It’s not a secret that VMware loves the Microsoft Powershell scripting technology. And it’s not a secret that VMware loves to humiliate any Microsoft effort to compete with Hyper-V.
Merging together the two passions, Mike DiPetrillo, the now famous Special System Engineer of Industry Research and Competitive Analysis department at VMware, produced a script which brings the SCVMM Quick Migration feature to VMware VirtualCenter.
Microsoft Quick Migration isn’t comparable to VMware VMotion as the former implies some downtime when moving a virtual machine from a physical host to another, but some VMware customers may find it interesting because VMotion comes as an expensive option.
DiPetrillo assures that he’s not a professional script writer. Despite that he could build the feature with just 130 lines of Powershell code.
Maybe it’s just the powerful VMware Infrastructure Toolkit for Windows, maybe its just the powerful Powershell language, but the thing sounds very ironic here.
Of course this is not even near an official feature or tool and VMware doesn’t support it in any way.
Nonetheless the script is already popular among the community and some users already managed to improve it.
To demonstrate the capabilities of its VI PowerScripter (still in beta 2 at the moment) the new Swiss startup Icomasoft (see the virtualization.info coverage here) integrated the script into VirtualCenter and added a useful GUI to it:
Thanks to Duncan Epping for the screenshot.