vSphere Portable Management Toolbox – vPi by Xtravirt

vPi is a nice portable Management toolbox created by Xtravirt, for VMware admins. This toolbox which can be installed on Rapsberry Pi pocket computers, is packed with opensource tools and scripts for managing and monitoring VMware vSphere environments, so it's kind of “Swiss knife” for Virtualization consultants or IT admins. The toolbox can be downloaded as an ISO file from Xtravirt web site here.

Xtravirt known to my readers as a creator of free utility called vAlarm or some nice VMware vSphere Presentation Packs (PPT).  Also their utility for downloading vSphere documentation for offline reading, has been covered on my blog.

So this new project called vPi is nowThe personalized ISO image has GUI and shell access, where multiple utilities can run at the same time or can be scheduled. It's an Open source solution, community supported.

A quote from Xtravirt's website:

Supported by industry guru  – vGhetto health check and scripts provided by VMware’s William Lam, including approximately 150 pre-packaged scripts and reports.

Photo from a presentation done by Sean Duffy (you can download the presentation – link below)

The details of the software bundle:

• Perl 5.14.2 + CPAN 1.98
• VMware vSphere Perl SDK 5.1.0 build 780721
• Python 2.7.3
• Ruby 1.8.7 & 1.9.3 + Rubygems 1.8.24
• Ruby vSphere Console 1.1.0 (https://labs.vmware.com/flings/rvc)
• vGhetto Scripts – built as DEB package from William Lam. Includes a custom vGhetto update script to easily update the scripts from William’s Sourceforge repository
• ESXCLI 5.1 (a special ARM compiled version allowing it to run on the Raspberry Pi hardware)
• vmkfstools 5.1.0
• Misc. software: ngnix-light, PPTP Client, ifstat, iftop, subversion client, tmux

Here is a video presentation of the vPi on vBrownbag done by Sean Duffy:

Links:

• There is also a PPT which can be downloaded here: https://www.shogan.co.uk/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=vPi.pptx
• Quick start Guide (from Rapsberrypi website)

Source: ProfessionalVMware.com