There are number of excellent free tools you should take a look at when you next have an opportunity. If you have a free scripts, tool or process that you would like to have hosted on RTFM Education then please drop me an email. I recieve many thousands of hits per week, so your sure to have your work recognised by everyone in the VMware Community.

Michael Knight’s – Patching Script
This script allows you to apply multiple patches in the tgz that can be download from VMware’s Website

http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/vi3_patches.html

Simply download the tgz files to /var/updates and then execute Michael’s script with sh esx_apply_patches.sh. Michael’s script will find all the tgz files, extract them, and apply them in date order. During the install process it will give you a progress of the update process with 1 of 8 style counters.

Remember most patches require you to power off VMs before hand, and some require a reboot of the ESX host at the end

Link: http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/downloads/esx_apply_patches.sh

Richard Garsthagen’s – runvirtual.com
Richard is VMware employee and his current role is as the Technical Marketing Manager for EMEA. In his “spare time” Richard is exponent of the VirtualCenter SDK. He has number of free tools which he hosts on his website and they are all rather excellent. This include:

• ITQ VLan and Portgroup Manager (Bulk changes to ESX vSwitches and Portgroups)
• The VM Order HOTLINE (Automated VM provisioning)
• Virtual Mac Tool (Manage static MAC address in a VM)
• VM PerfMon (Show real performance inside a VM)
• VM Time (Check the time in a VM against ESX host time)
• VMotion Info (Check the CPU attributes of your ESX Host)

Link: http://www.run-virtual.com

Ulli Hankeln’s - MOA
Ulli’s website http://www.sanbarrow.com/ hosts a plethora of free tools. Perhaps the most powerful is his MOA project. It is a plugin for Barts Pebuilder version 3.1.10a and it builds a Windows-LiveCD based on 2k3 with VMware Workstation 5.5.*, from within MOA you can run other virtual machines.

Link:

http://www.sanbarrow.com

Alex Mittell’s – visbu 
Alex Mittell of Oxford University has released a free ESX 3.x.x backup script

Link:

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=70253&tstart=0

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~alexm/README

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~alexm/visbu-0.8.4.tar.gz

Ricky El-Qasem – VMsnapper
Ricky El-Qasem of http://www.virtualizeplanet.com has a cool tool available for free. It allows you to select more than one VM and revert its snapshot – this is better than the Vi Client where each snapshot must be reverted by hand…

Link

http://www.virtualizeplanet.com/content/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=26&Itemid=44

Veeam Tools
Veeam have some tools that are for free (although you must register an email address before downloading them) others are evaluation only. There software includes:

• Root_Access (Automates the enabling of root SSH access on a ESX host) FREE!  
• Fast SCP (Quicker than WinSCP!) – FREE!
• Report (Creates Visio Diagrams from VirtualCenter data) EVAL
• Monitor (Performance Analysis) EVAL

Link: http://www.veeam.com/