A number of great projects have come https://ausweb.com.au/dedicated-servers/ from out of these flings but my favorite, at least so far, is VMware Guest Console (or VGC).
The vSphere Client is focused on managing ESX/ESXi hosts and virtual machines (and it does a great job of it). However, it doesn’t get into managing the guest OS. VMware Guest Console steps in to manage those virtual guests’ operating systems.
To summarize – VGC will manage files and processes on all virtual machines in the vSphere infrastructure. Additionally, it will manage snapshots of VMs and perform mass deployment of scripts across multiple VMs.
Perform a CLI commands on all VMs – what if you need to delete some files or perform a CLI-based update command on 100+ VMs in your virtual infrastructure? VGC can do it for you.
Locate and Kill Processes on all VMs – what if you have a virus running on multiple VMs in your VDI virtual infrastructure? VGC can locate every VM running a particular process and kill it.
Once VGC talks to vCenter (or ESX), you’ll want VFC to login to your guest VMs. There are a few different ways that this can be accessed but I right-clicked on the vCenter server in VGC and selected login guest. I specified the default Windows username & password for these VMs and VGC proceeded to login to each. This is how it obtains the process list and gains access to the files for each VM. You can specific separate credentials for Windows vs. Linux VMs.
Overall, VGC is a very powerful tool for managing processes and files on VM guests. Additionally, VGC manages snapshots and VM details – all for free. To learn more about VGC, watch a video, which I created, where I demo the power of VMware Guest Console.