VMware has had their Lab Flings program going for a number of years now and in 2015 I wrote this post listing out my Top 5 Flings. Since then there have been some awesome Flings released and I thought it was a good time to update my Top 5 Flings to reflect the continued awesomeness generated within the VMware Labs. Since my last post there have also been a number of flings that have found their way into product releases:

Flings are apps and tools built by our engineers that are intended to be played with and explored.

There are 128 (up from 57 from August of 2015) Flings listed on the site though some have been depreciated. They range across most of VMware’s Product stack…most of them have been created out of some requirement or function that was/is lacking in the current toolset for their respective products. Most of them solve usability issues or look to resolve performance bottlenecks and look to optimize product experience.

Fling Number 5 – Storage Profile Updater

This Fling is a simple tool that enables the migration of vCloud Director virtual machines and templates from the default any storage profile to a specific storage profile. The tool can be run from the command-line with the help of a configuration file, and it allows you to change storage profiles in a batch style of processing.

For those that upgraded vCloud Director from 1.5 to 5.x you would know about the Any profile issue…this fling allows you to migrate all VMs from that default storage policy to any new one you might have configured in your Provider vDC.

Fling Number 4 – Cross vCenter VM Mobility – CLI

Cross vCenter VM Mobility – CLI is a command line interface (CLI) tool that can be used to migrate or clone a VM from one host to another host managed by a linked or isolated vCenter (VC) instance. It has been built using vSphere Java-based SDK APIs.

Currently, as of vSphere 6.0, the vSphere HTML5 Web Client allows users to perform Cross-VC operations like migration and cloning if two VCs are linked. If VCs are not linked, users cannot view the infrastructure across multiple VCs and thus, cannot utilize this functionality through UI. This Fling provides a way for users to access this vSphere feature through simple CLI commands. It also supports cross-cluster placement and shared storage vMotion between two VCs.

Cross vCenter migrations is probably one of the most underrated features VMware has released and has been present since vSphere 6.0. Originally exposed via the API’s William Lam blogged about a wrapper he wrote to use the functionality and this Fling sits beside that as possible tools to perform the cross vCenter actions.

Fling Number 3 – Embedded Host Client

The ESXi Embedded Host Client is a native HTML and JavaScript application and is served directly from your ESXi host! It should perform much better than any of the existing solutions

This Fling was a revelation when it was first released and adds a very usable and functional HTML5 web interface from which to manage your ESXi hosts. It’s now productized and packaged into ESXi 5.5, 6.0 and 6.5 and there is continues on going development of the tool along with bug fixes and features that can be installed via the vib on the Fling site.

Fling Number 2 – VMware Tools for Nested ESXi

This VIB package provides a VMware Tools service (vmtoolsd) for running inside a nested ESXi virtual machine. The following capabilities are exposed through VMware Tools:

Provides guest OS information of the nested ESXi Hypervisor (eg. IP address, configured hostname, etc.).
Allows the nested ESXi VM to be cleanly shut down or restarted when performing power operations with the vSphere Web/C# Client or vSphere APIs.
Executes scripts that help automate ESXi guest OS operations when the guest’s power state changes.
Supports the Guest Operations API (formally known as the VIX API).

The release of this Fling was met with a lot of thankyou’s from those who had battled with NestedESXi Hosts not having VMTools available. If anything, the ability to cleanly shutdown or restart the ESXi Guest was welcomed. With the release of ESXi 6.0 (and subsequent 6.5 release) the Tools are included in the OS by default…but for those running 5.x Nested Hosts its a must have.

Fling Number 1 – ESXi Mac Learning dvFilter v2.0

MAC learning functionality solves performance problems for use cases like nested ESX.  This ESX extension adds functionality to ESX to support MAC-learning on vswitch ports. For most ESX use cases, MAC learning is not required as ESX knows exactly which MAC address will be used by a VM. However, for applications like running nested ESX, i.e. ESX as a guest-VM on ESX, the situation is different. As an ESX VM may emit packets for a multitude of different MAC addresses, it currently requires the vswitch port to be put in “promiscuous mode”. That however will lead to too many packets delivered into the ESX VM, as it leads to all packets on the vswitch being seen by all ESX VMs. When running several ESX VMs, this can lead to very significant CPU overhead and noticeable degradation in network throughput. Combining MAC learning with “promiscuous mode” solves this problem. The MAC learning functionality is delivered as a high speed VMkernel extension that can be enabled on a per-port basis. It works on legacy standard switches as well as Virtual Distributed Switches

This Fling is close to my heart as I learnt at VMworld 2014 that it was born out of a blog post I did on Promiscuous Mode that triggered William Lam to approach Christian Dickmann with the issues and look for a way to solve the issue. As you can see from my followup post it works as designed and is the single must have Fling for those who run Nested ESXi labs. It was recently upgraded to version 2.0 to support ESXi 6.5.

As of last week there a new ESXi Learnswitch Fling was released which builds upon (but can’t be used with) the MAC Learning fling.

ESXi Learnswitch is a complete implementation of MAC Learning and Filtering and is designed as a wrapper around the host virtual switch. It supports learning multiple source MAC addresses on virtual network interface cards (vNIC) and filters packets from egressing the wrong port based on destination MAC lookup. This substantially improves overall network throughput and system performance for nested ESX and container use cases.

To learn more, read ESXi Learnswitch – Enhancement to the ESXi MAC Learn DvFilter.

For a full list of the Flings available for download, head to this link

https://labs.vmware.com/flings/?utf8=%E2%9C%93&order=date+DESC