Vizioncore Free Tools!!

The first post is about a couple of Vizioncore’s free tools, namely vEcoShell and vFoglight Quick View.

As any regular readers of my blog or followers on twitter will know I am a big fan of vEcoShell (www.thevesi.org), the good news is that vEcoShell has now left beta and is still a freeware application. Great thanks must go to Scott Herold (@vmguru) and his team as well as the community for making such a fantastic free product!.

vEcoShell is a freeware application that utilises the power of PowerShell in a graphic user interface to assist administrators manage and report on their virtualised environment.

You don’t need to have any powershell experience or knowledge as everything is presented to you through the GUI, vEcoShell takes care of the powershell code.

With the community being heavily involved in the product some of the best powershell experts in the VMware community have teamed up together to make their own powerpack to help you even further. For more information on the powerpack check out the landing page on Alan Renouf’s blog http://www.virtu-al.net/featured-scripts/vmware-powerpack/

With this first GA of the product comes a couple of new features over and above the last beta these include

• Completely rewritten PowerPack to support VMware PowerCLU 4.0 Update 1 and its ability to manage connections to multiple $viServer objects.
• Ability to copy and paste code from “PowerShell Code” tab directly into standalone PS1 files (Will still need to Add-PSSnapin and Connect-VIServer for script to function).
• Ability to copy and paste code snippets from the internet and they will work without needing to add our $managedHost.connection code everywhere.

For the latest information of vEcoShell, blog posts by Scott Herold and to join in with the community visit http://www.thevesi.org

The next free product is vFoglight Quick View, you may already be familiar with Vizioncore’s VMware monitoring product vFoglight (http://www.vizioncore.com/products/vFoglight). They have now released a simple cut down version of the product that aims to give you basic monitoring information regarding your virtualised environment. It supports monitoring of 1 vCenter with up to 250 and will give you 6 reports surrounding the health of your environment. An important point to note is that there is no upgrade path between vFoglight Quick view and the fully featured product, so if you are thinking about purchasing vFoglight in the short term you maybe better trialling a vFoglight.

The install process for vFoglight Quickview is very simple and is a point and click operation, it did take a little longer than I expected but when I installed it, it was only in a VMware Fusion VM on my MBP.

Once installed the management console for vFoglight Quick View is accessed by a web browser, this makes it very easy for multiple people to access and for remote access over a VPN etc.

When accessing the console you are presented with a very clear view of the health of your environment, you will see the spinning dials that are a familiar vFoglight view. I have been using the product to monitor my virtual environment for the last week and have been very pleased with the results.

Here is a getting started video put together by Vizioncore