sessions

VMworld Europe 2013 Day 2 and the VMworld Party

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Sessions summary

 

Here is a list of sessions I managed to attend on Wednesday:

  • Getting started with Horizon Workspace: Use cases and Configuration
  • Demystifying VMware Mirage: Tips and Tricks for Success

Horizon Workspace is really quite well featured, and provides a centralised location for the workforce to access all the apps, desktops and data that is relevant to their role in the company. VMware use this internally, and it is a great example of how one can mobilise a large workforce.

The Mirage session felt quite lengthy, but it did have a wealth of information and best practices tips that were discussed. The session did start to feel a little bit tedious toward the end, but that was mainly due to the many slides of tips & tricks. Perhaps a slightly higher level look at the best practices would have suited the session time better. However, anyone who attended should now have a very good idea of how to approach a Mirage deployment from the start to the finish.

 

Vendor time / Solutions Exchange

I had a good wander around the solutions exchange and chatted with various vendors. Some of the interesting areas I looked at were:

  • Nutanix
  • Simplivity
  • PernixData
  • nVidia
  • PuppetLabs
  • Cisco
  • VCE

I must say thanks to Simplivity and Nutanix for their vExpert gifts – I collected an awesome Raspberry Pi, and vExpert Beer glass from both 🙂

 

Hands on Labs

I got some more time on the HOLs section and managed to do some more PuppetLabs modules. This is a great framework/product and I’ll definitely be looking into it further in the future. It was also good to catch up with Steven Thwaites at the PuppetLabs stand – previously known from Xsigo, and have a chat with him around all the awesome PuppetLabs framework and functionality.

puppet-labs-logo

 

Bloggers / Community lounge

I spent a bit of time early morning catching up with other bloggers and networking. I had a good chat with Erik Bussink, and we also had a bit of a look at some troubleshooting his vMetrics plugin he grabbed from this blog which was having trouble connecting to WordPress. Incidentally, he has some awesome information about Infiniband and using it in your lab environment with ESXi – go check out his blog for more info if you are interested!

 

VMworld Party

Hanging around after the main conference event until 7pm, meant we could jump straight across to the VMworld party. The event was put together well, with some impressive layouts.

In the center area was a large roller disco, with the main stage up front hosting two or three acts throughout the evening. Food and drinks were plentiful and there were various arcade games scattered around the area. I had to fire up some old school Street Fighter, so we had a few vs. games of that among others.

Left to right: Darren Woollard, Michael Poore, Gregg Robertson, Paul, Daragh, Sean Duffy, MrX?, Ather Beg, Curtis Brown
Left to right: Darren Woollard, Michael Poore, Gregg Robertson, Paul, Daragh, Sean Duffy, MrX?, Ather Beg, Curtis Brown
Roller disco
Roller disco

VMworld 2013 Party

Taio Cruz - not my first choice in music, but great to have a live act none the less :)
Taio Cruz – not my first choice in music, but great to have a live act none the less 🙂

VMworld 2013 Party

VMworld 2013 Party
Aliens on stilts walking around the party

Get vCenter User Sessions and Idle times with PowerCLI

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Today I was looking into a small “nice to have” notification system for users that had left their vSphere clients open and logged into vCenter. I found this great bit of script to list currently logged in users over at blog.vmpros.nl and thought I would expand on this in my own way to generate a handy list of logged in users and their current idle time – similar to the way the “Sessions” tab in the vSphere client displays user session information. When I got home this evening I expanded on the original script from vmpros.nl to create the following:

 

$Now = Get-Date
$Report = @()
$svcRef = new-object VMware.Vim.ManagedObjectReference
$svcRef.Type = "ServiceInstance"
$svcRef.Value = "ServiceInstance"
$serviceInstance = get-view $svcRef
$sessMgr = get-view $serviceInstance.Content.sessionManager
foreach ($sess in $sessMgr.SessionList){
   $time = $Now - $sess.LastActiveTime
   # Our time calculation returns a TimeSpan object instead of DateTime, therefore formatting needs to be done as follows:
   $SessionIdleTime = '{0:00}:{1:00}:{2:00}' -f $time.Hours, $time.Minutes, $time.Seconds
   $row = New-Object -Type PSObject -Property @{
   		Name = $sess.UserName
		LoginTime = $sess.LoginTime
		IdleTime = $SessionIdleTime
	} ## end New-Object
	$Report += $row
}
$Report

 

[download id=”6″]

 

Here is an example of the output of the script:

 

Using this bit of PowerCLI script, it should be easy for you to create your own notification system based on user session idle time, or some functionality that would disconnect idle users. Let me know if you do improve on the above, or if you have any other suggestions.