On the subject of our site sponsors PHD Virtual Technologies Inc. I’ve mainly talked about their flagship product esXpress.
However, in addition to esXpress for backups, PHD Virtual Technologies has developed a suite of free open source utilities for optimizing virtualized environments. Whether you need to plan, document, configure, snapshot, or automate repetitive tasks, they have a free product that can help.
VMNetBac allows you to backup and restore the network configuration of your virtual machines. Designed for Windows 2000, 2003 and XP virtual machines it can be useful as a quick recovery tool when performing intrusive or mass-upgrade type tasks where there may be a risk of losing network configurations.
Virtual SAN appliance for VMware ESX 3 Server provides the benefits of shared VMFS storage without the cost of a SAN. It utilizes otherwise unused local storage in the ESX server to facilitate enterprise-level features such as vMotion, DRS and HA. All volume data is synchronously replicated between hosts, providing full failover capability with data integrity in the event of host, disk or appliance failure. Virtual SAN appliance has been designed to be as easy to configure as possible, and full documentation is provided.
SnapHunter is an ESX 3 Service Console utility which reports back on the Snapshot status of virtual machines from multiple ESX Servers. Features include:
• Identifying virtual machines containing snapshots; showing size, date and name of snapshot
• Optionally committing snapshots
• Email reporting and scheduling
QuickConfig reduces the time needed to deploy and configure VMWare ESX 3 servers, and to eliminate inconsistencies that can arise with manual operations. This Windows GUI utility is based upon similar functionality in the VMware web-based Scripted Installer, but with the additional options of creating post-configuration files and loading and saving configurations for repeated use.
Check them out! They’re FREE!
