Trilead VM Explorer is a management tool that eases management, backup and disaster recovery tasks in your VMware ESX Server environment. You get maximum flexibility: backups can be stored to ESX, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD based storage platforms or directly to a SAN.

Features:

• Multi-Server Management: The graphical user interface of VM Explorer allows to connect to multiple ESX, Linux and FreeBSD servers at the same time in the same interface.


• Server to Server fast copy: Allows you to copy files directly (drag&drop) between ESX, Linux and FreeBSD servers at full speed: throughput is only limited by the available network/storage system bandwidth.


• ESX to ESX/Windows/Linux/FreeBSD/SAN Backup & Restore: Our unique ESX to any backup feature allows to backup virtual machines to other ESX Servers, Linux or FreeBSD servers. Of course, virtual machines can also be stored to a SAN (ISCSI or NFS) directly attached to an ESX. Furthermore, backups can also be saved on the Windows machine where the VM Explorer is running.


• Support for ESX 3i: VMX version 1.5 includes beta support for the next generation of ESX servers.


• File Browser: Browse instantly your ESX/Linux/FreeBSD servers' file system and copy files from one to the other just by drag & drop. Supports also up- and download to the management station.


• Integrated SSH Client: The integrated SSH Terminal Client allows you to configure all your Unix/Linux based Servers trough SSH, all within one software.


• Job Scheduler: The integrated job scheduler allows you to perform unattended, periodic backups of your virtual infrastructure.


• Integrated ESX Snapshot Manager: Create and remove snapshots directly from within VMX.


• Dynamic Compression: To make use of slow network links (e.g., for wide-area replication) or to save space on the target system, backups can be dynamically compressed.

• Screenshots


• Editions


• Download

From Yellow Bricks (Duncan Epping):

I’ve been doing VMware Design Reviews lately and so are my colleagues of the PSO department. A Design Review is quick scan of your design documentation by a VMware consultant. The consultant will hold your docs against best practices and propose changes to the design.

One of the things we encounter on a regular base is that admins took the easy path for their Storage Design zoning. So what’s zoning? In short: a way to partition your fabric into smaller subsets. These small subsets provide you with a better security and less interference...

Posted by Gabriel Maciel

Back in February I wrote a post about the VMware Tools and Utilities I use to administer our VMware environment. Now, via vmware-land.com we get the following list:

1-Putty - Telnet and SSH client for remotely connecting to the ESX service console
2-WinSCP and Veeam FastSCP - SCP clients for browsing ESX server file systems and transferring files to/from ESX hosts
3-VI3 SnapHunter and SnapAlert - Utilities that can report all running snapshots on ESX hosts including name, size and date. Can also automatically email reports and optionally commit snapshots
4-VI Scripted Backup Utility - A backup utility that is run from the Service Console that provides VMDK level backups of any VM on storage accessible by the host
5-MCS StorageView - A utility that displays all the logical partitions, operating system, capacity, free space and percent free of all virtual machines on ESX 3.x or Virtual Center 2.x
6-SSH Plug-in - A VI client plug-in that integrates an SSH console directly into the client
7-Storage VMotion Plug-in - A VI client plug-in that extends the client’s functionality by providing an integrated, graphical tool that can be used to invoke storage VMotion (SVMotion) operations
8-VMotion Info - A program that will collect Vendor, Model, CPU Types and the CPU feature bits from all hosts to check for VMotion compatibility
9-VMCdConnected - Scans all Virtual Machines and shows if they have a CD connected to it. After scanning the VM’s you can disconnect all the CD’s with a click of a button
10-VMware Converter – (Performs hot and cold conversions of physical and virtual servers to virtual machines. Also converts image formats

Enjoy!

Posted by Gabriel Maciel

This is the list of the links for this week:

1. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Connection Broker Comparison via Quest
2. Microsoft Hyper-V to flaunt advanced virtualization features via Infoweek
3. Virtualization's Impact on IT Operations - Part 1 via Virtual Strategy Magazine
4. Deploying Virtual Servers in a SAN Environment via Virtual Strategy Magazine
5. Alternatives to VCB for VMware backup via SearchVMware

And the winners for this week are:

1. Storage options for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V via Jose Barreto's Blog
2. More on Storage Options for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V via Jose Barreto's Blog
3. Microsoft Licensing: Part 5 (virtualization) via markwilson.it
4. Remote Access for Vendors via Life as a Healthcare CIO
5. Dice reports a 40% increase in the demand for virtualization jobs via virtualization.info

"We know that ESX can handle a large number of IOPS, but we set out to see just how far we could push it. We went to EMC and got as many storage arrays as we could lay our hands on. We picked a realistic workload of 100% random with a 50/50 read/write mix and 8KB block size and then fired it up. We kept pushing more and more IOPS and managed to get up to 100,000 IOPS before running out of storage array bandwidth. And we still had plenty of headroom to spare with ESX!"

Read the full article here

Posted by Gabriel Maciel

Mike Laverick recently gave a really interesting 42 minutes Webcast covering the following topics:

1) ESX Partitioning
2) Local VMFS Volumes
3) Pros & Cons of using SAN Storage
4) How big should my LUNs be?
5) How big should my Virtual Disk be?
6) How should you arrange Virtual Disks in VM?
7) What are the storage considerations for VDI?
8) What storage considerations do you have with VMware Virtual Machine Snapshots?
9) Storage Monitoring / Reporting advices
10) How fast will my Virtual Center Data Base grow?

You can watch the event here.

Posted by Gabriel Maciel