leedesmond’s blog

Hot News! Official announcement of the release of VMware Lab Manager:

Subject: Announcing VMware Lab Manager
Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2007
From: The VMware Team do-not-reply act vmware.com

Now Available from VMware

Virtual Lab Automation - A new class of automated software development and test infrastructure.

Unifying IT tasks, teams and resources across the software lifecycle has always been a difficult challenge. The issues that plague traditional software development include static resources that do not map to development needs, slow manual system setup and provisioning and inconsistencies in systems across test and development organizations.

Leveraging the power of VMware Infrastructure, Lab Manager lets you:

- Automate the setup, capture, storage and sharing of multi-machine software configurations.

- Close the loop between development and production and streamline the entire lifecycle management process.

- Move, share and coordinate multi-machine configurations across teams and facilities efficiently and fluidly.

Attend an upcoming Webinar to learn more about VMware Lab Manager and the power of Virtual Software Lifecycle Automation.

…

Learn more about how Lab Manager can help you:

http://www.vmware.com/products/labmanager/overview.html

- Reduce the capital and operating expense of maintaining disparate systems

- Shorten the time you spend provisioning configurations by up to 50%

- Minimize software defects that slip into production

Try Lab Manager at no cost for 30 days.

http://www.vmware.com/download/labmanager/eval.html

Thank you,
The VMware Product Team

No Comments »

As ESX Server 2.5.x continues to reign in the VMware world, one excellent reference that should belong to every serious virtualization practitioner’s bookshelf must be VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide (ISBN: 0971151067), ATDG 2.5.

Now that ESX Server 3.0.x has been out on the market for some months, the 2 original authors (Ron Oglesby and Scott Herold) plus Mike Laverick (new) are working feverishly on the successor to ATDG 2.5, known currently as the VI3Book. At the official site, you will also find electronic versions of ATDG 2.5 gradually being released free in the PDF format. Thanks Ron and Scott for making this happen!

See also: Home of the Virtual Machine Gurus

No Comments »

Expanding on this topic discussion further,

PS C:\> $wshshell = New-Object -ComObject WScript.Shell
PS C:\> $lnk = $wshshell.CreateShortcut (”$home\Desktop\myhome.lnk”)     #shortcut must have a file extension of .lnk or .url

The $wshshell.CreateShortcut() method does not actually save the shortcut until the $lnk.Save() method is explicitly called. This means that the former can be used to obtain a reference to the shortcut if it already exists.

You use $lnk.TargetPath property to specify or modify the actual item itself, be it an executable, a document or folder. This maps to the Target field of the GUI (on the shortcut tab) when the properties of the link is inspected.

The $lnk.FullName property returns the fully qualified path of the shortcut such as C:\Documents and Settings\administrator\desktop\myhome.lnk (maps to General > Location on GUI).

Some other useful operations:

$lnk.Arguments = “filename.ext”      #appends the arguments to the $lnk.TargetPath property

$lnk.WorkingDirectory = “C:\temp”      #maps to Start in: on GUI

$lnk.Description = “This is my home folder”      #corresponds to the Comment field on the shortcut tab.

No in-built method exists to rename a Windows Desktop Shortcut. This is actually not necessary because a shortcut is stored just like your regular file or folder in the underlying file system, and the Rename-Item cmdlet can be deployed:

Rename-Item $lnk.FullName “myNewHome.lnk” -PassThru

Similarly, a shortcut can be deleted using the Remove-Item cmdlet (will not show up in the Recycle Bin):

Remove-Item “$home\Desktop\myNewHome.lnk”

1 Comment »