Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

Whilst we all await the “official” vSphere administration app for the iPad, as previewed at VMworld I found myself needing something to control my home vSphere lab environment from my shiny new iPad.

The iPad has now integrated itself as the device of choice with my wife & kids and is in regular use as a web-browser and media-player in the living room at home rather than laptops so this seemed like a logical extension

A quick browse of the iTunes store turned up iDatacenter, whilst not cheap at 8.99 GBP it works well in my testing as a basic administration interface to my lab and allows me to reboot guests/hosts as well as kick off vMotion and storage vMotion tasks.

It doesn’t offer a remote console or any historical performance graphing but it is good for basic administration tasks and looking at current statistics like CPU, memory and disk space – which is handy as my home lab currently has 21 ESX hosts and 54 “production” virtual machines

The following photo shows a quick view of the interface, my only minor gripe is that it doesn’t seem to recognise clusters as a management object – just individual ESX hosts or virtual machines and it can be a little bit slow at times, but those aside it’s worth checking out if you have this sort of requirement.

The application home-page is here http://nym.se/idatacenter/ and there is a video demonstrating the key features.