Today, I received my invitation to BlueBear’s new Kodiak 0.0.3.  Kodiak is a virtual infrastructure management tool created in Adobe’s AIR and should be multi-platform in both server and client technology.  Currently, any AIR platform is supported as client platform, and from Kodiak you can manage VMware ESX, ESXi and Server products.  BlueBear claims that Xen support is underway, and HyperV should happen in the future too.

I’ve been trying Kodiak now for a few hours on OS X and although it looks pretty and helps me visualize my test environment running on VMware Server 2, I am still unable to use the console.  Kodiak’s documentation is sparse, which is not helped by it’s current apply-and-you-might-ever-get-allowed-to-the-beta program.  But I hear positive comments when running it on Windows, so if you want to try Kodiak out, don’t wait and head over to their website to register yourself into the beta program.

BlueBear Kodiak 0.0.3 screenshot

One small reminder: if you want to connect to your VMware host (let it be ESX, ESXi or VMware Server 2), make sure you use the same server address as you currently use in your VMware Infrastructure Client: servername-or-ip:portnumber.  It saves you the humiliation of running into error #2032, which actually means that AIR and Kodiak is not able to connect to your VMware environment.

And I want my console to work!

Update: Bluebear came out with 0.0.4 of their Kodiak management software, with some SSL modifications that would make working with self signed certificates much easier.