Category: vSphere

The VMware Labs flings monthly for March 2021 – New Website

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A day late but never late than never, this is your monthly overview with all the latest and greatest VMware flings. The flings site received a new fresh look head out to https://flings.vmware.com to have a look yourself. I am not sure if the (are they new?) tags for updated or new flings are okay yet as one has been marked updated but it seems to be new while one new one I could find a blog post for from last month but I missed it for my overview, not sure what happened there. Overall I see four new flings and ten received an update.

New Releases

Configuration Wizard for Nuance PowerMic

vRealize Automation Code Stream CLI

Hillview: Distributed Data Visualization

SDDC Import/Export for VMware Cloud on AWS

Updates

Workspace ONE Mobileconfig Importer

Workspace One UEM Workload Migration Tool

vSAN Hardware Compatibility List Checker

Vmss2core

vRealize Build Tools

Horizon Cloud Pod Architecture Tools

Workspace ONE App Analyzer for macOS

App Volumes Packaging Utility

DoD Security Technical Implementation Guide(STIG) ESXi VIB

VMware OS Optimization Tool

New Releases

Configuration Wizard for Nuance PowerMic

Nuance PowerMics are the leading dictation device used in Healthcare today.
This handy standalone Fling will assist in determining the optimal PowerMic configuration for a specific customer environment.

To determine the configuration that works best for you, we need to know a few details about the customer environment:

  • Endpoint type
  • Endpoint vendor
  • Endpoint operating system
  • Single/nested mode
  • Horizon protocol

The PowerMic Configuration Wizard will then provide the specific settings for optimal PowerMic performance and accuracy in the customers environment.

vRealize Automation Code Stream CLI

vRealize Automation Code Stream CLI is a command line tool written in Go to interact with the vRealize Automation Code Stream APIs. This Fling is written to help automate Code Stream and provide a simple way to migrate content between Code Stream instances and projects.

  • Import and Export Code Stream artefacts such as Pipelines, Variables, Endpoints
  • Perform CRUD operations on Code Stream artefacts such as Pipelines, Variables, Endpoints
  • Trigger Executions of Pipelines

Hillview: Distributed Data Visualization

Hillview is a simple cloud-based spreadsheet program for browsing large data collections. The data manipulated is read-only. Users can sort, find, filter, transform, query, zoom-in/out, and chart data. Operations are performed using direct manipulation in the GUI. Hillview is designed to work on very large data sets (billions of rows). Hillview can import data from a variety of sources: CSV files, ORC files, Parquet files, databases, parallel databases; new connectors can be added with relatively little effort. Hillview takes advantage of all the cores of the worker machines for fast visualizations.

Hillview is a distributed system, composed of two pieces:

  • A distributed set of one or many workers, which should be installed close to the data (e.g., on the machines that host the data).
  • A front-end service that runs a web server and aggregates data from all workers.

The source code of Hillview is available as an open-source project with an Apache-2 license from Hillview’s github repository. For any questions, feature requests or bug reports please file an issue on github.

SDDC Import/Export for VMware Cloud on AWS

The SDDC Import/Export for VMware Cloud on AWS tool enables you to save and restore your VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) networking and security configuration.

There are many situations when customers want to migrate from an existing SDDC to a different one. While HCX addresses the data migration challenge, this tool offers customers the ability to copy the configuration from a source to a destination SDDC.

A few example migration scenarios are:

  • SDDC to SDDC migration from bare-metal (i3) to a different bare-metal type (i3en)
  • SDDC to SDDC migration from VMware-based org to an AWS-based org
  • SDDC to SDDC migration from region (i.e. London) to a different region (i.e. Dublin).

Other use cases are:

  • Backups – save the entire SDDC configuration
  • Lab purposes – customers or partners might want to deploy SDDCs with a pre-populated configuration.
  • DR purposes – deploy a pre-populated configuration in conjunction with VMware Site Recovery or VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery

Detailed instructions can be found on the Instructions tab, in the README.md included in the Zip file or on Patrick’s blog (http://www.patrickkremer.com/sddc-import-export/).

Details about the use cases and origins of the project can be found on Nico’s blog (https://nicovibert.com/2021/02/08/fling-sddc-import-export-for-vmware-cloud-on-aws/).

Updates

Workspace ONE Mobileconfig Importer

The Workspace ONE mobileconfig Importer gives you the ability to import existing mobileconfig files directly into a Workspace ONE UEM environment as a Custom Settings profile, import app preference plist files in order to created managed preference profiles, and to create new Custom Settings profiles from scratch. When importing existing configuration profiles, the tool will attempt to separate each PayloadContent dictionary into a separate payload for the Workspace ONE profile.

Changelog

Version 1.1

  • Support for Big Sur
  • Updated icon

Workspace One UEM Workload Migration Tool

Quite a few updates for this fling already!

The Workspace One UEM Workload Migration Tool allows a seamless migration of Applications and Device configurations between different Workspace One UEM environments. With the push of a button, workloads move from UAT to Production, instead of having to manually enter the information or upload files manually. Therefore, decreasing the time to move data between Dev/UAT environments to Production.

Changelog

Version 2.1.0

  • Fixed app upload issues for Workspace One UEM 1910+
  • Fixed profile search issue for Workspace One UEM 1910+
  • Added profile update support
  • Added template folder structure creation
  • Updated Mac app to support notarization for Catalina

Version 2.0.1

  • Fixed Baseline Migration issue
  • Fixed Profile Errors not displaying in the UI

Version 2.0.0

  • Baseline Migration Support
  • MacOS application
  • UI refactoring to make bulk migrations easier
  • Added support for script detection with Win32 applications

Version 1.0.1

  • Fixed issue with expired credentials.

vSAN Hardware Compatibility List Checker

The vSAN Hardware Compatibility List Checker is a tool that verifies all installed storage adapters against the vSAN supported storage controller list. The tool will verify if the model, driver and firmware version of the storage adapter are supported.

Changelog

Version 2.2

  • Support multi-platforms for Windows, Linux and MacOS
  • Bug fixed

Vmss2core

Vmss2core is a tool to convert VMware checkpoint state files into formats that third party debugger tools understand. It can handle both suspend (.vmss) and snapshot (.vmsn) checkpoint state files (hereafter referred to as a ‘vmss file’) as well as both monolithic and non-monolithic (separate .vmem file) encapsulation of checkpoint state data.

Changelog

Version 1.0.1

  • Fixed running out of memory issues
  • Added support for more versions of Windows 10/Windows 2016

vRealize Build Tools

vRealize Build Tools provides tools to development and release teams implementing solutions based on vRealize Automation (vRA) and vRealize Orchestrator (vRO). The solution targets Virtual Infrastructure Administrators and Solution Developers working in parallel on multiple vRealize-based projects who want to use standard DevOps practices.

Changelog

Version 2.12.5 Update

  • [vRBT] Package installer – Add support for installation on a standalone vRO (not embedded) version 8.x with basic authentication
  • [vRA] Added catalog entitlements and examples to the vra-ng archetype
  • [vRO] Support / in Workflow name or path, by substituting it with dash (-) character.
  • [vRBT] Added http / socket timeouts support in the installer
  • [ABX] Support for ABX actions
  • [vRO] Support of placeholders in workflow description
  • [vRA] Import vRA8 custom resources before blueprints
  • [vROPS] Fixed policy import / export problem with vROPs 8.2, maintaining backward compatibility
  • [MVN] Fixed ussue with installer timeouts
  • [TS] vRO pkg – Adds support for slash in workflow path or name
  • [vRBT] Package installer – updated documentation, added checking of workflow input, writing of workflow error message to file, setting of installer exit code when executing of a workflow
  • [TS] Allow additional trigger events for policies trigered by the vcd mqtt plugin
  • [MVN] Fix Missing vRA Tenant After Successful package import
  • [MVN] Fix vROPS import fails on certain assets

Horizon Cloud Pod Architecture Tools

The Horizon Cloud Pod Architecture Tools mainly acts as a wrapper around the lmvutil for Horizon Cloud Pod Archtitecture.

Changelog

Version 1.1

Based on the customer requests, have added few more command line options for CSV reports generation and AD LDS data cleanup.

What’s New:

Adds support to cleanup stale global local entitlement assignments from ADAM DB.

  • Global AD LDS Command:
    adlds-analyzer.cmd –resolve-localpool-ga
  • Scans the cloud pod database and resolves the stale entries of local pool global assignments.
    Note: This resolves deleted local pool conflicts of current pod only. If dashboard session data load error or session search fails in a different pod, a scan and resolve has to be executed in that pod.
  • List of new commands added to Local AD LDS:
    adlds-analyzer.cmd –export-machine
  • All machine data exported as CSV file. Compatibility: Horizon 7.10 and above, 8.x
    adlds-analyzer.cmd –export-machine -pool=”DesktopPool1,DesktopPool2″
  • All machine data exported as CSV file. Use -pool= to filter machines by desktop pool name. Compatibility: Horizon 7.10 and above, 8.x
  • Spaces are not allowed in -pool= optional argument.
    adlds-analyzer.cmd –export-session
  • All local sessions data exported as CSV file. Compatibility: Horizon 7.10 and above, 8.x
    adlds-analyzer.cmd –export-session -pool=”PoolName1,PoolName2″ -farm=”FarmName1,FarmName2″
  • All local session data exported as CSV file. Use -pool= to filter sessions by desktop pool name. -farm= filter sessions by RDS farm name. Compatibility: Horizon 7.10 and above, 8.x
  • Spaces are not allowed in -pool= and -farm= optional argument.
    adlds-analyzer.cmd –check-apps-integrity
  • Scans and lists the stale application icons in local ADLDS instance.
    adlds-analyzer.cmd –check-apps-integrity -input=”AbsoluteFilePath1″,”AbsoluteFilePath2″
  • Reads the list of adam LDIF files in “-input=” for parsing and exports the stale application icons data to a file.
    adlds-analyzer.cmd –export-named-lic-users
  • Exports the utilized and un-utilized named license users list information.

Workspace ONE App Analyzer for macOS

The Workspace ONE macOS App Analyzer will determine any Privacy Permissions, Kernel Extensions, or System Extensions needed by an installed macOS application, and can be used to automatically create profiles in Workspace ONE UEM to whitelist those same settings when deploying apps to managed devices.

Changelog

Version 1.2.1

  • Fixed bug that caused crash with certain System Extension configurations

App Volumes Packaging Utility

This App Volumes Packaging Utility helps to package applications. With this fling, packagers can add the necessary metadata to MSIX app attach VHDs so they can be used alongside existing AV format packages. The MSIX format VHDs will require App Volumes 4, version 2006 or later and Windows 10, version 2004 or later.

Changelog

Version 1.2 Update

  • Fixed bugs found in internal testing.

DoD Security Technical Implementation Guide(STIG) ESXi VIB

The DoD Security Technical Implementation Guide (‘STIG’) ESXi VIB is a Fling that provides a custom VMware-signed ESXi vSphere Installation Bundle (‘VIB’) to assist in remediating Defense Information Systems Agency STIG controls for ESXi. This VIB has been developed to help customers rapidly implement the more challenging aspects of the vSphere STIG. These include the fact that installation is time consuming and must be done manually on the ESXi hosts. In certain cases, it may require complex scripting, or even development of an in-house VIB that would not be officially digitally signed by VMware (and therefore would not be deployed as a normal patch would). The need for a VMware-signed VIB is due to the system level files that are to be replaced. These files cannot be modified at a community supported acceptance level. The use of the VMware-signed STIG VIB provides customers the following benefits:

  • The ability to use vSphere Update Manager (‘VUM’) to quickly deploy the VIB to ESXi hosts (you cannot do this with a customer created VIB)
  • The ability to use VUM to quickly check if all ESXi hosts have the STIG VIB installed and therefore are also in compliance
  • No need to manually replace and copy files directly on each ESXi host in your environment
  • No need to create complex shell scripts that run each time ESXi boots to re-apply settings

Changelog

Update March 2021

  • New ESXi 7.0 STIG VIB release
  • Updated sshd_config file to meet the ESXi 7.0 Draft STIG which is also now the default config in 7.0 U2 with the exception of permitting root user logins.
  • Removed /etc/vmware/welcome file from VIB since it can be configured via the UI or PowerCLI now with issue.
  • Draft ESXi content can be found here: https://github.com/vmware/dod-compliance-and-automation/tree/master/vsphere/7.0/docs
  • See the updated Overview and Installation guide included in the download.

VMware OS Optimization Tool

No comments needed, just use the OS Optimization Tool when creating your golden images!

Changelog

March 2021, b2002

  • Fixed issue where the theme file was being updated by a Generalize task and the previously selected optimizations including wallpaper color were being lost.
  • The administrator username used during Generalize was not getting passed through properly to the unattend answer file. This resulted in a mismatch when using some languages versions of Windows.
  • Removed legacy code GPO Policy corruption
  • Removed CMD.exe box that displayed at logon.
  • Windows Store Apps were not being removed properly on Windows 10 version 20H2. Fixed the optimizations to cope with the differences introduced in this version.

Optimizations

Changed step Block all consumer Microsoft account user authentication to be unselected by default. When disabled this was causing failures to login to Edge and Windows store.

Changed the step Turn off Thumbnail Previews in File Explorer to be unselected by default. This was causing no thumbnails to show for store apps in search results.

Windows Update

On Non-Enterprise editions of Windows 10, KB4023057 installs a new application called Microsoft Update Health Tools: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/kb4023057-update-for-windows-10-update-service-components-fccad0ca-dc10-2e46-9ed1-7e392450fb3a. Added logic to ensure that the Windows Update Medic Service is disabled including after re-enabling and disabling Windows Updates using the Update tab.

Templates

Windows 8 and 8.1 templates have been removed from the list of built-in templates. To optimize these versions of Windows, use the separate download for version b1130.

Removed old Windows 10 templates from the Public Templates repository:

  • Windows 10 1809-2004-Server 2019
  • Windows 10 1507-1803-Server 2016

January 2021, b2001 Bug Fixes

  • All optimization entries have been added back into the main user template. This allows manual tuning and selection of all optimizations.
  • Fixed two hardware acceleration selections were not previously controlled by the Common Option for Visual Effect to disable hardware acceleration.

Optimize

  • During an Optimize, the optimization selections are automatically exported to a default json file (%ProgramData%\VMware\OSOT\OptimizedTemplateData.json).

Analyze

  • When an Analyze is run, if the default json file exists (meaning that this image has already been optimized), this is imported and used to select the optimizations and the Common Options selections with the previous choices.
  • If the default selections are required, on subsequent runs of the OS Optimization Tool, delete the default json file, relaunch the tool and run Analyze.

Command Line

  • The OptimizedTemplateData.json file can also be used from the command line with the -applyoptimization parameter.

Optimizations

  • Changed entries for Hyper-V services to not be selected by default. These services are required for VMs deployed onto Azure. Windows installation sets these to manual (trigger) so these so not cause any overhead on vSphere, when left with the default setting.

The VMware Labs flings monthly for February 2021 – Reach alert!

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It’s been a busy month on the flings front, no less than 17(!!) new releases and updated flings. This is how my browser tabs look:

If I have therm all correct there are 6 new releases and 10 updates (2 1 of which update without a changelog so a boo for that!) so this post is going to be a long one!

New Releases

Community NVMe Driver for ESXi

VMware Cloud Foundation Powernova

Workspace ONE Access Migration Tool

Sample Data Platform Deployment on Virtualized Cloud Infrastructure

Community Networking Driver for ESXi

Code Stream Concourse Integrator

Updates

ESXi Compatibility Checker

VMware Machine Learning Platform

Virtualized High Performance Computing Toolkit

Horizon Peripherals Intelligence

Workspace ONE App Analyzer for macOS

VMware OS Optimization Tool

Horizon Helpdesk Utility

HCIBench

Horizon Reach

Workspace ONE Discovery

App Volumes Migration Utility

New Releases

Community NVMe Driver for ESXi

This Fling is a collection of ESXi Native Drivers which enables ESXi to recognize and consume various NVMe-based storage devices. These devices are not officially on the VMware HCL and have been developed to enable and support the VMware Community.

Currently, this Fling provides an emulated NVMe driver for the Apple 2018 Intel Mac Mini 8,1 and the Apple 2019 Intel Mac Pro 7,1 allowing customers to use the local NVMe SSD with ESXi. This driver is packaged up as an Offline Bundle and is only activated when it detects ESXi has been installed on either an Apple Mac Mini or Apple Mac Pro.

VMware Cloud Foundation Powernova

VMware Cloud Foundation Powernova is a Fling built on top of VCF that provides the users the ability to perform Power Operations (Power ON, Power OFF) seamlessly across the entire inventory. It has a sleek UI to visualize the entire VCF inventory (which is the first of its kind for VCF) across the domains of VCF.

The UI is easy to use and elucidates the current Health and Power State of each node in the VCF inventory. Powernova lets the user work on the Power Operations on the components with domain specific inter dependencies automatically resolved.

Powernova also performs valid health checks on all nodes in the VCF inventory to ensure Power Operations are performed only on healthy nodes. Powernova takes minimal input (4 user defined inputs on their VCF system) and does all the magic for the users behind the scenes.

If any infrastructure maintenance activity, VCF migration activity, or power operations need to be performed only on specific domains in VCF, then Powernova is the one stop solution for all VCF users.

Workspace ONE Access Migration Tool

Workspace ONE Access Migration Tool helps ease migration of Apps from one WS1 Access tenant to another (on-premises to SaaS or SaaS to SaaS) and use cases that require mirroring one tenant to another (for setting up UAT from PROD or vice versa) by providing capabilities listed below

Features
  • Copying of App Categories
  • Migrating Weblinks (3rd party IDP), icons as is
  • Creating a link to federated apps and copying the icons (to maintain the same user experience)
  • Copying App Assignment to a Category mapping

Sample Data Platform Deployment on Virtualized Cloud Infrastructure

Data is king and your users need a sample data platform quickly.

With this Fling, you will leverage your VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 with vRealize Automation deployment and stand a sample data platform based on vSphere Virtual Machines in less than 20-minutes comprising of Kafka, Spark, Solr, and ELK.

You can also choose whether to deploy a wavefront proxy and configure the components to send data to the wavefront proxy or use your own.

Community Networking Driver for ESXi

This Fling is a collection of ESXi Native Drivers which enables ESXi to recognize and consume various PCIe-based network adapters (See Requirements for details). These devices are not officially on the VMware HCL and have been developed to enable and support the VMware Community.

Code Stream Concourse Integrator

The Code Stream Concourse Integrator (CSCI) Fling provides integration between a vRealize Automation Code Stream and Concourse CI tools with which users can trigger Concourse CI pipelines from Code Stream pipelines without any additional tooling/scripting. This enables users to use the features from both the tools flexibly and seamlessly as per their needs. This solution is built using Code Stream’s extensibility feature named Custom Integration.

Updates

ESXi Compatibility Checker

The ESXi Compatibility Checker helps the vSphere admin out in checking if their environment will work with later versions of ESXi. [non-sponsored advertisement]Also check Runecast, they can run a simulation for you as well.[/non-sponsored advertisement]

Changelog

Build 20210219

  • Fix for ESX / VC 7.0 U1 Versioning issues
  • A new logo 😉

VMware Machine Learning Platform

Our goal is to provide an end-to-end ML platform for Data Scientists to perform their job more effectively by running ML workloads on top of VMware infrastructure.

Using vMLP allows to:

Save the costs by enabling efficient use of shared GPUs for ML workfloads
Reduce the risks of broken Data Science workflows by leveraging well-tested and ready-to-use demos and project templates
Faster “go-to-market” for ML models by utilizing end-to-end oriented tooling including fast and easy model deployment and serving via standardized REST API

Changelog

Version 0.4.1

  • Jupyter: R Kernel
  • Jupyter: BitFusion 2.5.0 Demo
  • Jupyter: MADlib/RTS4MADlib on Greenplum Demo
  • Multiple bug fixes

Virtualized High Performance Computing Toolkit

This toolkit is intended to facilitate managing the lifecycle of these special configurations by leveraging vSphere APIs. It also includes features that help vSphere administrators perform some common vSphere tasks that are related to creating such high-performing environments, such as VM cloning, setting Latency Sensitivity, and sizing vCPUs, memory, etc.

Changelog

Nope 🙁

Horizon Peripherals Intelligence

Horizon Peripherals Intelligence is an online self-serviced diagnosis service that can help increase the satisfaction when using peripheral devices with Horizon product by both the end users and the admin user. Currently, we support diagnosis for the following device categories – USB storage devices, USB printers, USB scanners, Cameras. We will continue to cover more device categories in the future

Changelog

Version 1.0

  • Add support for USB Audios, Speechmics, Signaturepads, Barcode scanners
  • Add support for L10n of web pages in simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and English
  • Add support for window 7 and windows 2012R2
  • Add support for 32 bits OS
  • Add support for cmdline installation

Workspace ONE App Analyzer for macOS

The Workspace ONE macOS App Analyzer will determine any Privacy Permissions, Kernel Extensions, or System Extensions needed by an installed macOS application, and can be used to automatically create profiles in Workspace ONE UEM to whitelist those same settings when deploying apps to managed devices.

Changelog

Version 1.2 

  • Added support for Big Sur
  • Updated icon

VMware OS Optimization Tool

Image optimize you must with osot!

Changelog

  • nope 🙁

Update: OSOT didn’t receive an update, someone only edited the page according to Hilko.

Horizon Helpdesk Utility

Besides ControlUp the helpdesk fling  is the best tool to help your users.

Changelog

Version 1.5.0.24

  • Added support for Horizon 8.1

HCIBench

HCIBench stands for “Hyper-converged Infrastructure Benchmark”. It’s essentially an automation wrapper around the popular and proven open source benchmark tools: Vdbench and Fio that make it easier to automate testing across a HCI cluster. HCIBench aims to simplify and accelerate customer POC performance testing in a consistent and controlled way. The tool fully automates the end-to-end process of deploying test VMs, coordinating workload runs, aggregating test results, performance analysis and collecting necessary data for troubleshooting purposes.

Changelog

Version 2.5.3

  • Fixed graphite permission issue which blocked vdbench/fio grafana display
  • Updated drop cache script to make it compatible with upcoming vSphere
  • md5sum: 622625cc7a551bd7bf07ff4f19a57a17 HCIBench_2.5.3.ova

Horizon Reach

Again if you’re not a ControlUp customer Reach is the next best thing to manage you’re Horizon environment.

Changelog

Version 1.3.1.2

  • Added support for Horizon 8.1
  • Bugfixes

Workspace ONE Discovery

VMware Workspace ONE UEM is used to manage Windows 10 endpoints, whether it be Certificate Management, Application Deployment or Profile Management. The Discovery Fling enables you to view these from the device point of view and review the Workspace ONE related services, which applications have been successfully deployed, use the granular view to see exactly what has been configured with Profiles, view User & Machine certificates and see which Microsoft Windows Updates have been applied.

Changelog

February, 16, 2021 – Version 1.2

  • Replaced icon
  • New logo 🙂

App Volumes Migration Utility

App Volumes Migration Utility allows admins to migrate AppStacks managed by VMware App Volumes 2.18, to the new application package format of App Volumes 4. The format of these packages in App Volumes 4 have evolved to improve performance and help simplify application management.

Changelog

Version 1.0.7 Update

  • Migration fails if their are blacklisted registry entries containing embedded NULL chars.
  • File system migration fails if their are directories having a trailing DOT name ( ex- Microsoft. ).

The VMware Labs flings monthly for December 2021: Happy New Year

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Let’s start with wishing all of you a happy New Year!

<Insert random stolen 2021 fireworks picture>

Just like me with my bog it’s been quiet on the flings front. No new ones but 4 received updates.

HCIBench

VMware Event Broker Appliance

Supernova – Accelerating Machine Learning Inference

App Volumes Packaging Utility

Updates

HCIBench

HCIBench is one of many performance benchmarking tools, make sure to use it wisely with real life data sizes.

Changelog

Version 2.5.2

  • fixed testing issue for hybrid cluster
  • fixed testing issue for the version prior to vSphere 6.7
  • fixed easy-run issue with self-defined ip range
  • replaced icon
  • upgrade httpd to 2.4.46

VMware Event Broker Appliance

All kinds of changes to the VMware Event Broker Appliance fling, not only a new logo. You can check them out on William Lams blog here.

Supernova – Accelerating Machine Learning Inference

Project Supernova is to build a common machine learning inference service framework by enabling machine learning inference accelerators across edge endpoint devices, edge systems and cloud, with or without hardware accelerators.

Changelog

Version 1.2 Update 

  • Support Xilinx Cloud FPGA

App Volumes Packaging Utility

The App Volumes Packaging Utility helps to package applications. With this fling, packagers can add the necessary metadata to MSIX app attach VHDs so they can be used alongside existing AV format packages. The MSIX format VHDs will require App Volumes 4, version 2006 or later and Windows 10, version 2004 or later.

Changelog

Version 1.1 Update

  • Rebase with the latest code

The VMware Labs flings monthly for October 2020

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First of all I hope that everyone is staying safe en sound and keeping their social distance. Over here we’ve been back to a light lockdown again but at least most of the shops are still open. I just opened the flings site and the VMware engineers have been dam busy! This are the tabs I had after opening all of them.

If I count it right I have six new flings and another eight received updates, I can’t remember the last time we had so much activity on the flings front. The new flings include one of the most anticipated VMware products for the last years: ESXi on Arm!

New Releases

Sample Data Platform on VMware Cloud Foundation with VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Provisioning

vSphere Pod Autoscaler

Workspace ONE Discovery

ESXi Arm Edition

Horizon Peripherals Intelligence

Storage Performance Tester

Updating Flings

vRealize Build Tools

VMCA Certificate Generator

USB Network Native Driver for ESXi

Demo Appliance for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid

Workspace ONE App Analyzer for macOS

App Volumes Migration Utility

True SSO Diagnostic Utility

HCIBench

New Releases

Sample Data Platform on VMware Cloud Foundation with VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Provisioning

With this Fling, you will leverage your VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 deployment and stand a sample data platform on a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid guest cluster in less than 20-minutes comprising of Kafka, Spark, Solr, and ELK.

Additionally, this Fling comes with a market data sample application (using real market data from dxFeed) that shows how all these data platform components work together.

vSphere Pod Autoscaler

This Fling is useful for vSphere PodVM users who want to perform auto-scaling on vSphere PodVMs based on memory utilization.

This python script is intended to implement the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler algorithm for podVM for the vSphere 7.0 with Kubernetes. The implementation follows the algorithm from the official Kubernetes documents: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/run-application/horizontal-pod-autoscale/

This script will automatically scale the number of PodVMs in the environment. The script will perform the following actions:

  1. The script will retrieve the memory utilization of PodVMs in the environment
  2. The script will then allow users to provide the memory threshold for PodVMs
  3. The script will then calculate the desired number of replicas based on the memory threshold and utilization
  4. The script will automatically scale the PodVMs to the desired number of replicas calculated in step #3

Workspace ONE Discovery

VMware Workspace ONE UEM is used to manage Windows 10 endpoints, whether it be Certificate Management, Application Deployment or Profile Management. The Discovery Fling enables you to view these from the device point of view and review the Workspace ONE related services, which applications have been successfully deployed, use the granular view to see exactly what has been configured with Profiles, view User & Machine certificates and see which Microsoft Windows Updates have been applied.

Discovery provides you a view of the Managed device and can be used to help with troubleshooting.

ESXi Arm Edition

Hello ESXi-Arm Fling participants!

Over the past several years, you’ve seen us demonstrate our virtualization technology on the Arm platform across several use cases, everything from running mission critical workloads on a windmill, to running on the SmartNIC, to running on AWS Graviton in the cloud. We realized that the resilient platform created for the datacenter can be equally valuable in non-traditional environments. We’ve learned a lot from exploratory discussions with customers and Arm Silicon Partners.

Now we’d like to give our customers a chance to evaluate this technology in their own environments. This evaluation program is for the enterprise architects who are considering the viability of virtualizing Arm workloads, for the test/dev team looking for a way to spin up Arm environments, and for the tinkerers who simply want to explore running ESXi-Arm in a small form factor Edge environment. We’re interested to understand what features you will find most valuable, and how you will want to deploy this technology.

As there has been an update for this fling already here’s the changelog:

Changelog

October 22, 2020 – v1.1

Note: Upgrade is NOT possible, only fresh installation is supported. If you select “Preserve VMFS” option, you can re-register your existing Virtual Machines.

  • Fix for https://flings.vmware.com/esxi-arm-edition/bugs/1098 (PSOD adding to VDS)
  • Support for Arm N1 SDP platform
  • Support for VMs on Neoverse N1 CPU
  • Pass-thru stability improvements to LS1046A and LX2160A platforms
  • Fix for vCenter/DRS incorrect CPU usage
  • Fix for VM crash when VM storage fills up
  • Stability fix for non-coherent DMA device support
  • Installer: tolerate RAM size within 4% of 4GB instead of 3.125 (for the otherwise unsupported RK3399 boards)
  • Serial port handling improvements (for unsupported/unknown boards, to be a bit more resilient of firmware configuration errors)
    • Documentation Updates:
      Moved and expanded iSCSI doc for Pi doc to main ESXi-Arm Fling doc
    • Added LS1046ARDB docs (including ref to it from main ESXi-Arm doc and Fling website)
    • Fixed Ampere server name and links (its HR330A/HR350A, not SR-something)
    • Added Arm N1SDP document (including ref to it from main ESXi-Arm doc)
    • Updated GuestOSes known to work with ESXi-Arm including new “Verified” section
    • Updated instruction to update EEPROM for Pi doc

Build 17068872
VMware-VMvisor-Installer-7.0.0-17068872.aarch64.iso

October 06, 2020 – v1.0 (Initial Release)

Build 16966451

VMware-VMvisor-Installer-7.0.0-16966451.aarch64.iso

Horizon Peripherals Intelligence

Horizon Peripherals Intelligence is an online self-serviced diagnosis service that can help increase the satisfaction when using peripheral devices with Horizon product by both the end users and the admin user. Currently, we support diagnosis for the following device categories – USB storage devices, USB printers, USB scanners, Cameras. We will continue to cover more device categories in the future.

Storage Performance Tester

Storage Performance Tester is a one-click storage performance test tool, which is able to collect IOPS, latency and CPU cycles per I/O for ESXi storage stack. This tool automates all the testing steps including the customized VMs deployment, I/O workload running, and storage performance analysis. It displays the performance metrics through multiple visualized graphical charts. The only thing that users need to do is enter one command and wait for the performance report of your server.

This tool is designed to be a developer-friendly tool help troubleshoot and identify storage performance issues. It could be used to validate the maximum performance of new storage hardwares/drivers and setups of vSphere/vSAN. For more details please check the guild located in the instructions

Updated Flings

VMCA Certificate Generator

The VMCA Certificate Generator is useful to create your own certificates using the VMCA in vCenter if you don’t have access to a purpose build system in your network.

Changelog

Version 1.0 Update

  • Added the open source license file.

vRealize Build Tools

vRealize Build Tools provides tools to development and release teams implementing solutions based on vRealize Automation (vRA) and vRealize Orchestrator (vRO). The solution targets Virtual Infrastructure Administrators and Solution Developers working in parallel on multiple vRealize-based projects who want to use standard DevOps practices.

Changelog

Version 2.8.8 Update

  • [MVN] Support SHA1 checksum generation for JS,TS,XML,vRA,vRANG project types.
  • [MVN] Include the pom.xml description content as description of the built vRO package artifact
  • [TS-AutoGen] Define a property for storing the version of the API for which this project is generated.
  • [TS-AutoGen] Store the API version as part of the vRO package description.
  • [vRA-NG] Adds support for import/export of custom resources and resource actions.
  • [TS] Typescript projects for vRO, now support syntax for specifying a description for a configuration element attribute.
  • [vRA-NG] Adds support for using project name when managing vRA-NG content.
  • [vROps] Adds support for vROps 8.1
  • [vROps] Change default authentication provider to Token-based Authentication
  • [TS] Extend vropkg tool to support Polyglot bundle
  • [TS] Support for skipping unmapped dependencies, e.g. –skipUnmappedDeps
  • [TS] Bumped up Typescript version to 3.8.3
  • [TS] Added support for tsconfig file override using the project option of the tsc executable.
  • [MVN] Updated vRBT infrastructure project with latest dependencies and improved installation robustness
  • [vROps] Fixes a problem with resource kind during alert definition import
  • [TS] Use fixed node package versions
  • [vROps] Support for policy assignment to custom groups
  • [vRA] Fixes a problem with vra-ng authentication always setting System Domain and users not being able to authenticate with different domain
  • [vROps] Removed sshHost from Installer. Use host instead.
  • [TS] Make dependency:go-offline execution conditional
  • [TS] All version of Node are supported from 10.x and above
  • [TS] npm repository is no longer needed [TS] Support for RequireJS imports/exports
  • [TS] Support for yaml configurations
  • [TS] Improved workflows and policy templates transpilation
  • [TS] Improved diagnostic messages
  • [TS] Improved handling of cycle references
  • [TS] Extended workflow support
  • [TS] Support for ES2017.String

USB Network Native Driver for ESXi

USB has become one the most widely adopted connection type in the world & USB network adapters are also popular among Edge computing platforms. In some platforms, there is either limited or no PCI/PCIe slots for I/O expansion & in some cases, an Ethernet port is not even available. Another advantage of a USB-based network adapter is that it can be hot-plugged into an system without a reboot which means no impact to the workload, same is true for hot-remove.

This Fling supports the most popular USB network adapter chipsets found in the market. The ASIX USB 2.0 gigabit network ASIX88178a, ASIX USB 3.0 gigabit network ASIX88179, Realtek USB 3.0 gigabit network RTL8152/RTL8153 and Aquantia AQC111U. These are relatively inexpensive devices that many of our existing vSphere customers are already using and are familiar with.

Changelog

October 26, 2020 – v1.7

  • Added support for ESXi 7.0 Update 1
  • USB NIC Bindings are now automatically persistent
  • 5GbE USB NICs now properly show Full vs Half Duplex

Note: This is ONLY for ESXi 7.0 Update 1, for ESXi 7.0/6.7/6.5, please ensure you are using the correct version of driver.

ESXi701-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-40599856-component-17078334.zip

Demo Appliance for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid

The Demo Appliance for Tanzu Kubernetes grid includes all the things needed tolearn about and run a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid.

Changelog

Oct 28, 2020 – v1.2.0

  • Support for latest TKG 1.2.0 release
  • Support for TKG Workload Cluster upgrade workflow from K8s 1.18.8 to 1.19.1
  • Updated to latest version of Harbor (1.10.5), Docker Compose (1.27.4), Kubectl (1.18.10), Octant (0.16.1), TMC (6867ad54), TKG Crashd (0.3.1) CLI in appliance

TKG-Demo-Appliance-1.2.0.ova
MD5: 0f0c60358a867b432698144820f8e8b0

Workspace ONE App Analyzer for macOS

The Workspace ONE macOS App Analyzer will determine any Privacy Permissions, Kernel Extensions, or System Extensions needed by an installed macOS application, and can be used to automatically create profiles in Workspace ONE UEM to whitelist those same settings when deploying apps to managed devices.

Changelog

Version 1.1 Update

  • 10/27/2020 – Fixed bug that prevented Privacy Preferences from loading when default shell was set to zsh.

App Volumes Migration Utility

App Volumes Migration Utility allows admins to migrate AppStacks managed by VMware App Volumes 2.18, to the new application package format of App Volumes 4. The format of these packages in App Volumes 4 have evolved to improve performance and help simplify application management.

Changelog

1.0.6 Version Update

  • Create meta_json.zip in migrated appstacks.

HCIBench

HCIBench is THE tool to test the performance of your VSAN cluster. Always use your own metrics based on the actual requirements for your environment.

HCIBench stands for “Hyper-converged Infrastructure Benchmark”. It’s essentially an automation wrapper around the popular and proven open source benchmark tools: Vdbench and Fio that make it easier to automate testing across a HCI cluster. HCIBench aims to simplify and accelerate customer POC performance testing in a consistent and controlled way. The tool fully automates the end-to-end process of deploying test VMs, coordinating workload runs, aggregating test results, performance analysis and collecting necessary data for troubleshooting purposes.

HCIBench is not only a benchmark tool designed for vSAN, but also could be used to evaluate the performance of all kinds of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Storage in vSphere environment.

Changelog

Version 2.5.1 Update

  • Fixed non vSAN cluster testing issue
  • Fixed pre-validation storage policy issue
  • Added in-place upgrading capability, to do so, you can also upgrade HCIBench to the latest version by running the following command in HCIBench: tdnf install -y git && git clone https://github.com/cwei44/HCIBench.git && sh HCIBench/upgrade.sh
    MD5 Checksum: 1d14426f92b353e90469a8623ade2bc1 HCIBench_2.5.1.ova

Version 2.5.0 Update

  • Added support vSAN HCI Mesh testing, now you can test both local and remote vSAN datastores at the same time
  • Added support local storage including VMFS and vSAN-Direct testing
  • Added vSAN Debug Mode, allow user to collect vm-support bundle and vmkstats automatically when running testing against vSAN
  • Changed guest VMs name convention to {vm_prefix}-{datastore_id}-batch_num-sequence_num
  • Enhanced testing report format
  • Allow user to specify customized IP addresses for guest VMs
  • Allow user to configure CPU and Memory for guest VMs
  • Added best practice and network troubleshooting guide in the user manual
  • Bug fixes
  • MD5 Checksum: 817c2c788364f252e728d4253b3b96da HCIBench_2.5.0.ova

True SSO Diagnostic Utility

The True SSO Diagnostic Utility allows for validation of the various components needed for True SSO.

Horizon View True SSO uses Microsoft Enterprise Certificate Servers to issue certificates that are used when the user logs on to the desktop. The Horizon View Enrollment Server (ES) is responsible for sending a certificate request to certificate servers, and for monitoring the PKI configuration settings in the Active Directory.

Changelog

Version 2.2

  • The tool has been updated to allow performance-testing of the enrollment-server.

The VMware Labs flings monthly for June 2020

  By , , , , ,

And another month gone, for some the Summer Holidays have already started while others might have to wait a few weeks or so. This month there have been two new fling releases and seven received an update.

New Releases

Workspace ONE App Analyzer for macOS

True SSO Configuration Utility

Update flings

Python Client for VMC on AWS

FlowGate

VMware OS Optimization Tool

VMware Event Broker Appliance

App Volumes Entitlement Sync

Unified Access Gateway Deployment Utility

vSphere Software Asset Management Tool

New Releases

Workspace ONE App Analyzer for macOS

The Workspace ONE macOS App Analyzer will determine any Privacy Permissions, Kernel Extensions, or System Extensions needed by an installed macOS application, and can be used to automatically create profiles in Workspace ONE UEM to whitelist those same settings when deploying apps to managed devices.

 

True SSO Configuration Utility

True SSO can be a though cookie to actually configure the True SSO Configuration utility might be help to help you with that.

This project is intended for the VMware Horizon customers in order to use True SSO Configuration Utility to help you configuring TrueSSO using View Connection Server, Enrollment Server and your Certificate Authoriry / Active Directory.

Updated Flings

Python Client for VMC on AWS

If Python is your favorite programming language the Python Client for VMC on AWS will help you in automating things for VMC.

Changelog

Version 1.1

  • Added support for Distributed Firewall.

FlowGate

Flowgate helps you integrate multiple systems like Infoblox, Pulse IoT center and PowerIQ with your IT management systems..

Changelog

Version 1.1

  • Refactor the powerIQ and Nlyte adapter to support more metrics and properties
  • Refactor the Metric api.
  • Enhance the manual facility mapping functionality, support pdu,switch and sensor mapping.
  • Support add IP and AssetName mapping.
  • Security bugs fixed.
  • largely reduce the images size

VMware OS Optimization Tool

If you are into EUC the VMware OS Optimization Tool is THE tool to optimize your images or at least the base to use for scripting those optimizations.

Changelog

June, 2020, b1160

Windows Update

Brand new option called Update that make it easier to re-enable Windows Update functionality on a Windows image that has previously been optimized and had this disabled.

This process has the following four steps:

  • Enable – Changes the required registry values, local group policy and enables the required services.
  • Windows Update – Starts the Windows update process and open the Windows setting page. You can run the Windows Update process as often as required and reboot, if necessary, before progressing to the next step.
  • Restore – Returns all settings to their original values. This will also disable scheduled tasks that get regenerated when a Windows Update runs.
  • Recommendations – After updating Windows, it is recommended that you rerun an optimize and then a finalize task.

Generalize

Completely redesigned interface that makes it easier to change the settings to customize the unattend answer file. These include:

  • Time Zone.
  • Input, system, UI, and user locales.
  • Administrator account autologon and password.
  • Copy Profile.

You still have the ability to view and edit the generated unattend answer file, if required, before execution.
Added cleanup of the local administrator profile before performing a copy profile including deleting the following registry entries:

  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Associations\FileAssociationsUpdateVersion
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Associations\UrlAssociations

Finalize

Commands added to disable App Volumes services, if installed, before running the Finalize steps.

Common Options

Selections are now retained between runs. This makes it easier to rerun an optimize with the same common option settings.

Command Line

Standardization for the main command line options.

  • Optimize can be run with either -optimize or -o
  • Generalize can be run with either -generalize or -g
  • Finalize can be run as either -finalize or -f

Optimizations

Remove optimizations that, while not selected by default, can cause issues if selected:

  • CloudExperienceHost – CreateObjectTask (Disable Scheduled Tasks)
  • CacheTask (3 items)

Guides
Updated OSOT user guide: VMware Operating System Optimization Tool Guide.

VMware Event Broker Appliance

The VMware Event Broker Appliance provides functionality for event driven automation in your SDDC.

Changelog

https://github.com/vmware-samples/vcenter-event-broker-appliance/releases/tag/v0.4.1

App Volumes Entitlement Sync

The App Volumes Entitlement Sync Tool will read, compare and sync entitlements from one App Volumes instance to another.

Changelog

Version 4.0 Update:

  • Still supports 2.x App Volumes Managers
  • Added support for 4.x – both Application Packages and Legacy 2.x AppStacks
  • Fixes Application / Package relationships on replication
  • Saves manager address, username and domain to registry
  • Improved logging and error trapping
  • Able to sync Application Package Markers
  • Able to delete empty Applications
  • Detects and displays selected assignment type
    Displays the version of the CURRENT marker or shows if none is set
  • Shows App Volumes manager version on main page

Unified Access Gateway Deployment Utility

I personally prefer to deploy my uag’s using powershell but if you prefer a gui the Unified Access Gateway Deployment Utility will help you with that.

Changelog

1.1.0 Version Update

  • Bug fixes and minor improvements
  • New logo

vSphere Software Asset Management Tool

The vSphere Software Asset Management (vSAM) is a tool that collects and summarizes vSphere product deployment information.

Changelog

Version 1.2 Update

  • Show vSAN product information in the report.
  • Show unmasked license keys in the report as an option.
  • Add a License Inventory Table in the report.

 

The VMware Labs flings monthly for May 2020

  By , , , , , , ,

Another month, another monthly overview of the new and changed flings as published on https://flings.vmware.com/. There are three new flings and seven received an update.

New flings:

Linux Driver for Precision Clock Virtual Device

Demo Appliance for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid

Supernova – Accelerating Machine Learning Inference

Update flings:

VMware Appliance for Folding@Home

VMware Event Broker Appliance

Virtual Machine Compute Optimizer

VMware Machine Learning Platform

vSphere Mobile Client

Horizon Session Recording

Horizon Helpdesk Utility

New Releases

Linux Driver for Precision Clock Virtual Device

The Linux Driver for Precision Clock Virtual Device fling is an alternative way for synchronising time using a newly introduced piece of virtual hardware in vSphere 7.

ptp_vmw is a Linux driver for VMware Precision Clock, a new type of virtual device available in ESXi 7.0 (hardware version 17 on-wards) that provides virtual machines with access to the underlying ESXi host’s system clock. Guests can use the device as a reference clock in Chrony time synchronization software to synchronize their system clocks with.

Precision Clock offers an alternative to existing methods of time synchronization in the guest, such as NTP. A potential benefit of using Precision Clock, when compared to a network time synchronization, is that it uses a VMware proprietary paravirtual interface between a virtual machine and the host to fetch time information. Achievable accuracy using network based time synchronization in a guest is limited by delay and variability in the virtual networking paths (including the guest’s own networking stack), especially under high loads. By avoiding virtual networking, time synchronization using Precision Clock can, potentially, achieve higher accuracy. See the vSphere 7.0 documentation at https://docs.vmware.com for more information about this virtual device.

This fling includes a Linux kernel module source RPM, which can be built and installed in a Linux system. Upon loading the driver, a PTP clock device is created, which can be consumed as a reference clock in Chrony. See included README file for more information.

Demo Appliance for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid

A Virtual Appliance that pre-bundles all required dependencies to help customers in learning and deploying standalone Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) clusters running on either VMware Cloud on AWS and/or vSphere 6.7 Update 3 environment for Proof of Concept, Demo and Dev/Test purposes.

This appliance will enable you to quickly go from zero to Kubernetes in less than 30 minutes with just an SSH client and a web browser!

Features:

  • Quickly deploy TKG Clusters onto VMware Cloud on AWS or vSphere-based infrastructure
  • Online vSphere Content Library to sync all TKG Demo Appliance dependencies
  • Accompany step-by-step workshop-style guide
  • Embedded Harbor registry pre-loaded with all required TKG and Demo Containers
  • Support for Air-Gapped and Non-Internet accessible environments
  • Sample demo applications including Persistent Volume, K8s 3-Tier Application with a LoadBalancer example
  • Easily access and debug TKG Clusters using Octant

What’s Included:

Supernova – Accelerating Machine Learning Inference

With machine learning is widely used in enterprises, big data are trained on the edge, inference services go to production either in the cloud or on the edge.

On the edge

  • Edge devices have limited resources, space and power supply
  • Edge servers cost much higher than devices
  • Hardware accelerators are heterogeneous in architecture and various on interfaces and performance on the edge

In the cloud

  • Accelerator market is dominated by Nvidia GPU
  • Other options come as AMD GPU, Intel Habana Goya/Altera FPGA, AWS Inferentia, Xilinx FPGA etc
  • Common inference interfaces from cloud to edge doesn’t appear generally
  • Limitation on specific hardware accelerators or cloud leads to new vendor lock-in

Project Supernova is to build a common machine learning inference service framework by enabling machine learning inference accelerators across edge endpoint devices, edge systems and cloud, with or without hardware accelerators.

  • Micro-service based architecture with Restful API
  • Support heterogenous system architectures from leading vendors
  • Support accelerator compilers to native code
  • Neutral to ML training framework file formats
  • Work on both edge devices and clouds
  • Hardware CPU support:
    • x86-64, ARM64
  • Hardware accelerator support:
    • Intel VPU, Google Edge TPU, Nvidia GPU
  • Software
    • Inference toolkit support: OpenVINO, TensorRT & Tenserflow Lite
    • Training framework data format: Tensorflow, Caffe, ONNX, MxNet

Updated flings

VMware Appliance for Folding@Home

Do you have some cpu resources left to use for a good cause? The VMware appliance for folding@home makes life doing that just a bit easier.

Changelog

May 6, 2020 – v1.0.4

  • F@H software has been updated to latest 7.6.13

VMware-Appliance-FaH_1.0.4.ova
MD5: 151a5708f5d8cada3f5b48936e749f60

VMware Event Broker Appliance

The VMware Event Broker Appliance gives users makes live easier for creating business logic based on events.

Changelog

Here.

Virtual Machine Compute Optimizer

The Virtual Machine Compute Optimizer (VMCO) is a Powershell script that uses the PowerCLI module to capture information about the hosts and VMS running in your vSphere environment, and reports back on whether the VMs are configured optimally based on the Host CPU and memory.

Changelog

Version 2.1.0

  • Fixed errors in reporting for some VMs that are on hosts with 4 sockets
  • Fixed “memory” missing from Details when VM memory spans pNUMA nodes
  • Added ability to call function with “-simple” which only reports VM info (leaves out vCenter, Cluster, and Host)

VMware Machine Learning Platform

The VMware Machine Learning Platform was build to provide an end-to-end ML Platform.

Changelog

Version 0.2.0

  • Added support for vSphere with Kubernetes and Tanzu Kubernetes GRID in addition to VMware
  • Cloud Foundation/PKS
  • Upgraded to Kubeflow 1.0 GA
  • Added support for GPUs
  • Introduced a new data registry component called Data Manager
  • Upgraded minor components/libraries to the latest versions
  • Added an easy-to-use installer
  • Lots of bug fixes

vSphere Mobile Client

The vSphere Mobile client is the tool to have if you want to be able to an early check on your vCenter while running to your desk to do it on those nice and fancy big screens you have over there.

Changelog

Version 1.11.0

New features:

  • Virtual keyboard for VM console, with all special keys available
  • Details page for cluster objects

Improvements:

  • iOS devices now have the VM console, still requires direct ESXi connection for both Android and iOS
  • Library updates for better compatibility

Bugfixes:

  • Host no longer shows as standalone when part of a cluster
  • Issues for all objects are calculated similarly, by adding together fired alarms and configuration issues
  • Virtual CPU count in VM summary page is now correct
  • All details pages are showing information in a similar way

Horizon Session Recording

The Horizon Helpdesk Recording fling is an underestimated fling in my eyes, it gives you the opportunity to properly record whats’s happening in a users vdi session.

Changelog

Version 2.0.8

Note: Version 2.0.8 is a complete re-write of the whole fling, This fling does not support upgrading, this will require a new deployment, server and agent.

  • The agent is now multi-threaded.
  • The web service is now written in angular.
  • The web service now supports high availability (see documentation).
  • This release will only work with Horizon 7.9 or higher.

Horizon Helpdesk Utility

After Reach that sadly had to be pulled the Horizon Helpdesk Utility is on of the best flings to have ever been released for Horizon. FInally a fast tool that properly helps your helpdesk without having to go to the admin console.

Changelog

Version 1.5.0.21

  • Fixed an intermittent issue with the agent crashed when viewing a pool / session.

The VMware Labs flings monthly for April 2020

  By , , , , , ,

Another month down in the Corona quarantaine. That doesn’t mean that the engineers didn’t work on flings. More the opposite since I can’t remember having to go to page 2 on the site to see all of the new releases and updates. I see four new releases and nine updated flings.

The new ones: Tech For Good – Virtual Reality Experience, vSphere Replication Capacity Planning, Python Client for VMC on AWS, Horizon Cloud Pod Architecture Tools.

The updated flings: vRealize Operations REST Notifications Helper, App Finder for Tunnel, USB Network Native Driver for ESXi, vSphere Software Asset Management Tool, VMware OS Optimization Tool, Power vRA Cloud, VMware Appliance for Folding@Home, Virtual Machine Compute Optimizer, vSAN Performance Monitor.

New flings

Tech For Good – Virtual Reality Experience

The Tech For Good – Virtual Reality Experience fling is a VR huide through 4 key pieces of tech.

Download this Virtual Reality Application for the Oculus Quest and Oculus Go, you will watch this VR experience hosted by VMware, Bask Iyer, CIO and Chief Digital Transformation officer, as he walks us through 4 key technologies Cloud, Mobile, IoT and AI and illustrates new opportunities for technology to deliver a positive impact on society.

vSphere Replication Capacity Planning

The vSphere Replication Capacity Planning Fling reveals actual VM traffic consumption and delta size. This helps you perform a capacity planning or estimation of vSphere Replication network bandwidth utilization prior to enabling vSphere Replication for VMs.

This Fling exposes graphics regarding LWD (lightweight delta) network traffic and delta size metrics, represented in different time frames – hourly, daily, weekly and monthly.

Python Client for VMC on AWS

Python Client for VMware Cloud on AWS is an open-source Python-based tool. Written in Python, the tool enables VMware Cloud on AWS users to automate the consumption of their VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC.
Note this is not to interact with your VMware Cloud on AWS vCenter but to run tasks such as creating and deleting networks, setting up security groups and services and building network security rules on the Management and Compute Gateways.

Detailed instructions can be downloaded in the instructions tab or can be also found on the following blog post:
https://nicovibert.com/2020/02/25/pyvmc-python-vmware-cloud-aws/

Horizon Cloud Pod Architecture Tools

The Horizon Cloud Pod Architecture Tools fling is a set of tools that helps with managing a Horizon cloud pod.

Horizon cloud pod architecture (CPA) has lmvutil commands to manage the global database entitlements data using command line interface. A lmvtools command line wrapper is now available to enhance the command execution of lmvutil commands to input the password only once and leave the command execution to continue. It has capability to export all the site, site-pod mapping, global entitlements, user global assignments, local pool assignments, home site overrides, backup global entitlements in lmvutil commands format to file. The command builder has in-built mechanism to comment the stale user global assignments and stale home site assignments.

Update flings

vRealize Operations REST Notifications Helper

vRealize Operations REST Notifications Helper helps vRealize Operations Manager users improve and customize the REST notifications of alerts. It collects the most useful information about an alert, creates a new payload by user configuration, and sends it to third parties.

Changelog

Version 1.4.0

  • Added vRealize Operations Cloud Support
  • Added custom tags support
  • Bugfixes and improvements

App Finder for Tunnel

This application is a utility which can be used for conveniently flagging the applications to use WorkspaceONE Tunnel on macOS.

Changelog

Unknown

USB Network Native Driver for ESXi

Specially made for homelabs the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi makes it possible to use usb network cards with ESXi.

Changelog

April 6, 2020 – v1.5

  • Added support for ESXi 7.0

Note: This is ONLY for ESXi 7.0, for ESXi 6.5/6.7, please ensure you are using the correct version of driver.

ESXi700-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-34491022-component-15873236.zip

vSphere Software Asset Management Tool

The vSphere Software Asset Management (vSAM) is a tool that collects and summarizes vSphere product deployment information. It calls on vSphere APIs for deployment data and produces a PDF report that the customer can consult as a part of their infrastructure review and planning process. This lightweight Java application runs on Windows, Linux or Mac OS.

Changelog

Version 1.1

  • Added vSphere 7.0 support; Added the Host Inventory Table in the generated software asset management report.

VMware OS Optimization Tool

Osot is the tool to optimize your Horizon golden images.

Changelog

April,2020,b1151

  • Fixed several issues in CLI.

April, 2020, b1150
.docx file of recent change log located in the hyperlink above.

Includes various bug fixes and many new optimizations that have a huge beneficial effect.

Support for Windows 10 version 2004 has been added.

Optimizations

Lots of Windows 10 and Windows Server optimizations have been added to this version. These include settings for Windows features and also for applications:

  • Office 2013/2016/2019
    • Disable start screens
    • Disable animations
    • Disable hardware acceleration
  • Internet Explorer 11 and Edge browserBlank home page
    • Prevent first time wizard
    • Disable hardware acceleration
  • Adobe Reader 11 and DC
    • Disable hardware acceleration
    • Multiple additional optimizations

More optimizations have been added for Windows services and scheduled tasks to achieve a faster OS initialization and improve performance.

UI Button Renames and Reorder

Several buttons have been renamed to more closely reflect the task they perform.

  • Analyze is now called Optimize.
  • The old page that displayed the results of an optimization task used to be called Optimize. That has been renamed to Results.

Inside the Optimize page the buttons at the bottom left have been reorganized. These are now in order that you would execute them in. Analyze > Common Options > Optimize

Removed the button for Compatibility as this was a legacy item.

The top-level buttons and tabs have been reordered to better reflect the main tasks and the order you carry them out in. Analyze > Generalize > Finalize.

Common Options

New option in Visual Effect to allow the selection of disabling hardware acceleration for IE, office and Adobe Reader. The default is that this is selected but this allows this to be easily unselected if using hardware GPU.

Added Photos to the list of Windows Store apps that can be selected to be retained.

Setting the background to a solid color is now selected by default.

Generalize

More comprehensive Sysprep answer file that helps with some optimization items that were getting undone by the Sysprep process.

Finalize

New options to carry out some tasks that get undone during Generalize.

  • Disable Superfetch service. This reduces high usage of CPU and RAM.
  • Clean temporary files from the default user profile.

Automate the use of SDelete to zero empty disk space.

  • Overwrites empty disk space with zeros so that the VMDK size can be reduced when it is cloned.
  • This uses SDelete which needs to be downloaded from Microsoft Sysinternals and copied to a location in the path (Windows\System32 or current user directory).

Create Local Group Policies

  • Creates local group policies for computer and user settings that can then be viewed with tools like RSOP and GPEdit.
  • This uses LGPO.exe which can be downloaded as part of the Microsoft Security Compliance Toolkit. LGPO.exe should be copied to a location in the path (Windows\System32 or current user directory).

Command Line

Command line support added for the Generalize step.

Command line support added for the Finalize step. This also simplifies and consolidates the previous system clean tasks (NGEN, DISM, Compact, Disk Cleanup) under the new -Finalize option. These can now be run without specifying a template.

Fixed naming of Paint3D application when wanting to retain this while removing other Windows Store Applications. This had been previously been incorrectly named as MSpaint.

Templates

Windows 10 version 2004 was added to the built-in template Windows 10 1809 – XXXX-Server 2019.

Legacy templates for Horizon Cloud and App Volumes packaging have been removed. The two standard Windows 10 templates should be used instead.

LoginVSI templates are no longer built in. They are still available to download from the public templates interface.

Guides

Updated OSOT user guide: VMware Operating System Optimization Tool Guide.

Updated Creating an Optimized Windows Image for a VMware Horizon Virtual Desktop guide coming soon.

Power vRA Cloud

PowervRA Cloud is a PowerShell module that abstracts the VMware vRealize Automation Cloud APIs to a set of easily used PowerShell functions.

Changelog

Version 1.2

  • Support for vRealize Automation 8.1
  • New cmdlets
  • Connect-vRA-Server
  • New-vRA-Server-CloudAccount-VMC
  • New-vRA-Server-CloudAccount-vSphere

VMware Appliance for Folding@Home

This Fling is a vSphere Appliance that contains the Folding@Home client software to help the fight against Covid.

Changelog

April 17, 2020 – v1.0.3

  • F@H software has been updated to latest 7.6.8
  • Add OVF property (guestinfo.fah_next_unit_percentage) to control Workload Unit Percentage (default value of 90)

VMware-Appliance-FaH_1.0.3.ova
MD5: d82d0829badc64e7e19bf24999a2db1a

April 1, 2020 – v1.0.2

  • F@H software has been updated to latest 7.5.1
  • Add OVF DeploymentOption (Small, Medium and Large) to help simplify initial configuration including optimal memory setting for 16 vCPU
  • SSH is now disabled by default (can be enabled during OVF deployment)

VMware-Appliance-FaH_1.0.2.ova
MD5: 44843701611febbf45d72b8b37a0778a

Virtual Machine Compute Optimizer

The Virtual Machine Compute Optimizer (VMCO) is a Powershell script that uses the PowerCLI module to capture information about the hosts and VMS running in your vSphere environment, and reports back on whether the VMs are configured optimally based on the Host CPU and memory.

Changelog

Version 2.0.4

  • Fixed errors with reporting on VMs with odd number of vCPUs
  • Fixed reporting on VMs that have CPU Hot Add enabled

vSAN Performance Monitor

The vSAN performance monitor is a monitoring and visualization tool based on vSAN Performance metrics.

Changelog

Version 1.3

  • Fixed issues related to user login. We have removed the user password configuration screen while deploying the fling. Users will be prompted to change the password after login.
  • Few tweaks related to Grafana charts. Removed the login screen to access graphs.

[Update 23-04-2020]Adding vCenter server to Horizon View using the api’s

  By , , ,

Update

I don’t know since what version but somewhere this script stopped working because VMware change some things. In 7.8 there was a change about the thumbprint algorithm to DER_BASE64_PEM so it might have started there. Another change is that in the sslcertthumbprint field they stopped using the thumbprint but actually add the entire certificate.

What is needed to fix this?

Replace:

$spec.CertificateOverride=($services.Certificate.Certificate_Validate($spec.serverspec)).thumbprint

with

$spec.CertificateOverride.SslCertThumbprint=($services.Certificate.Certificate_Validate($spec.serverspec)).certificate
$spec.CertificateOverride.sslCertThumbprintAlgorithm = "DER_BASE64_PEM"

and you should be good. I have already updated the version of the script below.

A big thank you to Mark Brookfield for asking me about this

/update

Yesterday Sean Massey (https://thevirtualhorizon.com/) asked me if it was possible to add a vCenter server + some other things to Horizon View using the api’s. With a quick look at the api explorer I confirmed this should be possible. The other things he asked I will put in a separate blogpost.

It looks like a simple matter of building the spec and I should be good. In the end it turned out to be a bit more work then expected. Some items are not required according to the api explorer but should at least be called in the spec (set them to something empty) while others can safely be left away. The automatic generated ssl certs in my lab also turned out to be a pita. First I copied them from a current spec and later I downloaded the certificate on the Connection server itself and read that cert. Andrew Morgan (http://andrewmorgan.ie/)from VMware helped me out with this by showing their internal script that they use. It turned out that except for the SSL certs I was on the right path. As usual I will add this functionality to the vmware.hv.helper but since that might take a while I decided to create a useful script

$hvServer = $global:DefaultHVServers[0]
$services=  $hvServer.ExtensionData

# Create required objects

$spec=new-object VMware.Hv.VirtualCenterSpec
$spec.serverspec=new-object vmware.hv.serverspec
$spec.viewComposerData=new-object VMware.Hv.virtualcenterViewComposerData

$spec.Certificateoverride=new-object vmware.hv.CertificateThumbprint
$spec.limits=new-object VMware.Hv.VirtualCenterConcurrentOperationLimits
$spec.storageAcceleratorData=new-object VMware.Hv.virtualcenterStorageAcceleratorData

# vCenter Server specs

$spec.ServerSpec.servername="pod2vcr1.loft.lab"        # Required, fqdn for the vCenter server
$spec.ServerSpec.port=443                                 # Required
$spec.ServerSpec.usessl=$true                             # Required
$spec.ServerSpec.username="administrator@vsphere.local"   # Required user@domain
$vcpassword=read-host "vCenter User password?" -assecurestring
$temppw = [System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::SecureStringToBSTR($vcPassword)
$PlainvcPassword = [System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::PtrToStringAuto($temppw)
$vcencPassword = New-Object VMware.Hv.SecureString
$enc = [system.Text.Encoding]::UTF8
$vcencPassword.Utf8String = $enc.GetBytes($PlainvcPassword)
$spec.ServerSpec.password=$vcencPassword
$spec.ServerSpec.servertype="VIRTUAL_CENTER"

# Description & Displayname, neither is required to be set

#$spec.description="description"              # Not Required
#$spec.displayname="virtualcenterdisplayname" # Not Required
$spec.CertificateOverride=($services.Certificate.Certificate_Validate($spec.serverspec)).thumbprint
$spec.CertificateOverride.SslCertThumbprint=($services.Certificate.Certificate_Validate($spec.serverspec)).certificate
$spec.CertificateOverride.sslCertThumbprintAlgorithm = "DER_BASE64_PEM"


# Limits
# Only change when you want to change the default values. It is required to set these in the spec

$spec.limits.vcProvisioningLimit=20
$spec.Limits.VcPowerOperationsLimit=50
$spec.limits.ViewComposerProvisioningLimit=12
$spec.Limits.ViewComposerMaintenanceLimit=20
$spec.Limits.InstantCloneEngineProvisioningLimit=20

# Storage Accelerator data

$spec.StorageAcceleratorData.enabled=$false
#$spec.StorageAcceleratorData.DefaultCacheSizeMB=1024   # Not Required

# Cmposer
# most can be left empty but they need to be set otherwise you'll get a xml error

$spec.ViewComposerData.viewcomposertype="STANDALONE"  # DISABLED for none, LOCAL_TO_VC for installed with the vcenter and STANDALONE for s standalone composer


if ($spec.ViewComposerData.viewcomposertype -ne "DISABLED"){
    $spec.ViewComposerData.ServerSpec=new-object vmware.hv.serverspec
    $spec.ViewComposerData.CertificateOverride=new-object VMware.Hv.CertificateThumbprint
    $cmppassword=read-host "Composer user password?" -assecurestring
    $temppw = [System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::SecureStringToBSTR($cmpPassword)
    $PlaincmpPassword = [System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::PtrToStringAuto($temppw)
    $cmpencPassword = New-Object VMware.Hv.SecureString
    $enc = [system.Text.Encoding]::UTF8
    $cmpencPassword.Utf8String = $enc.GetBytes($PlaincmpPassword)
    $spec.ViewComposerData.ServerSpec.password=$cmpencPassword
    $spec.ViewComposerData.ServerSpec.servername="pod2cmp1.loft.lab"
    $spec.ViewComposerData.ServerSpec.port=18443
    $spec.ViewComposerData.ServerSpec.usessl=$true
    $spec.ViewComposerData.ServerSpec.username="m_wouter@loft.lab"
    $spec.ViewComposerData.ServerSpec.servertype="VIEW_COMPOSER"

    $spec.ViewComposerData.CertificateOverride=($services.Certificate.Certificate_Validate($spec.ViewComposerData.ServerSpec)).thumbprint
    $spec.ViewComposerData.CertificateOverride.sslCertThumbprint = ($services.Certificate.Certificate_Validate($spec.ViewComposerData.ServerSpec)).certificate
    $spec.ViewComposerData.CertificateOverride.sslCertThumbprintAlgorithm = "DER_BASE64_PEM"
}


# Disk reclamation, this is required to be set to either $false or $true
$spec.SeSparseReclamationEnabled=$false 

# This will create the connection
$services.VirtualCenter.VirtualCenter_Create($spec)

 

Looking at the output it will only ask for the vCenter user’s password and if a Composer server is set for that user’s password.

 

The VMware Labs flings monthly for March 2020

  By , , , , ,

We are living in some crazy times, we have been locked down here already for several weeks and in my area things are improving, just like my dad who is recovering from Corona. The virus didn’t stop the VMware engineers from working on flings though. This includes the new VMware Appliance for Folding@Home if you want to help in the battle against Corona or other illnesses. Other new releases are Workspace ONE Mobileconfig Importer and Unified Access Gateway Deployment Utility while the following received an update: vSphere Software Asset Management Tool, Desktop Watermark,  vCenter Event Broker Appliance,, Ubuntu OVA for Horizon, Workspace ONE UEM SCIM Adapter, vSphere Mobile Client, Infrastructure Deployer for vCloud NFV and last but not least Horizon View Events Database Export Utility.

New Releases

VMware Appliance for Folding@Home

I already spoiler the VMware Appliance for Folding@Home but this appliance gives you the opportunity to add your computer power in the search for a solution against Corona or other diseases.

This Fling is a vSphere Appliance that contains the Folding@Home client software. Upon deploying the VMware Appliance for Folding@Home, the user will be prompted to enter information to configure the Folding@Home software. Once the appliance is deployed, the Folding@Home client is running and ready for Working Units. The Fling is also pre-configured to allow remote management of the Folding@Home client. For more information on the Folding@Home Project and how we can be a Force for Good against diseases like the Coronavirus, visit the website www.foldingathome.org.

The Folding@Home Appliance is configured to automatically join Team VMware ID 52737. Everyone is welcome to join! Check out http://vmwa.re/fah for team and individual statistics.

Workspace ONE Mobileconfig Importer

The Workspace ONE mobileconfig Importer gives you the ability to import existing mobileconfig files directly into a Workspace ONE UEM environment as a Custom Settings profile, import app preference plist files in order to created managed preference profiles, and to create new Custom Settings profiles from scratch. When importing existing configuration profiles, the tool will attempt to separate each PayloadContent dictionary into a separate payload for the Workspace ONE profile.

Unified Access Gateway Deployment Utility

In case the manual deployment is too much work or the PowerCLI based is too difficult engineers have now created Unified Access Gateway Deployment Utility for Mac or Windows to install the uag.

Unified Access Gateway (UAG) Deployment Utility assists the deployment of UAG appliances by running the utility on Windows or macOS machines. This utility provides better user interface, which is self explanatory about the next steps and better error handling through useful messages & tool tips which will make it easier for an admin to deploy single or multiple appliances.

Updated Flings

vSphere Software Asset Management Tool

Changelog

March 2020

  • Minor wording update to the generated software asset management report.

Desktop Watermark

Changelog

v1.1 – Build 20200302-signed

  • Added a new attribute %DATETIME% to show hour and minute info on screen.

vCenter Event Broker Appliance

Changelog

Too damn much so better head over to William Lam’s blogpost.

Ubuntu OVA for Horizon

Changelog

v1.2

  • Special thanks to Robert Guske for testing & feedback
  • Support for Horizon 7.11 and later
  • Support for vSphere 6.7+
  • Updated OVA base image to Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS
  • Updated Virtual Hardware to v14
  • Added option to configure static networking
  • Added support for USB 3.0 and USB Redirection (via linux-agent-installer.sh)
  • Added KDE Desktop Environment Option
  • Added Gnome Desktop Environment Option (recommended)
  • Developer Desktop Package option
  • Added Keyboard Layout Option
  • Added option to enable SSH
  • Removed runlevel 5 setting
  • Fixed MOTD prompt code
  • Disabled auto software updates
  • Removed greeter modifications to support SSO
  • Numerous improvements to script
  • Script renamed to ‘optimize.sh’

Workspace ONE UEM SCIM Adapter

Changelog

20.03 Release Notes:
Please Note: If you have already setup WS1 SCIM Adapter, it is possible that moving to 20.03 will create new accounts. Please consider resetting Directory Services configuation for the OG you are connecting to.

New Features:

  • Windows 10 OOBE Enrollment now supported
  • Bitnami Node.js 12.16.1-0 now supported with embedded install
  • Various Enterprise and Custom SCIM Schema attributes now supported (see below table)

Bugs Fixed:

  • Resources with special characters in immutableId do not update

vSphere Mobile Client

Changelog

Version 1.10.2

Improvements/Fixes

  • Better support for older devices
  • Fix some issues related to the back button
  • Fix for the annotation not defined issue

Version 1.10.1

  • Fixed “TypeError : Cannot read property of ‘annotation’ of undefined”
  • Errors causing white screen should now have more information about the cause

Infrastructure Deployer for vCloud NFV

Changelog

Version 3.2.1 Update

  • Updated to new version
  • Replaced user guide the new version

Horizon View Events Database Export Utility

Changelog

Version 2.2

Fixed the following issues:

  • Able to return data for All Pools
  • Able to return data on just user logon and logoff events
  • Both of these actions would cause a crash or error in previous versions

The VMware Labs flings monthly for February 2020

  By , , , , , , ,

First of all my excuses for not posting more last month. It was a short but very busy month so I just couldn’t find the time for that. The people behind VMware flings have bee busy though with one new fling and seven updates ones. New is Pallas (for managing edge ESXi hosts) and the following received updates: Virtual Machine Compute Optimizer, USB Network Native Driver for ESXi, vSphere HTML5 Web Client, App Volumes Entitlement Sync, App Volumes Migration Utility, vRealize Build Tools, Power vRA Cloud.

New Releases

pallas

Pallas helps an admin to manage edge ESXi hosts where it’s not possible to manage them using vCenter due to security reasons.

The goal of Pallas is to provide management ability for ESXi hosts that cannot be managed by vCenter due to firewall or network issues.

 

Case 1: You have several ESXi hosts which running in a private network, but you have requirement to management them in the public network.

 

Case 2: Your ESXi host don’t wire connections and must connected through WiFi or Mobile network. For example, you use ESXi running on the oil rig, train head and you want to remote manage the ESXi securely.

 

Case 3: In IOT world you have the virtualized Edge devices requirements (ESXi host on Edge Device) and need remote management the ESXi(like patch, create VM etc.)

 

This solution includes a dominate-agent VM to provide remote management ability on the ESXi. If the ESXi has no wire connection then a pluggable network device (USB WiFi card, 3G/4G/5G sim card or other device that can provide network access ability) is needed, the pluggable network device will be pass-through directly to the dominate-agent VM. A remote manager server that accept connections either in public cloud/hybrid or private datacenter.

 

The dominate agent VM will talk to ESXi through ESXi SDK for workload VM management. There is no direct connection between the workload vm and dominate agent by default.

 

The dominate agent VM will talk to Pallas Manger though MQTT protocol, it will not allow any inbound traffic.

 

Updated Flings

Virtual Machine Compute Optimizer

Virtual Machine Compute Optimizer is a script that analyses vm’s and the hosts running them to see if they run in an optimized way. It does not look into the vm’s themselves, if that is needed vRealize Operations is recommended.

Changelog

Version 2.0.2

  • Modified Get-OptimalvCPU.ps1 to account for vCenters with no clusters
  • Modified Error Catches so they display the line number of the error

USB Network Native Driver for ESXi

The USB Network Native Driver for ESXi was specially made for homelabs that need USB ports for extra network connectivity.

Changelog

February 12, 2020 – v1.4

  • Add SuperMicro/Insyde Software Corp USB Devices in the supported list
  • Resolved 9K Jumbo frame issue on RTL8153 chipset devices
  • Resolved invalid speed reporting for some quick devices by using the default speed

ESXi670-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-33242987-offline_bundle-15615590.zip
ESXi650-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-33268102-offline_bundle-15620342.zip

vSphere HTML5 Web Client

And the vSphere html5 client keeps improving and improving.

Changelog

Fling 5.0 – build 15670023

New Features

  • Code Capture new language: the recorded interaction can now be translated to Go.
  • PowerActions: integrating PowerCLI and the vSphere Client. The vSphere Client now provides the ability to execute PowerCLI commands and scripts, and store scripts in a library. Custom actions backed by PowerCLI scripts can be defined and executed on inventory objects.
  • PowerActions must be explicitly enabled on a vSphere Client Fling deployment. For setup instructions and a quick walkthrough, see the file PowerActions_documentation_Fling50.pdf .

Improvements

  • PowerActions: when executing a script from the context menu of an object, the context object is prepopulated, but the object selector control has to be expanded and collapsed in order for this to become visible.

Release Notes

  • The base operating system for the fling is changed to Photon OS.
    Upgrade from previous versions to 5.0 is not supported. A new appliance has to be deployed.

Server.bat Replaced, December 3

Fix a small error where ls.url was printed twice in the resulting webclient.properties which leads to errors when trying to login to the H5 web client.

App Volumes Entitlement Sync

The App Volumes Entitlement Sync helps the App Volumes admin in copying entitlements between various App Volumes environments like from test to production.

Changelog

Version 2.4

  • Fixed problem with sync button being disabled
  • Added check for App Volumes 2.x and App Volumes 4.x managers and will pop up message that they can’t be synced

App Volumes Migration Utility

You might want to use the App Volumes Migration Utility if you are upgrading from App Volumes 2.* to App Volumes 4.

Changelog

Version 1.0.1

  • Fix for Migrated Appstack upload failure in AVM due to JSON parsing error.
  • Instructions doc updated to reflect the name change from “Upload Prepackaged Volume” to “Upload Template” in the AVM UI.

vRealize Build Tools

vRealize Build Tools provides tools to development and release teams implementing solutions based on vRealize Automation (vRA) and vRealize Orchestrator (vRO). The solution targets Virtual Infrastructure Administrators and Solution Developers working in parallel on multiple vRealize-based projects who want to use standard DevOps practices.

Changelog

Version 2.4.18

  • Support vRA 8 support for blueprints, custom forms, subscriptions and flavor-mapping
  • vRO 8 support for existing content management and import
  • Support vRO 8 export of WFs in a folder structure derived from WF tags
  • Support for running WFs on vRO using maven command
  • Support persisting JS Actions IDs in source to allow for actions originating in vRO first to not create conflicts
  • TypeScript Projects (experimental) support improvements and bug fixes
  • General bugs fixing an documentation updates

Power vRA Cloud

Power vRA Cloud makes the vRA API’s more accessible for people already used to PowerCLI or PowerShell.

Changelog

Version 1.1

  • Bug fixes and following new cmdlets
  • Add-vRA-Project-Administrator
  • Add-vRA-Project-Member
  • Get-vRA-DeploymentFilters
  • Get-vRA-DeploymentFilterTypes
  • Get-vRA-FabricNetworksFilter
  • Get-vRA-FabricImagesFilter
  • Remove-vRA-Project-Administrator
  • Remove-vRA-Project-Member
  • Update-vRA-Project-ZoneConfig