For those that are not aware, VMware has had their Lab Flings going for a number of years now and on the back of the latest release (ESXi Embedded Host Client) I spent some time looking through all the flings and I thought it be useful to produce a list of my Top 5 Flings. The list below represents the Flings i’ve found most useful since I was first introduced to them…they reflect my love of NestedESXi and operations around vCloud…however there are a lot more that others will find useful.
Before the list…What are VMware Flings?
Our engineers work on tons of pet projects in their spare time, and are always looking to get feedback on their projects (or “flings”). Why flings? A fling is a short-term thing, not a serious relationship but a fun one. Likewise, the tools that are offered here are intended to be played with and explored. None of them are guaranteed to become part of any future product offering and there is no support for them. They are, however, totally free for you to download and play around with them!
There are 57 Flings available for download at the time of writing this post and 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…some of them end up being productised themselves.
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 – vCMA
VMware vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA) is a fully configured and ready to run virtual appliance that is required to manage your datacenter from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets (iPad). Using either a mobile browser or the native iPad application, administrators can now perform various troubleshooting and remediation activities in their VMware environments from anywhere in the world.
Back before the Web Client was introduced in vSphere 5.0 this was one of the best ways to access your vCenter Hosts and VMs to perform actions remotely from you mobile phone or device. It is was an easy install and did the job…this evolved into the current vSphere Mobile Watchlist.
Fling Number 3 – PowerCLI Extensions
VMware PowerCLI is one of the most successful command line tools for managing your VMware products. With the many existing cmdlets designed for the system administrator or vSphere Admin, PowerCLI is the easiest and most powerful tool for managing your environment.
PowerCLI Extensions gives PowerCLI users access to early access functionality by extending the core PowerCLI cmdlets to include new experimental features and gives PowerCLI customers the ability to provide early feedback.
For anyone using PowerCLI to manage and automate their vSphere environments the PowerCLI Extensions have been a valuable tool to have at your disposal. Over the last couple of weeks the Fling has become even cooler by allowing access to the VMFork Instant Clone Technology APIs which up to this point have been hidden from general consumption in vSphere/ESXi 6.0
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 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
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.
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.
For a full list of the Flings available for download, head to this link
https://labs.vmware.com/flings/page/4?cat=1&orderby=comment_count
