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VMware has released the first beta version of their Infrastructure Toolkit. You can download it right now and start playing around with it. The beta consists of 102 Powershell cmdlets that covers most, if not all, aspects of administrating and scripting their Virtual Infrastructure.

I haven't played around with it yet, but I have a few tasks I definately want to script using the toolkit. Check our the VMware Communities site for more details and discussions.

Scripting snapshot based VM backups to secondary storage, perhaps iSCSI based, is on my todo list for work right now. I'll have to look at that when I return to work over the easter holidays.

Seems like Microsoft is having problems with delivering some of the promised features that were to be present in Viridian (Longhorn Virtualization). Yesterday the following was published by Windows Server Division WebLog:

So we are making the following changes, and postponing these features to a future release of Windows Server virtualization: · No Live migration · No hot-add resources (storage, networking, memory, processor) · Support limit of 16 cores/logical processors (e.g., 2 processor, quad-core systems is 8 cores; or 4 processor, quad-core system is 16 cores)

The lack of initial support for over 16 cores is one thing, but no hot-add of resources and especially no Live Migration was a surprise to me. Perhaps thats why you aren't really allowed to migrate virtual machines to often?

Jokes aside, I think this is a somewhat major blow for Viridian and Longhorn, I really did think at least Live Migration would make it into the final product. After all, thats one of the key points with VMWare VI3, and makes management of the host systems much easier and reduces scheduled downtime to a minimum.

Veeam Software, probably best known for their great FastSCP application, has made v1.5 of their Veeam Reporter available for download.

Veeam Reporter is a small application that aims to help VMware VI3 customers to administer and document their setup into Microsoft Visio 2003 and newer.

I gave it a test run, with a trial license, and it came through with flying colors! Within a couple of minutes I had a complete virtual network and storage map of my entire VI3 configuration, including configuration details on each of my VMs.

While VirtualCenter 2.x gives you a map view of your VI3 infrastructure, Veeam Reporter takes this to the next level and gets all your data extracted into easily modifiable Visio files.

Documentation and configuration management is essential to a successful VI3 implementation and Veeam Reporter complements the somewhat lacking Virtual Center map view in a great way.

As usual screenshots are available, and you can also view a sample Visio HTML report from the Veeam Reporter site.