Introduction
My day job, among other things consists of administration and configuration of virtual machines (VM) that are used in the test environment. Primarily for this purpose, we are using the Hyper-V virtual environment.
In order to simplify administration and configuration of the whole job, we are using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Console 2012 R2 (SCVMM) application. Besides all the beautiful features of this application are made, my colleagues and I had the need to see additional information about each virtual machine inside SCVMM 2012 R2 console, simplify VM(s) administration.
Hyper-V servers on which we creating VM(s) for test environment are found in a different Active Directory (AD) domain than the corporate AD domain. Access to all VM(s) is achieved through RDP connections. Due to the large number of VM(s) that are there, we need to isolate VM(s) from different test systems. In order to complete this task, we always create VM(s) from different systems using different IP subnets (different VLAN(s)). Because of this, we have to see information about VLAN using by VM(s) inside SCVMM console.
It often happens that the VM(s) on different Hyper-V clusters inside SCVMM console, have the same or similar name. Only IP address that VM(s) are using, has unique value. Therefore, the data in the SCVMM console was necessary to show the IP address of the VM.
Also, there is a need to display a column with the checkpoint number for VM. It often happened that we make one or more checkpoints in the context of one or more VM(s) and later forget to delete the checkpoints, which led to slowdown these VM(s).
Very often, the entire administration and configuration of VM(s) can’t execute only using SCVMM console but at the same time for the administration of VM(s) we need to use the Microsoft Cluster management console and Hyper-V console. It is therefore necessary to copy the VM name or the IP address from SCVMM console to the clipboard and use that data from clipboard to filter data inside Microsoft Cluster management console and Hyper-V console. Because of this, I add options inside Add-in to copy the VM name or IP address shown in the SCVMM console to clipboard.
The project was designed using Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop as .NET Framework 4 using C# programming language.
SCVMM Add-in was tested on the computer with OS w2k12R2 and SCVMM 2012 R2 without any rollup and all another rollup from 1 to currently installed rollup 12 for SCVMM 2012 R2.
How to Use
You need to install this add-in inside SCVMM 2012 R2.
Install can be done by importing the SCVMMAddin.zip file inside the "out" folder into your SCVMM 2012 R2 console. You may have to run SCVMM as admin in order to install the extension.
Complete screenshots of how to do that can be found inside help files with different help file formats, inside “doc” folder.
After installing Add-in inside SCVMM console, you need to add additional properties for VM to SCVMM console and after that step, you can see additional properties about each VM(s).
Additional Resources
From MS documentation, you can see how to write add-in for SCVMM here.
An example Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 project is available for download at this link.
You can see the idea and the original code at the blog on web location here. In the mean time, I found the same code from the mentioned blog on web location here.
To generate help file in a different file format, I used free software from chmProcessor.
"ChmProcessor is a tool for creating HTML help (CHM files) from MS Word or HTML files."
You need to download and install chmProcessor software to your computer. After that, you need to write your help as MS Word document. That document will be used as source for chmProcessor tool to generate documentation of different file types.
All the icons used in this SCVMM Add-in have been taken from this website.
