Five apps to round out your vSphere solution

vSphere Client for iPad

Where tablet computing is concerned, the iPad is king. You have to download the iPad Client from the Apple App Store and then install the VMware vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA) virtual appliance connectivity broker. But no configuration is required on the vCMA. Just let it boot up and get a DHCP address. Here's a look at the vCMA downloaded and installed as a virtual appliance.

vSphere Client for iPad

The vSphere Client for iPad can now be pointed to the IP address of the vCMA to log into a vCenter Server system. The screen shot above shows the vSphere Client for  the iPad looking at a host's virtual machines.

vSphere Client for iPad

From here, power on, power off, suspend, and other basic tasks are available to administer virtual machines. You'll also see quick and easy views into the virtual machine's basic CPU and memory and disk performance information.

VMware vCenter Converter

VMware Converter is not at all past its prime. There are still plenty of use cases for it, including moving VMs outside cluster boundaries and some resizing techniques that can be done only while the VM is offline.

Version 5.0 snuck out last year during VMworld when nobody was watching. It includes support for vSphere 5 along with a slew of new killer features. For instance, it can now import Hyper-V VMs and backup images directly to vSphere virtual machines.

VMware vCenter Converter

VMware Converter 5 also lets you realign block sizes of the guest operating system partition. (Previously, systems that were read by VMware Converter and written to a VMFS volume on an ESXi host would incur partition offsets that would cause duplicated read and write behavior.) This critical feature is a default with VMware Converter 5.

vCenter InventorySnapshot

The vCenter InventorySnapshot tool lets you assess the current configuration and export it via a one-time iteration of the Java applet tool. This is handy if you often need to create vSphere labs with complicated cluster and DRS configuration. The InventorySnapshot tool will authenticate against the vCenter Server and then gather all objects in the datacenters and clusters. The authentication step is shown above.

vCenter InventorySnapshot

The entire configuration of the cluster objects is reported as a PowerCLI script (the vSphere PowerShell extension). Here's an example of this code report after the vCenter InventorySnapshot tool has been run.

vCenter InventorySnapshot

The ability to save this script for rebuilding a cluster can be invaluable in lab situations as well as production environments that may have custom DRS or HA attributes.

You can also host password changes within the vCenter InventorySnapshot tool. The screen shot above shows the field to change a host's root password and apply the same configuration to multiple hosts. (Only one host is shown in this example.)

ThinApped vSphere Client

VMware has produced a publicly distributable version of the vSphere Client in a ThinApp form. You may remember ThinApp as an application virtualization solution-- so why not do this to the vSphere Client itself?

The vSphere Client is a bulky install, especially if only for one-time use. The ThinApped client, however, is lightweight, requiring only about 168 MB of storage. This makes it perfect to sit with other common tools on a USB drive for quick and easy access when multiple Windows PCs and vSphere environments are used.

You know you're running the ThinApped version of the vSphere Client when the ThinApp splash screen appears on the screen, as shown above.

ThinApped vSphere Client

Once the client is loaded, it looks the same as the normal vSphere Client you may be using on your PC. The functionality behaves the same as the native install.

Here's a look at the ThinApped vSphere Client logging into a host.

vSphere PowerCLI

The VMware vSphere PowerCLI is a PowerShell extension specifically for vSphere. Installation is straightforward and you can be up and running in moments. From there, you can leverage some of its great community resources to retrieve data from your vSphere environment.

One resource is a very handy post by Luc Dekens that explains how to determine the IP, hostname, username, and session login for all active vSphere connections. This is different from the vSphere sessions screen, as it tells us only the username, the timing, and whether they are active.  

In the screen shot above, the script highlighted in Luc's post is being run, immediately giving my useable information.

vSphere PowerCLI

You can run simpler scripts to report the inventory of items such as hosts. You can run them with a one-liner, such as "Get-VM." as shown above.

vSphere PowerCLI lets you use it to the level of automation you are comfortable with, making it easy to get started. Plenty of online resources are available to help with PowerCLI scripting.