InventorySnapshot Fling Updated

Posted on 2 mins read

Personally I think this is one of the most useful Fling’s I have come across.

For those of you who do not know what a fling is…

A fling is a short-term thing, not a serious relationship but a fun one. Likewise, the tools that are offered here are intended to be played with and explored.

Four days ago the InventorySnapshot Fling was updated to version 1.1

From the release notes:

Updates in Version 1.1

These release notes are intended to supplement and super-cede the documentation in this fling.This release introduces three new features.

1. Template restoration. We have added snapshot and restore of VM templates. In other words, if you have templates in your hierarchy, when you snapshot and then restore the inventory, the templates should be re-registered properly. Prior to this release, we did not archive template information.

2. Command-line snapshot. You can now initiate InventorySnapshot from the command line using cmdLineSnapshot.bat or cmdLineSnapshot.sh. This will snapshot the inventory from the command line, but it will use dummy passwords for the ESX hosts. In order to edit the passwords for the ESX hosts, you will need to use the readFromSnapshot.bat (or readFromSnapshot.sh) UI. When you click on this script, a UI will come up that will ask you to specify the directory where the snapshot has been stored. You type in the name of the directory and click on ‘Read from snapshot directory.’ The UI will then load the snapshot, allowing you to modify host passwords, etc. You can also use the ‘Browse for snapshot directory’ to find the snapshot directory using the file browser.

3. Non-unique folder names. In the past, we required all entities (folders, VMs, RPs, etc.) to have unique names. We have now relaxed this restriction for VM and host folders. You can now have the following hierarchy:

Root
|
->Production A Folder
| |
| –>Production Folder
| |
| –>Host A1
|
->Production B Folder
  |
  –>Production Folder
     |
     –>Host B1

Note that the folder name “Production Folder” is repeated. This works for hosts and VMs. It should also work with datastores and networks, though those have not been as extensively tested.

Below is the original Video  released by the developers Ravi Soundararajan and Balaji Parimi

Flings are great tools - albeit not officially supported.

Something tells me we are going to get some new ones soon….

There is an RSS feed that you can subscribe to for new updates. I for one have update by bookmarks..