New VMware community created to share scripts

Nava Davuluri, a new hire into VMware’s product marketing group, recently announced VMware’s latest move within its community portal: a new piece of real estate called VMware Code Central.  Within this new community site, VMware hopes to centrally locate and organize freely available utilities, scripts, and code written for VMware environments and created by VMware community members.

Davuluri said the site “is intended for VMware community developers and system administrators who use VMware infrastructure and would like to have IT control through automation.”

[ Find out how VMware scripting is getting easier with VI Toolkit | Keep up with the latest virtualization news with InfoWorld’s virtualization newsletter and visit the InfoWorld Virtualization Topic Center for news, blogs, essentials, and information about InfoWorld virtualization events. ]

To kick things off, Code Central is inviting developers to submit their code written with the VMware vSphere SDK for Perl, PowerCLI, and CLI, or to submit Java or C# samples written for the vSphere Webservices SDK.

Some of the sample code already found on the community site includes the following:

• Backing up VMs in ESX(i) 3.5 and 4.x in vSphere SDK for Perl – allows users to perform backups of virtual machines residing on ESX(i) 3.5+ servers using methodology similar to VMware’s VCB tool
• Guest Provisioning System in vSphere PowerCLI – defines and creates VI guests based on templates
• Report into MS Word in vSphere PowerCLI – creates an environment report via MS Word and adds graphs and charts
• Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator in vSphere PowerCLI – recalculates all of your resource pools after you have deployed new virtual machines
• VMware Infrastructure Power Documeter in vSphere PowerCLI – creates nine different reports about the VMware infrastructure
• FindDatacenterByHostname in vSphere SDK for Perl – identifies the datacenter to which a particular VMware ESX host is assigned

If you’d like to participate by uploading your own code or scripting samples, Davuluri asks you to follow certain guidelines which should help make the site more user-friendly.  Help others by providing a clear and descriptive name to your project, assign it relevant tags for searching, offer a screenshot of the final result set so people know what to expect as the outcome, provide good documentation, and give additional links to other resources that may provide additional help or explanation.

If this community site takes off, it will not only help those administrators looking for automation assistance, but it will also provide assistance to VMware’s R&D team to help them figure out what types of automation VMware users are looking for that is lacking in their existing management products.