ForwardOrReverse

So here are the new editions.

Hmm.  My current Enterprise licenses will not give me the all of the feature of the new version.  There are a lot of angry blog posts out there on this new policy.  I do not know if I would consider myself angry, but I am disappointed and more than a little confused.

I understand that as new products come out (* Manager) I will be expected to pay extra for them.  They add a lot more value than the existing stack and I expect that.  In the case of new vSphere features VMware is introducing enhancements, but that is expected for a new product.

I do not understand being expected to pay more for something that is adding incremental value on a new product.  That is what the subscription is supposed to be for.

Here is a good write up of some other ramifications of this policy. VMware Slaps Enterprise and Cisco In Face, Opens Door For Competitors

My p2v was sticking at 2% and eventually failing.  Nothing was apparently wrong and a p2v worked yesterday to the same cluster.

Looking at the logs I ran across a message that led me to this forum post.  This was our problem too.  We had two NICs in a team – one was ok, but the other one had a duplex mismatch.  A quick change of active NICs and the p2v worked just fine.

Thanks Stridar for following up to your post with the resolution.

I have added some code to my Scripts/Programs page for securely storing credentials to disk to be used by scripts at a later time.

I explored the VI Credential cmdlets and I was not 100% happy with them so I decided to implement my own version that uses the Microsoft DPAPI for encryption.  Make sure to look at the README as it covers usage and current limitations.

I wrote these for use in some automated VMware monitoring I am doing, but there is no reason they have to be used with the VI Toolkit.  There are no dependencies on the toolkit.

Please provide feedback if you have any issues with the scripts.

When using Read-Host with the AsSecureString paramater in PS2 CTP3 the prompt text does not appear.  Here is a wrapper function that simulates the basic behavior.  This does not implement all of the other parameters of Read-Host as I only needed it for the base case.

# PowerShell v1
Read-Host "blah" -AsSecureString
blah: ****
System.Security.SecureString
 
# Powershell v2 CTP3
Read-Host "blah" -AsSecureString
****
System.Security.SecureString

My workaround:

# A workaround function for Read-Host not displaying prompt text when not in
# the ISE.
 
Function Read-HostSecurePrompt
{
    param
    (
        $prompt = ""
    )
 
    if ($prompt -ne "")
    {
       Write-Host ("$prompt{0}" -f ":") -NoNewline
    }
 
    # Throw the prompt back in just in case this is run in a graphical mode.
    Read-Host -AsSecureString -Prompt $prompt
}

Notepad++

I use Notepad++ for quick editing jobs because it is a very capable editor and it has a quick load time.  Works on a thumb drive.

Komodo Edit (Komodo IDE)

I use Komodo Edit a lot when I am working with Python, Perl, VBScript, JScript, or XML files.  It works on my Linux system as well which is a great bonus.  I like this editor because it more of a development environment and gives me a lot of flexibility in configuration and custom tools.

PowerShell Integrated Script Editor (ISE)

The ISE is in the CTP releases of PowerShell v2 and it is what I tend to use when I am working in PowerShell.  It is included in the distribution, is extensible with the custom menue, and it works.  It is pretty sparse on features, but I have not really needed much else up to now.

Primal Pad – Relatively new release from Sapien.  This is a neat addition to my USB drive.  I like that you can customize the toolbar to add custom commands.  This might be my new PowerShell editor for times when the ISE is not installed.  The link also lists the rest of the community tools provided by SAPIEN.

vi(m) – I am not geek enough to say that I use this as my every day editor, but it is one that is almost always available on my *nix systems so I use it a lot.  Also available for Windows.

Others that I have tried, but I don’t come back to often.

jEdit
Crimson Editor
UltraEdit
Admin Script Editor
PrimalScript