www.run-virtual.com Everything you always wanted to know about Virtualization

Yippie!!

Well normally i try to keep my posts serieus, but sorry I have to express myself tonight. For months I have been wresteling with the VI3 SDK and was only able to write my own apps using PHP and Perl. Which is great, but does also limit what apps I can write for you guys (and girls?).

At VMworld I went to the session “vmotion – apples and oranges” or some thing like that where an engineer explained what features can be an issue for vmotion between boxes. So I asked what is the easiest was to find out what CPU features your actual servers support. The answer was disappointing, some story about inserting a floppy of cdrom in your physical server, rebooting????? and the small app will tell you. So they actually do expect you to go to all your servers with a actual physical notepad and write all those bits and bytes down and then later compare them. Yeah right.

Well I am finding out more and more that the VirtualCenter client is by far not using all the actual functionality of the VI3 product. One of the things the SDK does expose is for every physical server what kind of CPU it has and what features are available. You can even compare if one physical server might have different cpus. So, yes I could write a very easy application in Perl (using the perl toolkit) that shows you all the servers and their cpu features, high light the differences and asking you if you want to set a specific cpu feature mask for a group of selected virtual machines. All automated. Writing that application should take me about one hour. But then all you people need to be able to run that application, meaning you need to have perl installed, add some extra needed modules to perl, download the VI perl toolkit, compile the toolkit and run my small perl app. MMmmmm, far from user friendly. One other option would be to create a Virtual Appliance with linux, all modules installed, and you can just run that. That is easy, but come on, for a simple app, you need to download an entire Virtual Appliance?? mmm. a bit of over kill.

So I have been troubeling with this delimma and every time I think, let’s just write it in Visual Basic. A simple application environment to write win32 application (sorry C#, java, etc all to complicated for me). But how the freak do you program a soap webservice client in VB???? Well no help from VMware, as there are no VB samples and all VMware engineers are diehard C++ programmers, so forget about them touching a low live like Basic. For months I have been trying to get VB using a proper WSDL to work, with no luck…… (even google let me down)

til now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yippie, I can not express how happy I am. For 3 nights in a row I have been limiting my sleeping time on trying this challange. But I have done it. I have a working VB application running, where I actually understand the source code and wrote every single line of it myself, I have no slow delay problems (as many other people have using the WSDL file). WOW! Why did no one do this before??

So soon, on www.run-virtual.com, a new application “VmotionIT”, an application that will check physical server diffenrences and automates setting CPU bit mask on all your virtual machines

I can finally go to sleep now, with a big smile on my face

Now I can dream of all the other cool win32 apps I can write:

EasyESXSetup – An application that allows you to automate adding ESX servers in your VC environment, configure the right network settings, including enabling vmotion networks, nfs setup profiles, etc.

VM_DiskReporter – a win32 service that places and updates actual Virtual Machine disk information into VirtualCenter

wmkusage – but then win32

mmmm much to do… need to request a holiday i think

Sweet dreams.