Does anyone know of any ways to automate the conversion of a .tib to a virtual machine file? I am looking to have a service that will automate the conversion process for my .tib files.
So far, the best solution that i found was using VMware PowerCLI, but it seems that you need access to their servers in order to use the actual conversion cmdlet (unless i am doing something wrong). If anyone has anymore information please let me know. Thanks!
VMware's standalone Converter can convert from some .tib versions and has an API, which I've never used.
I'm curious how you're doing this in PowerCLI.
edit - The Standalone Converter supports VMware Player and Workstation as destinations. See p20 here. So no, I don't think you need a full-fledged server installation to use this.
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Maybe a silly question, but google searching led me to no definitive answer. In short, if i am remoted into a citrix environment and running Excel from citrix, is Excel using my local PC's ram/cpu?
Unless Citrix works in very strange ways the answer is going to be no.
Excel doesn't have to be installed on your local machine and there's no easy way to make your computer provide resources to the remote system.
In the recent times, I tend to set-up and configure more and more VMs daily with very similar or the very same configuration, and due to the time consumption caused by that, I'm looking for a way to automate the whole process.
I have started looking around and I have found Vagrant which could be a very good starting point.
I would like to create a custom build of a VMWare VM ( vagrant box if not mistaken ), and I would like to use that box as my base and deploy it on my servers.
The trouble starts here:
On my servers I use VMWare vSphere and I see that Vagrant can support it via an external plugin, but, as I read along, I see that vSphere only supports VMs created from template or cloned from an existing one.
Is there any change to run my VMWare Workstation boxes with it ?
Also, I would be very grateful if you could provide me with some more info on the same matter using other ( maybe better suited ) solutions.
I know there are also Chef and Puppet, but are they maybe an overkill for my needs ?Thank you for your time and help,Best regards.
Have you looked into Ansible? http://www.ansible.com/home
There is an opensource one available it is extremly easy to use. Might be what you're looking for.
I would love to have an idea on how to automatically install a Windows XP virtual machine on Virtualbox/VmWare. Is this feasable via a programming language, for example ? Or maybe an automated script ? I need this to avoid manual installation each time one of my VMs crashes.
I am not asking for a full program that does this, but I just needs technical hints on how to do this, then I will perform your suggestions myself.
Yes it's possible.
Can't you just make a snapshot to when the VM is working, or at least a "Clean Install" snapshot that saves having to reinstall your OS and common applications every time?
Yes, it is possible to do this via script. Actually, all IaaS cloud companies now try to do the deployment of VMs (and also physical servers) via automation. First of all, it's cheap a quick. And there is little human factor in it.
Not sure about VirtualBox, but if it works with VMware, KVM etc., there is no reason it shouldn't with VB.
As for the script itself, there are big money in this, so finding something may prove difficult. Try to check openStack, AFAIK it should be open source.
I have written a program in PowerShell that loops and checks stuff.
I would like to convert this into a Windows service.
I've created a Windows service (in Admin->Services) but I can't start it.
I'm pretty sure I'm missing the proper interface that the system needs to call into in order to start/stop/pause/etc the service.
I can find plenty of examples when it comes to doing it in VB/C#/MS-lang but nothing about how to do it using PowerShell. Is there any documentation (or preferably code examples) out there to help with this?
There are a few items at issue here:
Are you sure that you really need a service? I agree with the comments about using the scheduler for running periodic tasks. The scheduler can start tasks as Administrator.
Services call a special set of APIs to communicate with the Service Control Manager, so an ordinary program can't be used directly.
The Service Control Manager uses CreateProcessAsUser to start the service process, so you need to point the SCM to an executable binary, as opposed to a script.
If you can't use the scheduler (though I strongly encourage you to try), I suppose that you could write an executable binary that acts as a service. It would then execute PowerShell and your script on your behalf. I'm thinking something like the srvany program that used to be included with the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit could bootstrap the service for you.
If you absolutly want to execute your PowerShell code into a service, I think you can write a C# service wrapper for PowerShell code.
You found examples of how to create a service with C#, and it's simple to call Powershell from C#. So I'am surprised that as small SrvAny oriented PowerShell does not exists yet.
My advice here, you better rewrite your code in C# as a service.
You can use the Compile Script into Service option of PowerGUI: http://documents.software.dell.com/DOC144271
I think what you are looking for is SrvAny.exe from Microsoft (I don't know that they support it any longer, but it has been around in the Windows 2000 Resource Kit for years. It will essentially turn just about any executable (.exe, .cmd, etc...) into a service. I have VBScripts running as quasi-services using Srvany.exe and it works on Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 (even 64 bit). It is a little limited in that it does not provide 100% service functionality (stopping a running script may be difficult) but if you now a bit about programming and the Windows environment you can adapt it to work pretty well (i.e. it will launch the program after server Restart/Startup as you would likely need from a service. There is some documentation with SrvAny.exe (although it can be a little obtuse and difficult to find). It is however Free and built for Windows so it should work for you.
I agree for simplicity that the Scheduled Task idea is worth thinking about as it is even more simplistic that srvany.exe
http://www.firedaemon.com/
Will allows you start littery anything as a service. There are also free alternatives to this application, that does the same.
A couple of years ago I used Make-shell to create custom shells with custom cmdlets.
Later I used snap-in technique and I forgot about that option.
Now I should deploy a set of custom cmdlets to a big set of customers, and it would be better to provide a zero-configuration solution; hence, I remembered the custom shell solution and I'm wondering if it is still the best solution in such scenario. It would be helpful also because my cmdlets use WF 4.0, so that the shell should run under latest framework version.
Anyway, I'm a bit scared about support for it: is it still working with Powershell 2.0 functionalities?
Are there alternative ways to easily deploy cmdlets on customers' machines?
Thank you
In PowerShell V2 the alternative are modules.
You can write script modules, binaries modules, manifest modules. Simple to deploy. They are deployed by a simple directory copy. And theoretically may be shared on the Network in a path writen in the environement variable PSModulePath.
According to this StackOverflow entry PowerShell (the engine) runs fine under .NET 4.0.
Make-shell is no longer provided with PowerShell, you can find it if you install the Windows SDK. This article present it as deprecated. But I'am not able to find the information on Microsoft site.
Not sure why you would use makeshell when you can create your own PowerShell "shell" called a host. Have you seen Joel Bennet's PoshConsole which uses .NET 4?
http://poshconsole.codeplex.com/
That said if you really want to use makeshell, I have more recent blog post where I built a new sqlps host with it even
http://sev17.com/2010/05/the-truth-about-sqlps-and-powershell-v2/