VMware community spices up VMware Storage VMotion

One of the things I like about being in the IT industry is the sense of community. And as both VMware and virtualization in general continue to expand in popularity, the virtualization community continues to grow around it. Case in point, VMware offered a new feature with its VI 3.5 product, Storage VMotion, and members of the community have already started helping others through the creation of additional 3rd-party utilities that help expand the ease of use of this VMware feature.

VMware describes Storage VMotion as a state-of-the-art solution that enables users to perform live migration of virtual machine disk files across heterogeneous storage arrays with complete transaction integrity and no interruption in service for critical applications.

This feature does for virtual machines and storage what VMware VMotion did for virtual machines and compute capacity. However, members of the community may not have been overly excited about the way it was implemented.

To try and answer that calling, there have already been two virtualization community members that have taken matters into their own hands.

Alexander Gaiswinkler has created a Storage VMotion graphical user interface. His instructions are simple: Install the VMware Remote CLI on a Windows machine to the standard path, Save the file vms.pl into the C:Program FilesVMwareVMware VI Remote CLIbin directory, Save the svmotionGUI.exe on the machine, and then Double click it.

You can download this utility from the VMware Community Forum.

Around the same time, Andrew Kutz from Lostcreations developed his own utility to solve end-user woes from using VMware’s Storage VMotion capabilities.

The tool is called SVMotion, and it is a VI 2.5 client plug-in that extends the client’s functionality by providing an integrated, graphical tool that can be used to invoke Storage VMotion operations. Kutz caveats the tool with a notice that the plug-in is not supported by VMware in any way.

Kutz told me that he had been tinkering around with reverse engineering the VI Client Plug-In architecture for a few weeks before Gaiswinkler’s stand-a-lone GUI application came out. The application was well received, said Kutz, but it was only a wrapper for the VMware RemoteCLI and he believed it should and could be a real plug-in.

When asked about the challenges of creating such a project, Kutz said “there is of course zero documentation on how to write VI client plugins”; and so he plans on releasing a white paper soon that will show other developers how they can create their own plugins. Kutz stated that “VMware also bypasses their own SDK within the plugin framework, instead transforming the largely procedural SDK set of APIs into a more object oriented namespace called Vmomi. And of course, this has no documentation either.”

The VMware Community Forum has been discussing both of these utilities. So far, everyone seems to really enjoy the functionality that these tools deliver. Kutz said, “The VMware forums are alive with users wondering why VMware has not incorporated this functionality themselves.” And he added, “My best guess is that they are working on it, but are running into some of the same challenges as me. For example, my plugin does not show file sizes (yet). This seems like a natural necessity for a storage migration plugin, but getting file size information from datastores is slow and cumbersome, and does not lend well to a snappy interface.”

You can find out more information about the SVMotion plug-in on Lostcreations.com, here. And you can download the tool, here.

Remember, neither of these tools are supported by VMware and therefore are to be used at your own risk.