Vinternals Doubles in Size!

Over the past few months I've been working away in the secret Vinternals coding labs on a virtual appliance with an esteemed colleague and virtualisation extraordinaire, Shyam Madhavan. What we've managed to put together is something we reckon is pretty amazing, and we hope to have something ready for you all in the next few days.

And here's the best part - it will be completely free.

After putting in such a monumental effort, it is only fair that he be rewarded with the massive fame and money that one can expect as a 50% partner in vinternals (needless to say, Shyam won't be quitting his day job). Keep your eyes peeled for some postings over the coming months / years, and be sure to check the site later in the week for more information on the appliance!

PowerShell - Create X Number of VM's per Datastore

We all love the 'shell, and the VI Toolkit for Windows even more. When i finish up with some other stuff, I'll surely be pointing my C# skills at some cmdlets for that.

Anyway, there are a load of "create VM" scripts out there, I thought I'd show you one with a useful twist - create a certain number of sequentially numbered VM's per datastore. For those new to the way of the 'Shell, # is a comment (unlike batch or vbscript)

$esx = Get-VMHost -Name esx.host.name
$template = Get-Template -name TEMPLATE-NAME
$x = 1

#loop through all datastores on host
foreach ($d in Get-Datastore -vmhost $esx)
{

#check that it's not a local datastore
if (!($d.name -match ":"))
{
#loop to create 10 VM's per datastore
for ($i=$x; $i -lt ($x + 10); $i++)
{
#append a number to VM name
$vmname = "VM" + "$i";
#create the VM from template
New-VM -Name $vmname -Template $template -Datastore $d -Host $esx
}
#set $x to the next number in sequence for the next datastore
$x = $i
}
}

There you have it. The only caveat is that the datastores don't get returned by name so if you have sequentially numbered datatstores and want the VM numbers to match (ie VM1 - VM10 on 'datastore 1', VM11 - VM20 on 'datastore 2'), you'll need to pump the datastores into an array and -sort it first or something. I'll leave the intrepid reader to handle that if required :-)

ESXi Free by End of July!

Yes I've been quiet of late, but for a very good reason... which I'll divulge maybe on the weekend ;-)

But todays news (Alessandro - you are a machine aren't you? When do you sleep!) was just too big to let go by - ESXi is finally free. Well... finally officially free - technically it's been free for ages, all you had to was download a patch for it, as ESXi patches are essentially entire new images (although of course it would've run in eval mode for 60 days... by which time another patch would have come out ;-)

This is a great way for VMware to hit back after the raft of troubles lately. All the arguments from Microsoft, Xen, etc have always been about price, and they no longer have a leg to stand on.

This actually makes Hyper-V more expensive than ESXi, as you still have to pay for the Windows OS in the parent partition. And pay for no less than Enterprise Edition if you want to cluster Hyper-V. Lets not forget the storage add-ons if you want a clustered file system.

This puts the ball squarely back in the competition's court, and might as well be the final nail in the coffin for Citrix XenServer as it is now the only major commercial hypervisor on the market you have to pay for.