The VMware Labs flings monthly for December 2018

Happy New Year everyone! Hope you all had a great (and safe!) end of the year. I just need to close the year up with one thing: an overview of flings that have been released or updated in December. No less than four new flings have arrived: VMware Workspace ONE Provisioning ToolDispatch-SoloAndroid Device Pre-Verification Suite and PowerCLI for VMware Cloud on AWS. Two flings have received an update: PowerCLI Extensions and the HCIBench.

New

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VMware Workspace ONE Provisioning Tool

The VMware Workspace ONE Provisioning Tool gives you an gui to provision and test WS One Applications.

The VMware Workspace ONE Provisioning Tool helps you test and validate your applications (exported as a .ppkg file) and the special-purpose unattend.xml configuration file as part of the Dell Provisioning for Workspace ONE offer. This tool simplifies the testing and validation of this process in your own environment before these files are sent and applied in the Dell factory.

Highlights

  • Simple UI to easily enable the IT admin to validate their ppkg and unattend.xml files in their own environment, mimicking what Dell is doing in the factory.
  • Supports PPKGs and unattend.xmls generated with Workspace ONE UEM Console 1811 or newer.
  • Highly flexible. Allows IT admins to specify the configurations for tool in a text based config file in order to change things like tool timeout and report location, to name a few.
  • Generates a detailed final summary report with client details and app installation results. This file is saved in C:\ProgramData\Airwatch\UnifiedAgent\Logs\PPKGFinalSummary.log after the “Full Process” button is clicked.
  • Halts the process if any steps fails for the given operation, giving the ability to IT admins to view & debug the state of the machine and the apps.

Supported Operations

  • Apply Apps Only – Given a ppkg, this tool deploys the applications on a test windows machine
  • Apply Full process – Given a ppkg and xml file, this tool deploys the applications on a test windows machine followed by Workspace ONE enrollment and Sysprep.

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Dispatch-Solo

The Dispatch-Solo fling actually is a prepackaged VM to get you started with dispatch as easily as possible.

Dispatch-Solo is lean version of Dispatch which has been packaged as VM appliance. The goals of Dispatch-Solo are simple:

  • Lower the barrier to entry – get started with Dispatch in a matter of minutes
  • Support nearly the full Dispatch feature set – API compatibility
  • Explore use-cases – get user feedback and iterate

Because Dispatch and serverless is still in its infancy, understanding use cases is the highest priority. It therefore makes sense to continue to focus on getting Dispatch in as many hands as possible and making it as easy as possible to get started exploring its usage. By packaging Dispatch-Solo as a VM appliance, getting started is quick and predictable.

For full documentation and examples see the Dispatch project page.

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Android Device Pre-Verification Suite

This Android Device Pre-Verification Suite Fling reduces the time to perform a preliminary test on any Android device from any OEM. Pre-verification result decides whether the device is eligible for a full device verification program or not. This eliminates the TAT (turnaround time) for basic test failures during the initial phase of verification from VMware. Customers/Partners can run this tool at their premise and check whether the device passes the device verification program entry criteria.

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PowerCLI for VMware Cloud on AWS

If you are using VMware Cloud on AWS the PowerCLI for VMware Cloud on AWS fling will give you an preview on what to expect from PowerCLI to automate VMC.

This Fling provides a community preview of the upcoming PowerCLI commands for managing VMware Cloud on AWS. It comes in the form of a single PowerCLI module and integrates with existing PowerCLI modules.

All commands have been automatically generated. They are still in development, contain known issues, and will change in the future.

Updated

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PowerCLI Extensions

The PowerCLI extensions fling gives you a preview on what to expect in the official PowerCLI releases.

Changelog

Version 3.0.0.11173018

  • Updated PowerCLI.Extensions Module to be compatible with VMware PowerCLI 11.0.0

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HCIBench

This one should be known by now, the HCIBench is made for benchmarking your hyperconverged infrastucture. Ideal for things like vSAN but please be aware that it could also possibly be tuned for that.

Changelog

Version 1.6.8.7

  • Enhanced easy-run, put original 4k,70% read as the first test case, then 4k, 100% read and 256k, 100% write
  • Enhanced tvm deployment validation
  • Added Checksum into easy-run consideration
  • Updated guest VM template with increased ring_pages and disk scheduler
  • Added DNS configuration guidance into welcome message

Version 1.6.8.5

  • Added 2 more test cases into easy-run, 4k 100% random read and 256k 100% sequential write
  • Batch deployment will be involved if deploying more than 8 VMs to speed up deployment process
  • Allow user to choose IP prefix when using static IP
  • Optimized UI to allow user to review the results by single click
  • Fixed regression issue when placing Datacenter/Cluster in the folder