Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 10

Busy week coming up. A full week of VCDX defenses again. This time we will conduct VCDX Defense interviews in Munich. I think we have over 10 candidates from 6 different countries and I am confident it is going to be fun again. Well at least for the people on the panel :-). No pressure guys... Anyway, before I pack my stuff to fly to Munich I wanted to give you this weeks Top 5. 

• Jason Boche - vpxd.cfg Advanced Configuration
  vpxd.cfg is an XML formatted file which can be modified to alter the native behavior of the VMware vCenter Server. Sparse references on the internet document the changes that can be made in this environment. Inspired by Ulli Hankeln, the purpose of this blog post is to collect and document all known, unknown, supported, and unsupported vpxd.cfg modifications in a centralized location.
• Duncan Epping - Reclaiming idle memory
  By default the balloon driver is used to reclaim idle memory. The balloon driver is in fact used as some operating systems only update there internal free memory map. Basically what I am saying is that the hypervisor is unaware of the fact that specific pages are unused as they might still contain data and the GOS(Guest Operating System) will not report to the hypervisor that the pages are not being used anymore. The balloon driver is used to notify the GOS that there is a lack of memory.
• Dave Convery - vShield Zones – Some Serious Gotchas
  vShield Zones seems to be the perfect solution for this. It works almost seamlessly with vCenter and the underlying ESXi hosts. It provides hardened Linux Virtual Appliances (vShield Agents) to provide the firewalling. It provides a fairly nice management interface to create the firewall rules and distribute them to the vShield Agents. Best of all, IT’S FREE! At least for vSphere Advanced versions and above. Keep in mind, that this is still considered a 1.x release and some things need to be worked out.
• Frank Denneman - Removing an orphaned Nexus DVS
  When installing the Cisco Nexus 1000V VSM, the VSM uses an extension-key for identification. During the configuration process the VSM spawns a DVS and will configure it with the same extension-key. Due to the matching extension keys (extension session) the VSM owns the DVS essentially. And only the VSM with the same extension-key as the DVS can delete the DVS.
• Eric Sloof - The vmClient 4.0 is released
  The vmClient is a lightweight tool which enables you to control the power of your virtual machines, it’s also capable of presenting the MKS console of your virtual machines. Before you can use the vmClient, you have to install the vSphere client on the same system. After starting the vmClient, you can logon to your vCenter server or individual ESX4 or ESX4i host. A list with available virtual machines will be presented after choosing the Virtual Machines menu item, you can also easily identify the power state of the virtual machines. Grey is powered off, green is powered on, yellow is suspended and red indicates that the virtual machine has an alarm. When you’re working in an RDP session there’s a menu item which can generate a Ctrl-Alt-Del in the guest OS instead of pressing Ctrl-Alt-Ins. The vmClient can run without borders in borderless mode. The menu bar has an option to search for virtual machines, just type in the first characters of your virtual machine name and the list will be filtered.