Just in case though ;)

VMware have their VI toolkit in beta, and I’ve been lead to believe that it has lots of PowerShell goodness. There are apparently 102 cmdlets included so a lot to take a look at and play with.

I’ve just found out that my main machine is due to arrive on Sunday, so as I am currently a man of leisure, I should have some “play” time available over the next week or two :)

The toolkit beta is available here and there’s also a blog available.

But he got back on the “tools” over the weekend, and posted a four part series on “Terminal Services Gateway and Terminal Services Web Access using Hyper-V”:
Part1
Part2
Part3
Part4

I wonder with that blog title, if his next move will be to Microsoft Marketing and product naming. *joke*

John has some excellent posts from his old days *grin* which are well worth a look while you’re perusing his site.

Hopefully, this latest burst in blogging signifies a return to form John?

I just find the interface very slow and hard work to use. As mentionend by Chrissy there is a VMware Infrastructure Client (2.5) that can be used instead of the Web UI.

Now ignoring the rather bizarre way required to acquire the 53mb client – which is included in the linux tarball and err, apparently not in the Windows package, I just can’t seem to get it to work – I am working in a test lab so I’m not using any AV, and I have the firewalls disabled on both of my Windows 2003 servers.

I’m able to connect via the Web UI, and all the other connectivity tests work fine:
- I can ping both servers from each other
- I can telnet from Server1 to the Host on port 8333

However, I always get the error message: “..could not establish the initial connection with server Server2. Details: The server took too long to respond”.

If anyone has any constructive ideas please feel free (really) to post a comment, or on my thread over on VMTN. ;)

I’ve found there’s a way to do this that is quite painless, and is possible with the tools that I use daily – admittedly it doesn’t mean that you use them daily, but maybe you do: WinPE from the Windows Automation Installation Kit (WAIK), and vmware-vdiskmanager.exe which is installed as part of VMware Workstation or Server.

First of all we need to open up cmd.exe and run the following command from within the VMware Workstation/Server folder:

In this example, we’re going to extend the hard disk in a 2003 server VM from 8GB to 10GB:

Next, we boot the Virtual Machine with a WinPe disk. We’re not going to go into the details of preparing a PE disk now, but the documentation can be found here.

Once the VM has booted into PE, we want to use the diskpart utility.

As you can see, checking the volumes after the extend shows that we now have 10GB available for use. A reboot back into the guest OS and we’re back in business, and we didn’t even have to break out Partition Magic!

Sure enough, on the Microsoft product page, there’s a link for the Top 10 Benefits of Virtual Machine Manager 2007, and down at number 10 we have:

Windows PowerShell provides rich management and scripting environment

The ability to automate common operations using a command line interface is core to the Virtual Machine Manager. The entire solution is built on the new command line and scripting environment, Windows PowerShell. This enables GUI operations to be quickly exported to PowerShell scripts for customization and automation.

This is great! The list keeps growing. :)