Using BGinfo for Tracking Virtual Machine Contents

I’ve really started to get into using Virtual Machines (VM) to do all of my development and beta testing.  I’ve got several VMs setup using VMWare Workstation and, although it’s not often, I do have several open at once from time to time.  I also keep a lot of older VMs that I used for a particular purpose (like testing some product or a side project).  This leads to a little management issue of all these VMs.  What was that VM for?  What’s on it?

I use Sysinternal’s BGInfo utility to add some system information to my desktop on all my VMs.  For example, my personal development VM has the following displayed in the bottom right-hand corner:

This tells me the Hostname (blurred out here), OS, SP and what I’ve got loaded to work with.  Kind of handy if you have a large number of VMs.  The tool can tell you all sorts of stuff and you can have it create something that is pretty static, like what I have above, or you can include it in the startup path to have some information included such as last boot time and resource utilization.  I’m sure this tool was really meant for people to put on multiple servers in a data center, but I find it quite useful for my VMs.

VMWare Workstation also has a little Notes section that you can use to put your notes about a VM, which I often use to record what’s on a VM (or at least what was initially loaded or why I created it).  That works out well if I’m scanning through the Summary view.

If you aren’t familiar with the Sysinternals tools then you really need to check them out.  They have everything from tools to diagnose system problems to Active Directory explorers and screen savers that simulate blue screens.  You can find a list of their utilities on the Sysinternals/Microsoft TechNet website (MS purchased Sysinternals a few years back).

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