, there’s one of our handy tutorials that talks about shared folders.  Enjoy!

And here’s that video tutorial on using Shared Folders:

What We’ll Be Up To

We’ll be demoing VMware Fusion 2 on five demo stations, handing out “My Mac Loves VMware” laptop and bumper stickers, and doing presentations in our theater.

Even better, we’ll have some special guests in our theater.  Every day at 2PM, Joe Kissell from Take Control Publishing, will be presenting tips and tricks from his awesome book “Take Control of VMware Fusion 2”, the quintessential power user’s guide to VMware Fusion 2.

So if you would like to come say hi, whether you’re a curious would-be user, a current customer, press, partner, or so on, our booth is the place to be.  We’ll have something for everyone.

Yesterday Apple released Mac OS X 10.5.6 update. For folks who are running Mac OS X Server 10.5.x in a virtual machine, you may see Software Update (in the virtual machine) offering to update your system. We recommend that you do not proceed with this update, or at least take a snapshot of your OS X guest first.

There are some known issues with this OS update that cause WindowManager to fail under default setting in a OS X virtual machine, as well as some USB issues. Go to the updated VMware Fusion 2.0.1 Release Notes for more details on these issues and workaround in case you already updated your virtual machine to 10.5.6.

These issues will be fixed in the next maintenance release of VMware Fusion. And they do not affect Mac OS X 10.5.6 as a host.

I usually leave the Team Fusion blog to the more talented writers on our team including Peter Kazanjy and Eric Tung, but I wanted to share with our readers my thoughts on 2008.

The Beginning – Macworld Expo 2008

This time last year, we were preparing to attend our second Macworld Expo. The VMware Fusion team was riding high off winning the 2007 Macworld Editor’s Choice Award right before Macworld Expo and we were excited to come to Macworld to show off VMware Fusion 1.1.

There was also a flurry of activity getting ready a surprise for Macworld, a technology preview that demonstrated installing and running Mac OS X Server in a virtual machine on Apple hardware. It was an exciting milestone to be the first virtualization company to publically demonstrate installing Mac OS X Server into a VMware virtual machine directly from Apple’s shipping Mac OS X Server installation media, but since it was a “technology preview” we couldn’t commit to when it would be released though some users were begging us to let them steal a copy of the technology preview as is from on the show floor.

Listening to Our Users and the Switch to VMware Fusion Contest

VMware Fusion continues to get amazing reviews from the press, but just important we are getting amazing user reviews on the Apple Store, Amazon.com, VersionTracker, MacUpdate and on personal blogs.  The strong support from the Mac community telling us what we were doing right and areas we could improve is something we greatly appreciate.

Great user reviews allowed VMware Fusion 2 to be chosen as the Most Loved Software product on Amazon.com and users voted VMware Fusion to be the only Mac virtualization software in the 2008 TidBITS Gift Guide. So, thanks for you support in 2008!

We had heard a lot of users telling us their were switching from Boot Camp and Parallels to VMware Fusion, so we wanted to hear their stories. We sponsored a Switch to VMware Fusion video contest and we saw some great videos, though Cara Jean Mean’s winning video was absolutely incredible.

VMware Fusion 2 Announced and Enters Public Beta 

In May 2008, we announced VMware Fusion 2 and released VMware Fusion 2 Beta 1. The VMware Fusion 2 announcement was exciting as the team had been working six months on a great new product and all we could say publically since VMware Fusion 1.1 was “no comment, but we are constantly working on making VMware Fusion even better.”

We are big fans of public betas at VMware. Our public betas give our users the opportunity to see what we are working on and more importantly it gives us broader coverage to make sure when we release the product that it is ready for prime time. So, thanks to you our users for taking the time to give us valuable feedback on what we did right and what we did wrong, which allows us to ship even better products!

VMware Fusion 2 Launched

On September 15, 2008, we launched VMware Fusion 2 at VMworld in Las Vegas and at Apple Expo in Paris. VMware Fusion 2 has over 100 new features and improvements over VMware Fusion 1 and was FREE upgrade to for all VMware Fusion customers as our thanks to you for choosing VMware Fusion as your choice for running Windows on your Mac.

Awards and Reviews in 2008 

VMware Fusion 2 received many great reviews so far including three I want to call out:

Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal said "VMware Fusion is now the better choice for running Windows on the Mac virtually."

Rob Griffiths at Macworld said "If you want to run Windows, Linux, or other operating systems on your Intel-powered Mac, there’s no better choice than VMware Fusion 2."

Dave Girard at Ars Technica said "VMware, in my opinion, is just the better option at this point…It’s fast, extremely stable, supports 64-bit client operating system and up to four processors for VMs, has VMrun command-line access, and multiple snapshots: all server-level features in a consumer priced product."

In addition to the many great reviews, VMware Fusion has won some great awards in 2008 including our second Macworld Eddy Award in a row!

PC World’s Top 100 Products of 2008

2008 Macworld Editor's Choice Award

Amazon's Best Software of 2008

Thank You

2008 was an amazing success for the VMware Fusion team thanks to your support. We can't thank the Mac community enough for how you have embraced VMware Fusion to date and we look forward to making 2009 an even better year for Mac users running Windows and other operating systems on their Mac.

Please come by our Macworld booth to meet me, Pete, David, and other members of the VMware Fusion team, we are in Booth 2202 in Moscone South.

Macworld’s just around the corner, and the VMware Fusion team is going to be there demoing our hearts out, talking to users, and doing our best to engage with the Mac faithful.

Come Say Hi!

Firstly, location.  We’ll be located in Booth 2202 in Moscone South.  This is the hall where Apple is located, and we’re on the right as you enter the hall.  Just turn right as you enter, and look for the big VMware banners hanging from the ceiling…

Or, just look at this map:

What We’ll Be Up To

We’ll be demoing VMware Fusion 2 on five demo stations, handing out “My Mac Loves VMware” laptop and bumper stickers, and doing presentations in our theater.

Even better, we’ll have some special guests in our theater.  Every day at 2PM, Joe Kissell from Take Control Publishing, will be presenting tips and tricks from his awesome book “Take Control of VMware Fusion 2”, the quintessential power user’s guide to VMware Fusion 2.

So if you would like to come say hi, whether you’re a curious would-be user, a current customer, press, partner, or so on, our booth is the place to be.  We’ll have something for everyone.

RSVP Pretty Please

If you’re planning on coming by our booth, do us a favor and drop us a note in the comments, or RSVP for our Facebook event.

Also, if you’re in town on Monday night, we’ll be sponsoring a user meetup at The Thirsty Bear restaurant, providing some good company and some tasty appetizers for Friends of Fusion before the show starts. 

Again, please RSVP so we know how many people to expect!

We’ll see you in San Francisco!

Congrats to my colleagues in the VMware Communities team for creating and fostering a place that made #3 on this list of web sites that IT pros should master in 2009.

There's some grousing in the comments over at Network World that some of the sites recommended here are "social sites," but I think that anybody who has participated at the VMware Communities is aware of the value it's brought them and their career. Virtualization as a platform and data center architecture touches on every part of your stack -- hardware, networking, storage, security, apps, and more. Being a part of a community of your peers -- one that's global and 24/7 and damn knowledgeable -- is as important a tool in your toolbox as a stack of white papers. This should be your first stop when you have a problem, and I hope you  stick around afterward -- you'll probably learn something!

Nine Web sites IT pros should master in 2009 | By Carolyn Duffy Marsan, Network World.

3. VMware Communities

Chances are you’ve already embarked on a server virtualization project, and continued consolidation of your servers is a key money-saving goal for 2009. Most of you are using VMware for your server virtualization projects, and our product reviewers recommend you stick with VMware over Microsoft’s Hyper-V for the foreseeable future. To get the best real-world feedback on how best to deploy VMware, keep your eyes on the VMware Communities Web site. It’s got user groups in your community and lots of tips from other VMware developers that can help you solve problems faster.

[You can also find this at InfoWorld]

Just wanted to wish everybody a happy (and prosperous) new year in 2009. This year should bring a lot of interesting developments to the virtualization world.  (Last year sure seemed to be busy.)

It's been 3 years since I started gathering together blogs and technical resources about VMware and virtualization. That topic deserves its own post, but if you've been watching you've seen the virtualization discussion continue its exponential growth, both when looked at over the last year and over this last quarter in the blogs on Planet V12n and lately Twitter. (Feel free to follow me on Twitter as jtroyer; again, Twitter deserves its own post in the next week or two after everybody gets their engines revved back up after the holidays -- it's been pretty quiet over the last two weeks.)

So welcome to 2009. If you're in the northern hemisphere, stay warm and/or dry. And to everybody, thanks for coming by and keep on virtualizing!

Thanks to none other than Mr. Luc Dekens the VI Toolkit Community Extensions are growing by leaps and bounds.

Here's a full list of the new advanced functions Luc has added:

As you can see most of these are around roles and permissions. Armed with these cmdlets you have a pretty complete way to automate the setup of permissions.

The other cmdlet is Get-TkeCDPInfo. CDP stands for Cisco Discovery Protocol, and if your ESX host is connected to a switch port that supports CDP, this cmdlet will help you determine what switch port the system is actually connected to.

Also, the VI Toolkit Community Extensions have been updated to support the newly-release PowerShell CTP3. One of the big differences between CTP2 and CTP3 is that script cmdlets are no longer supported, instead they have been replaced by Advanced Functions. Advanced Functions have a number of advantages over script cmdlets, one of the most obvious is support for embedding documentation in the function. If you load the community extensions and type "help Get-TkeCDPInfo" you'll get a full usage listing as well as other help to get you started. All in all, this stuff is starting to get a lot more usable.

If you can't wait to get started, be sure you have CTP3 installed and download the Community Extensions today!

Great work, Luc!

Site Recovery Manager 1.0 Update 1 was recently released (just in time for December holiday shopping!).  The full details of what’s new can be found in the release notes at http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/srm_pubs.html.  Here are some highlights:

• Expanded platform support for VMware Infrastructure.  Site Recovery Manager 1.0 U1 adds support for ESX 3.5 Update 2 and Update 3 as well as vCenter Server 2.5 Update 2 and Update 3.  It also adds support for ESXi for FibreChannel storage.  See the Site Recovery Manager Compatibility Matrix for full details of supported versions and required patches.
• Full support for RDM devices.  This release provides full support for virtual machines that use raw disk mapping (RDM) devices.  This enables support for adding virtual machines that are used with third-party clustering software such as Microsoft Clustering Services to a Site Recovery Manager recovery plan.
• Bulk entry for IP address reconfiguration.  This release includes a tool that allows you to specify IP properties (network settings) for any or all of the virtual machines in a recovery plan to make it easier to enter a large number of IP address changes.
• More granular permissions.   SRM now has separate permissions for testing a recovery plan and for running a recovery plan so that you can control access to both of those functions independently.
• Single-click reconfiguration of protection for multiple virtual machines.  This release introduces a “Configure All” button that applies existing inventory mappings to all virtual machines that have a status of “Not Configured”.
• Improved internationalization.  Non-ASCII characters are now allowed in many fields during installation and operation.
• Simplified Log Collection.  This release introduces new utilities that retrieve log and configuration files from the server and collect them in a compressed (zipped) folder on your desktop.

We’re excited about the continued momentum around Site Recovery Manager and looking forward to seeing people start to take advantage of Update 1.  If you are testing or deploying this update, let us know your feedback!

Jon

Hal posted a thread the other day about an apparent bug in New-VM which manifested itself by the inability to use all of the guest operating system types the documentation says are valid.

It turns out that the VI API Reference lists every possible guest OS that has ever been supported by any VMware product, and that a majority of them are invalid for any given version of ESX.

So which ones can you actually use? The answer is there, hidden under the usual web service layer that people so often resort to when cmdlets aren't quite enough. I suggested that a cmdlet to list the actual supported systems was in order, and in fact LucD created just such a cmdlet and added it to the VI Toolkit Community Extensions.

Here's a picture of it in action:

Thanks Luc!

Those of you who follow VMmark know that there are currently more than forty benchmark results from our partners posted on the VMmark Results Page . All of these results have been carefully reviewed by VMware to ensure compliance with the benchmark run and reporting rules. It has been very gratifying to see VMmark embraced and used so widely. Of course we try not to rest on our laurels and constantly seek opportunities to improve the utility of the benchmark.

As of December, the benchmark review process will be enhanced. A VMmark Review Panel comprised of several of our partners has recently been formed in order to provide additional rigor and transparency to the benchmark reviews. The founding members of the review panel are AMD, Dell, and HP, in addition to VMware. (We hope to add more partners soon.) I am delighted to welcome them to the review panel and thank them for showing their support for VMmark by devoting resources to this effort. This broader and more open review process will produce an even greater level of confidence in the accuracy and compliance of published results. Please see the VMmark Review Panel Guidelines for more information.

A lot of great new VIX stuff is coming up from all over, this time it's Daniel Doubrovkine on the VIX community telling us about a library he's created that makes calling VIX from .NET really easy. If you're a .NET minded individual this stuff will make your life a lot easier, and it supports everything VIX supports, Workstation, Server as well as ESX.

Below I offer just a small bit of proof about just how easy it really is by using it in a PowerShell script I whipped together in about 20 minutes. This script is designed to work with ESX and requires the VI Toolkit (for Windows) to be installed.

The script is basically yet another example of restarting a service in a guest, which you might as well be my version of "Hello World", still I'm really excited to see how much easier it's getting to manage your guests with VMware software.

Thanks Daniel!

# Before using this sample, download the Daniel Doubrovkine's VIX

# interoperability library from

# http://www.codeproject.com/KB/library/VMWareTasks.aspx

# and change the variable below to point to it.

$vestrisDir = "C:\Vestris.VMWareTasks"

# Run a script inside a VM using VIX. This should work against ESX 3.5

# U2 or higher, as well as VMware Server and Workstation. See below

# for an example.

function Invoke-Script {

param ($hostCred, $guestCred, $vm, $command, $args)

$vmo = get-vm $vm

$vmView = $vmo | get-view

$vmx = $vmView.config.files.vmpathname

$hostNet = $hostCred.GetNetworkCredential()

$guestNet = $guestCred.GetNetworkCredential()

add-type -path "$vestrisDir\1.0\Bin\Vestris.VMWareLib.dll"

add-type -path "$vestrisDir\1.0\Bin\Interop.VixCOM.dll"

$myHost = new-object vestris.vmwarelib.vmwarevirtualhost

$myHost.ConnectToVMWareVIServer("https://" +

$defaultVIServer.Name + "/sdk", 0, $hostNet.UserName,

$hostNet.Password)

$vm = $myHost.Open($vmx)

$vm.Login($guestNet.UserName, $guestNet.Password)

$vm.Execute($command, $args)

}

# Login stuff.

$ip = read-host "Enter the IP of your VC / ESX server"

write-host "Enter login and password to VC / ESX"

$hostCred = get-credential

write-host "Enter login and password to your VM"

$guestCred = get-credential

# Connect to ESX/VC

connect-viserver $ip -credential $hostCred

# This sample restarts the print spooler.

$command = "c:\windows\system32\net.exe"

$args = "restart spooler"

Invoke-Script -hostCred $hostCred -guestCred $guestCred `

-vm "Windows2k3SP2" -command $command -args $args

Our new blog Uptime continues to deliver the goods. Two new posts from VMware's own Lee Dilworth cover vCenter Site Recovery Manager from the overview (if you're still trying to get a handle on what SRM does and how it replaces that paper DR plan and set of scripts you've never really fully tested) to the first FAQ and set of tips if you've been trying it out.

First, the video. You might recognize VMware Evangelist & VMworld Europe impressario Richard Garsthagen as well, fresh off his first video hit, VMware Infrastructure 3 demo.

Link: Site Recovery Manager Demonstration Video now online!

Next, Lee's FAQ & tips on SRM:

Link: VMware Site Recovery Manager - "From general release to Update1, what have we learnt and what's new?". Lee goes into a bit more detail, but here's sample question:

Q: What are the SRM failback options we see no button for failback which is confusing us?

SRM absolutely supports failback and each storage vendor documents the failback process for their specific replicated storage configuration. What you have to consider is that without SRM in your virtual environment you are back to manual and/or home grown scripts for DR you will no longer have automated Recovery Plans, no offline DR testing capabilities, and no DR audit trail.

After many takes and re-takes we have finished the SRM demonstration video and posted this for all to see. The purpose of the video is to provide a basic understanding of the SRM solution along with the disaster recovery challenges it solves.

We hope you find this a useful resource to share with your colleagues or customers.

These are instructions on how to change your ThinApp license.

Requirements

The following items and knowledge are required for use of this procedure:

Instructions on How to Change Y