In one of my last posts, I showed you how you can inventory locally running VMs:
In this post, I want to finally show you the first version of my VDI Manager, which will help your users to keep track over their VMWare and Hyper-V VMs. You can find the project on my GitHub: Scripts/VDI-Manager at main · mmeierm/Scripts
The project consists out of the Client Scripts for the UI and Notifications and a Versions.json file, that you can save on a webserver or Azure Storage Account to let VDI-Manager know which VMs are current, outdated or have alerts assigned to them.
To get started, we have to adjust the version.json to match our known VMs:
The Names of the VMs in line 2, 11, etc. has to match with the VMs on the devices to be detected. The expiry date is used in the GUI to show if the Machines are still current or outdated and are used in the Notifications script to inform the user proactively as well. The Download filed is used in the GUI option to allow you to point the user to download this version from, in my example the Intune Company Portal. The ReplacedBy option points to the newer version that replaces the current VM. Notes are visible in the GUI next to all VMs. Alert and AlertMessage allows you to inform the user about urgent issues with a specific VM.
And once uploaded to the storage of our choice, we need to modify VDI-Manager.ps1 line 242 to point to our file:
VDI-Manager GUI
If you start the VDI Manager in the default GUI Mode:
You will see an overview over all Hyper-V and VMware Player / Workstation VMs running on this device:
The expiry will be reflected in the color of the cards and also of the title banner in the details view of a specific VM:
If a Update is available for a specific VM, we show the “Get update” Button in the details page, that allows the user to directly jump into Company Portal to download the newest verison of the VM
VDI-Manager Notifications
If you run the VDI Manager in Notification Mode (preferably via TaskScheduler or similar):
We can inform the user about VMs, that have a new version available, or VMs that have already expired:
We also can let them know about stale VMs that we not used for a long time or show them Alert messages about specific VMs, to let them know about urgent issues:
All these messages let the user directly jump into the GUI to get more information about the machines:
Conclusion
In my opinion, VDI Manager can help close the gap between IT trying to know what VMs are in use and the users trying to understand which is the right VM for them and keeping track on updates, etc.
Leave a Reply