If you’re a VMware Lab Manager user, you may have encountered a strange-sounding recommendation that you shouldn’t manage an ESX system with both Lab Manager and VirtualCenter. One reason stems from the fact that if you delete a VM directly from an ESX server, VirtualCenter will actually display the VM as "orphaned". If you use Lab Manager extensively you’re going to be creating and deleting a lot of VMs, and since Lab Manager manages ESX directly, this leads to lots of orphaned VMs, which can quickly become a usability issue.
Justin Grote has written a script that he uses to deal with this problem. Justin makes peace between the two by figuratively sending the two products to their respective rooms: all Lab Manager VMs are kept in their own folder and resource pool, which also makes it easy to identify an orphaned Lab Manager VM when it comes time to remove it later on. It’s a great example of how a tool like the VI Toolkit (for Windows) can make your life easier, whether it’s by filling in some of the blanks left in VMware’s products, or just coping with stuff that maybe shouldn’t be that hard to begin with.
Great work, Justin!
