Thanks to everyone for you hard work and contributions to our VI Toolkit Scripting contest.
Now the time has come to announce our winners!
First Prize: Our first prize, a trip to VMworld, goes to LucD for his script, which is a really cool Guest Provisioning System.
I really like Luc’s application because it very easily lets you clone lots of VMs, while giving you control over a lot of the parameters that are frustratingly manual when you try to do them with other VMware tools. Not only that, but you can queue up tens or even hundreds of clone jobs and run them all with the press of a button. This is especially useful since cloning VMs can take a really long time.
Not only that, but as you can see above, this is not just some script meant to be run on a grainy old CRT terminal, it’s a full fledged UI. Speaking of its really cool UI, Bruce Payette, one of the key designers of PowerShell and author of the book PowerShell in Action, had this to say about it: "This is exactly the kind of application we were thinking about when we made PowerShell able to work with WinForms."
Those of us who follow the VI Toolkit for Windows community know Luc quite well, as he has contributed countless great scripts and has really made a difference to a lot of people. So again, congratulations to Luc and we hope to see you in Vegas!
Second Prize: Second prize, a Macbook air, goes to tzamora for his script, VMware Infrastructure Power Documenter. This script makes some really nice reports about VI and outputs them as OpenXML documents that can be read in your favorite word processor or spreadsheet. Here’s a sample.
Here’s what Bruce had to say about this script: "Very nice report generation tool, using OpenXML with templating, Excellent use of “meta” programming with paragraph and sentence functions. Fully parameterized so it can be used from other scripts. Well documented. Both useful and reusable."
Tzamora is something of a newcomer to the VMware PowerShell world, in fact this winning entry was tzamora’s first post on our forums. Congratulations to you, whoever you are!
Third Prize: And Dan Baskette is the proud owner of our third prize, an XBox 360 Elite, for his script powerVDI. Dan’s script can let you create thousands of virtual desktops instantly, consuming the space of one (assuming you have the right hardware).
Here’s what Lee Holmes, author of the Windows PowerShell Cookbook had to say about it: "Automates a very complex scale-out task, and combines a lot of technology (VMWare, Putty, AD, etc) into a single PowerShell task. Offers interactive use, unattended scripting. For high-scale clusters, this would be an enormous time-saver. This script really demonstrates the super-glue nature of PowerShell."
Great work Dan!
Honorable Mentions:
I wanted to make a few honorable mentions because there really was a lot of great stuff contributed. We saw a lot of scripts around reporting, including our second prize winner — obviously this is a big concern for everyone. I wanted to point out my personal favorite reporting script, Alan Renouf’s "Report into MS Word". While Bruce mentioned that Power Reporter was a great example of meta-programming (I’m taking his word on it), I loved Alan’s script because it produces a report with lots of pretty charts and graphs. This is one script everyone should check out.
Hal Rottenberg also nominated slx86’s CloneVDI. As Hal mentions, this script really demonstrates the full power of the VMware Web Services API.
Each honorable mentionee will receive a VMware shirt and a VMware coffee mug.
Congratulations to all our winners, and thanks again to everyone for all your great contributions!
