Bluebear Kodiak

A couple of weeks ago, a colleague of mine pointed me at this site (thanks Raphael):

http://www.bluebearllc.net

They are a start-up software company who are building a “hypervisor-agnostic and cross-platform” virtualization management application.

I just received my beta key and have been having a quick look.  Its built on Adobe AIR and has a very fluid map model to move around the virtualization components.

You can see some screenshots here:

http://www.bluebearllc.net/kodiak/screenshots

It certainly looks very promising, as it is a free, open-source and can manage multiple ESX hosts without the need for VirtualCenter.  The maps are beautiful.  Combine this with a free ESXi license or two and you have a great solution for companies with no virtualization budget.

However I have one small bit of feedback for this new company.  They are branding everything around the bear nomenclature.  It is selling a small form factor server under the brand Koala.  As a “naturalised” Australian, I have to point out to my American software friends that Koalas are not part of the bear family as any fair dinkum true blue Aussie would know.

Virtual Center linux client

Long time no blog…

My apologies to anyone who has emailed me lately.  I promise to catchup with them soon.  Things have been a bit buzy.

I unfortunately haven’t made it to VMworld this year, but have been following the news as much as I can.  One great piece of news that I just read on Duncan Epping’s great blog:

…VMware just announced the fact that vCenter Server will be released as a linux virtual appliance in the future and the vCenter client will be cross platform available.

I assume that the vCenter client will be the VI4 equivalent of the VIC.

I have said many time before that the VC server should be a linux based VM.  Looks like its actually going to happen.  Yippee.

Other reference cards

Long time no blog. Sorry, been kinda busy lately, but I want to link to a post with some nice Linux related reference cards.

10 must-have Linux (and not only) cheat-sheets

And here is a site where the author has created several nice bash, perl and vim sheets, which all you Service Console gurus might like:

http://www.catonmat.net/projects/cheat-sheets

There are lots of these cheat sheets out there, especially for developers. Here are a couple of sites which list a lot of them:

http://www.cheat-sheets.org

http://techcheatsheets.com

Let me know if there any ones which you find particularly useful as an ESX user, and I’ll create my own “10 ten”.