Author: Wouter

The VMware Labs flings monthly for July 2018

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It’s been a busy month in the world of flings all of the flings except for one on the first page are new or updated ones. This means there are five(!) new ones and six(!) have received an update. The new ones are: Policy Builder, SDDC Certificate Tool, vAssist.ai NLP Platform, Workspace ONE UEM Samsung E-FOTA Tool and the Horizon Helpdesk Utility that I wrote yesterday about. The ones that received an update are: Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility,  Blockchain on Kubernetes, HCIBench, ESXi Embedded Host Client, vSphere HTML5 Web Client and last but not least the VMware OS Optimization Tool.

The new releases

[sta_anchor id=”policybuilder” /]

Policy Builder

The policy builder is an hosted fling that helps the user to create custom MDM policies for Workspace UEM (former Airwatch)

Official summary:

This cloud hosted Fling helps users with custom Mobile Device Management (MDM) policy generation that use MDM capabilities available through Microsoft’s Windows 10 MDM Configuration Service Providers (CSPs).

Note: On login with My VMmware credentials, the tool provides an easy to use form based UI that allows the Windows 10 admin to simply enter the required values for the policies and auto generates corresponding syncML that can be copied to publish through Workspace ONE Unified Endpoint Management.

This tool greatly reduces the effort of hand rolling syncML and the possibility of code and formatting errors when creating or managing custom settings profiles through Workspace ONE UEM.

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SDDC Certificate Tool

The SDDC Certificate Tool is an automated process that replaces all certificates in a SDDC for you. This normally can be a lengthy process but should be a breeze with this fling.

Official summary:

Replacing SSL certificates across VMware products is a manual and time-consuming process. The SDDC Certificate Tool automates this workflow and makes it easy to keep certificates across your SDDC up to date. It will replace all certificates in the supported products and reestablish trust between the components.

Supported Products

  • VMware Platform Services Controller (PSC)
  • VMware vCenter Server (VC)
  • VMware NSX for vSphere (NSX)
  • vRealize Log Insight (vRLI)
  • vRealize Operations Manager (vROps)
  • vRealize Automation (vRA)
  • vRealize Business for Cloud (vRB)
    More about this Fling: New SDDC Certificate Replacement Fling by William Lam

[sta_anchor id=”vAssist” /]

vAssist.ai NLP Platform

Not my cup of tea but this fling is supposed to be an example where you can talk against vRealize Automation.

Official summary:

vAssist.ai, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) platform, enables bot developers to train machine learning models for intent classification and entity extraction. This platform is available as a SaaS model which exposes easy-to-use REST APIs to train and parse natural language inputs. It also provides a multi-tenant user interface dashboard which can be used to annotate and visualize training data expressions and train machine learning models in the cloud.

VMware customers who are serious about building conversational interfaces can benefit from this platform. With this Fling we trained a sample model for vRealize Automation. Users can chat with the test bot to query available catalog services and initiate a provisioning request in a natural, conversational way. Please note that we are using a sample internal environment for vRealize Automation.

Features

  • NLU Engine for Intent and entity extraction
  • Customizable NLU pipeline
  • Rule based and ML based Conversation Engine
  • Privacy of the data
  • Scalable and Fault Tolerant
  • REST APIs exposed for integration with multiple channels and platforms

[sta_anchor id=”wsonesamefota” /]

Workspace ONE UEM Samsung E-FOTA Tool

The Workspace ONE UEM Samsung E-FOTA Tool is a fling for Workspace One UEM to add some extra functionality for Samsung devices.

Official summary:

The Workspace ONE UEM Samsung E-FOTA Tool is designed to add to the existing abilities of AirWatch’s Samsung E-FOTA implementation. These new abilities include scheduling a firmware/OS update in a targeted window. This feature is dependent on the existing abilities within AirWatch which enroll the MDM into Samsung E-FOTA and push profiles to enroll the device into Samsung E-FOTA. Users should use this tool along with the information gathered from the Workspace ONE UEM console. The information can then be used to make an API command to schedule the firmware/OS update to your Samsung devices.

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Horizon Helpdesk Utility

Like I said yesterday the Horizon Helpdesk Utility is how the original Horizon View Helpdesk Tool should have been. Please read yesterdays;s post for more information and screenshots.

The Horizon Helpdesk Utility is designed to be a tool used by real help desk agents. The Horizon Helpdesk Utility takes all of the functionality of the current HTML5 based Helpdesk in VMware Horizon and adds true desktop integration features, including:

  • Greater speed in queries
  • Reduced steps to find a session
  • Multiple monitoring windows
  • Keystrokes for fast access
  • Native remote control functionality
  • Real-time updates
  • Built-in session experience score based on session performance and variables

Updated flings

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VMware OS Optimization Tool

Changelog

July 30, 2018, b1100

  • Issue fix: With group selection operation, unselected optimization items are applied.
  • Issue fix: can not export analysis report

July 20, 2018, b1099

  • Template update: Windows 10 & Windows Server 2016
  • Prevent the usage of OneDrive for file storage
  • Registry changes:
reg add "HKLM\DEFAULT\Software\Classes\CLSID{018D5C66-4533-4307-9B53-224DE2ED1FE6}" /v System.IsPinnedToNameSpaceTree /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
* reg add "HKLM\DEFAULT\Software\Classes\Wow6432Node\CLSID{018D5C66-4533-4307-9B53-224DE2ED1FE6}" /v System.IsPinnedToNameSpaceTree /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f reg add "HKLM\DEFAULT\System\GameConfigStore" /v GameDVR_Enabled /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f reg add "HKLM\DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\People" /v PeopleBand /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f reg add "HKLM\DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\GameDVR" /v AppCaptureEnabled /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f reg add "HKLM\DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Notifications\Settings\Windows.SystemToast.SecurityAndMaintenance" /v Enabled /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f reg add "HKLM\DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\PenWorkspace" /v PenWorkspaceButtonDesiredVisibility /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f reg delete "HKLM\DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run" /v OneDrive /F reg delete "HKLM\DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run" /v OneDriveSetup /F

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Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility

Changelog

Version 2.2, July 16, 2018

  • Support for vSphere Resource Pool and VM folder for placement under advanced options
  • Support for VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) by specifying resource pool and folder options

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Blockchain on Kubernetes

Changelog

July 16 2018, BoK 2.1

  • Support deployment of Hyperledger Fabric 1.1.0.
  • Allow users to customize the Fabric organizations and peers in bok.yaml.
  • Add ingress controller for serving traffic to Fabric peers nodes and explorer node.
  • Make improvement on stability and usability.
  • Verified against Kubernetes 1.10.3 and Pivotal Container Service (PKS) 1.1.0.
  • Updated the PCF Fabric Tile which supports creating Kubernetes cluster via PKS Tile and deploy Hyperledger Fabric in the Kubernetes cluster.

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HCIBench

Changelog

Version 1.6.7.1

  • Fixed vSAN Performance Diagnostic API call
  • Fixed network validation message not clear issue
  • Fixed setting re-use VMs as default bug in 1.6.7

Version 1.6.7

  • Enabled https instead of http
  • Added storage policy field, user can specify storage policy for the data disks. For this version, storage policy can’t be assigned to existing client VMs
  • Enhanced deployment methodology
  • Enhanced vSAN Observer to avoid blow up the memory
  • Enhanced vSAN Performance Diagnostic API call with HCIBench workload configuration included
  • Added timestamp to the testing status
  • Bug fixes

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ESXi Embedded Host Client

Changelog

Version 1.31.0 build 9277095 (Fling 21) – July 20, 2018

  • General
    • Resolve several issues related to dropdown selection
    • Update NTP UX
    • Update AngularJS to 1.6.10
    • Other minor bug fixes

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vSphere HTML5 Web Client

Changelog

Fling 3.40 – Build 9292689
New Features

  • Host profiles
    • Check compliance
    • Pre-check and remediate host (known issue exists – see known issues)
    • Extract, edit host profile
    • Host profile favorites management (vCenter 6.5)
    • Copy settings between profiles (vCenter 6.5)

New EUC fling released: Horizon Helpdesk Utility

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Ok, normally I do a post each month with the latest and greatest flings and I will still do that tomorrow. Today though Andrew Morgan from VMware OCTO has released a fantastic new fling: Horizon Helpdesk Utility! But we already have the Helpdesk tool you might say? Well this fling is everything the helpdesk tool should have been. While it isn’t bad this one is way better.

First of all this fling is an app that you need to install on your own computer or a management server. It will keep its settings in C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\HorizonHelpDeskAgent\ .net Framework 4.5.2 is required but most will already have that or a higher version installed. Installation itself is a quick next next finish with the warning that the signer of the application is not trusted, I have been told that this might be fixed in the next release. After installation you will find a new application in your start menu. I have already attached it to my start menu as well.

After starting you will get a box where you will need to fill in the server address including the http part and your credentials (the same role is required as the regular helpdesk tool)

If you don’t have a trusted certificate you will get a box to accept that certificate.

After that I was looking for something to popup but I just had a small icon added down right

Right click on this and you’ll see a small search box. This search is more easily reachable by using ctrl+F12

Put in a name and you’ll get a box that contains all matching names

Double click the correct account or session and the real deal will open up for you.

The diagrams hardly need any explanation, please also notice the user experience rating on the top right. The image in my lab doesn’t have anything installed so I can’t really show a lot but here are the views from the other tabs as well:

All entitlements for the user

This is pulled directly from the event database

Some more fancy diagrams about the blast protocol

The last tab shows all processes on the desktop, this can easily be filtered on any of the info shown

A possible improvement here would be some kind of checkbox to show only the users own processes because otherwise things can get confusing at RDS hosts. I’ve already talked with Andrew about that (actually the checkbox was his idea).

On the top left there’s a couple of pull down menus to allow for some actions on the session or the machine itself.

The remote control functionality starts windows’ own mrsa tool.

Despite running it against my own very small lab the tool seems to perform very well. I consider it for the few moments that I have used it as a very decent replacement for the original helpdesk tool.

 

 

My Experience with the NSX 6.2 ICM On-Demand traning and the VCP-NV exam

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For the people who are only interested in the result: today I passed the VCP-NV exam with 367 points. This after I followed the NSX Install, Configure, Manage (hence the ICM) On-Demand course in May. This training was provided through the Partner training funds that my employer TenICT/AnylinQ have been assigned by VMware.

About the NSX ICM On-Demand training.

For the people not familiar with the on-demand training possibilities from VMware: with these courses one has a month the time to follow a set of computer narrated lectures covering all the same subjects as the official classroom training provides. Besides this you have access to a digital book belonging to the training. You also have access to a lab environment during this month where you have to complete all the lab tasks during the training.

Personally, I prefer classroom training since this allows the trainer to deviate from the official training when possible or required. Think about explaining things in a bit different matter or diving deeper into some of the material. Also, the computer-generated voice gets boring pretty fast and the sound quality also went sub par during some of the chapters. Combine this with a price that is only a fraction lower than the official price and I wouldn’t really recommend it unless you have someone sponsoring it for you.

What the training did was provide a good base for the exam. After this it’s a question of reading blog posts, playing with it in the lab (or Hands on Labs) and maybe you might need to read a book.

About the exam

So I did the exam as almost usual at @TheAcademy in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. They have a new room setup since over a year that I hadn’t been into yet (doing SME jobs has its perks) equipped with what I believe to be 21″ full HD screens. While these don’t provide for a better experience for vcp exams they do for vcap’s so that’s good to know. There are 77 multiple choice questions and I had two hours to spend on these. This time I didn’t need, and I left the building after 45 minutes. I can read English just as fast or sometimes faster than my native Dutch. The questions where a bit easier than I expected so maybe that score of 367 should have been a bit higher.

What you need to know

  • What permission level is needed to know what (Enterprise admin, NSX Admin, Auditor, Security Admin)
  • Order of installing things or setting them up
  • Be able to read drawings to follow the packets
  • Be able to create those drawings in your head and follow the packets
  • Some basic command line stuff for example for the controller cluster (only that what can be found in the courseware!)
  • Know your Distributed switches and what they can do
  • VPN Types
  • Best practices
  • What vm/function related to NSX does what
  • Networking basics
  • Numbers & maximums i.e. how many of what can do what, what’s needed to do that, what numbers needs this to be, What’s the default number for this.

Study Materials Used

  • NSX ICM On-Demand training
  • the links in vmiss’s blog post here
  • The Official Cert guide. Be aware that the exam is for 6.2 and not the 6.1 of the book but most still applies.

Do I know NSX inside out now?

No, and do you want to know why? This exam only hits the top of the iceberg in NSX possibilities, for example it hardly touches any real configuration nor does it have a lot of load balancing or nerd knob settings. For those things you really need to have a lot more experience and do the vcap exam. I am not sure if I will be following that path but this training and exam at least gives me enough knowledge to break things in NSX.

And a Queen video for those still reading

The VMware Labs flings monthly for June 2018

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It’s less than two months before VMworld US is on us, are you looking forward to it? I know I am! In June there have been six updates to VMware flings:

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ESXi Compatibility Checker

This was a new fling last month and now the ESXi Compatibility checker has been expanded with several functions like offline and multiple vCenter support. With this tool it is possible to check if your ESXi hosts will work with the latest and greatest that VMware has to offer.

Changelog

Build 8951845

Offline case support

  • The current script requires to be executed with access to both public internet and target hosts. The new version can separately validate compatibility from collecting hardware information. Hence, user can collect hardware information on a system without public internet access and save the information in a json file. And he can validate compatibility of collected hardware from a saved json file on a system with public internet access.

Example

  • The ‘-g’ option will collect hardware information and generate a json file. (no need to have internet access)
$compchecker.py -s <host> -u <user> -g <json-data-filename>
  • The ‘-f’ option will validate compatibility from a json file (no need to access target hosts)
$compchecker.py -f <json-data-filename>

Multiple virtual centers support

  • The host parameter with the ‘-s’ option now accepts comma separated multiple hostnames. This feature will be useful to create a single compatibility report for multiple VCs

example

$compchecker.py -s <host1>,<host2>,<host3> -u <user>(,<user>)

More information in the compatibility report

  • “Installed Release”, “Checked Release”, and hardware information have been added in the report.

The “-p” option to set a proxy server

  • The https proxy server can be specified with the “-p” option

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Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility

The Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility provides a GUI to migrate vm’s between vCenters.

Changelog

Version 2.1, June 21, 2018

  • Increased simultaneous migration limit to 100 from 10
  • Added check to ignore unknown fields for inventory info
  • Fixed source/target site names in task status view
  • Updated status API to include version number

 

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DRS Lens

As VMware vSphere DRS has become more widely adopted now, more and more users are interested in knowing how it works. They need more insights into DRS activity and actions. They want to know the value that DRS provides to their clusters. DRS Lens is an attempt to provide a UI-based solution to help understand DRS better. (yes this is a lame copy/paste, it’s too hot to come up with original stuf)

Changelog

Version 1.3

  • Upgraded apache tomcat to version 8.5.31 for security compliance.

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vSphere HTML5 Web Client

What would this monthly overview be without the vSphere HTML5 Web client?

Changelog

Fling 3.39 – Build 8835608

New Features

  • All the features of Auto Deploy (when compared with the vSphere Web Client)
    • Software Depots
    • Deploy Rules
    • Deployed Hosts
    • Discovered Hosts
    • Configure (Auto-Deploy configuration)
  • Script Bundles support for Auto-Deploy (Available only in the vSphere Client)
    • Script Bundles view where all bundles are listed
    • Ability to Upload a script bundle
    • Ability to Add/Edit deploy rules with script bundles
  • New virtual switches view on a host which includes topology diagrams for standard and host proxy switches

Improvements

  • vApp properties create, edit, delete and set value functionality
  • VM vApp option properties create, edit, delete and set value functionality
  • vCenter Extensions
  • VM SDRS create, edit and delete

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VMware OS Optimization Tool

Being an EUC guy this is simply my favorite fling, nothing new this time, it’s just a bug fix release.

Changelog

June 14, 2018

  • Issue fix: Crash in non-English locale (e.g. French)

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Horizon Migration Tool

The Horizon Migration Tool helps you to migrate from Xendesktop/App to Horizon View. This is mainly a maintenance version for a tool they missed in the last release.

Changelog

Version 3.0.1

  • Fixed issue: add missed XenAppDumper.exe for XenApp 5.0

 

My presentation at the vEUCtechcon 2018

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Yesterday it was clear for me that more people are interested in what Dutch secret agents have to do with airwatch/workspace one uem then with PowerCLi for Horizon View. Nonetheless there where some people listening to my presentation and watching the ginormous slide deck filled with gif’s that I created. My personal experience was that it went ok but nothing more than that. Sadly using the vga cable didn’t help against the connection bugs all presenters where having during the entire day. Also I would have preferred to have a monitor in front of me so I could actually hear myself talking in that big room. Personal points for next time: I had a good storyline in my head in advance, that didn’t come out at all. Also I need to channel my personal energy onto stage, I have the feeling that wasn’t really visible. Aka I need to do some more energetic storytelling.

For the people interesting in the presentation it can be found HERE. There’s a video recorded that I will add to this post when it gets published. Luckily there where also a couple of tweets about my sessions so we do already have some pictures.

https://twitter.com/HuibDijkstra/status/1012317207261601792

The art of planning your VMworld sessions

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The content catalog for VMworld has opened last week and I already know I marked way to many sessions as favorite for my own good. That’s why I decided on writing a couple of tips to the art of planning your conference. This might help you when the schedule builder opens on July 19th.

Levels

For each session there is a level listed with 100 for beginners, 200 for advanced and 300 for deep dives. My experience is that you might want to take the 200 and 300 levels with a grain of salt sometimes. I have seen deep dives that didn’t get any further than a high level overview but also had advanced sessions that went deeper than deep. Please look at the names of the presenters and check if you can find any old sessions for them to see if they managed to deliver the level the promised back then.

Yes this is my own session, I promise I will dive as deep as possible into those api’s

Workshops

First of all if you want to do any workshops its a case of being lightning fast when they are published to get a spot. Last year most of the workshops were reserved within hours of the schedule builder. Also keep in mind that the expert led hands on labs are mostly nothing different then the regular HOL’s but that there’s someone explaining some extra stuff. Some are unique though like the vCloud Foundation workshop last year where they had real VCF clusters for the students to play with. This is not something that easily done for the regular hol’s.

Regular workshops though will contain live exercises led by an expert that can more or less customize the workshop depending on the audience in the room.

Allow for time between sessions

This has been said before but if you have back to back sessions that are on complete different corners of the conference you will probably not make it. This is something you might only see when you get close to the conference  since rooms will be assigned rather late due to lots of people scheduling them. Thus make sure your schedule will still work when you arrive at the conference itself and when you have a feeling where all rooms are located.

Plan to visit the show floor

If you plan on only visiting the show floor briefly between I can guarantee you that you will be skipping the next session. I always plan a couple of 2-3 hour gaps for the show floor. Don’t expect a lot during the Welcome reception and/or the hall crawl, things will be packed then up to the point that it’s getting really hard to move around. Some of the sessions in the schedule builder are actually on the show floor so don’t get distracted too much when heading out for those.

Don’t plan too many sessions each day

You know that after lunch feeling you have at work or even worse when attending a course? This will probably be worse during VMworld since you will be overloaded with information during the day and parties at night. Personally I kept it to a maximum of four sessions each day or less.

Export your schedule to your personal agenda

While there will be an app released shortly before VMworld it might be handy to track all your appointments and sessions inside your own agenda. This way you can make sure that you have no overlapping between sessions and other activities. In previous years there was always an export function that made this easy.

My Schedule for VMworld EU 2017, or at least one of the versions.

 

 

 

New Horizon API calls in PowerCLI 10.1.1

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VMware quietly released a new version of PowerCLI last week: 10.1.1. This release is mainly an update for the Horizon View API’s. This to bring it back on level with the current Horizon release at 7.5. The release notes are not very extensive but it has a fix for some people getting time-outs when connecting to a Connection server  plus a bunch of new api calls.

I have dumped the output from the available api calls into two text files and made a comparison:

Since there’s no update yet in the API explorer I will have to make an educated guess on what the functions do:

DesktopTask

When looking at the available method’s for this call it looks like it has everything to do with Desktop task. But it also can’t do a damn thing without an vmware.hv.desktoptaskid. This will most probably bu retrievable using a query. This is something I will further investigate in the future.

DiagOperation

To be honest I have no idea yet what this one does. I have tried created a VMware.Hv.DiagOperationRequest and tried to send it but got an error that no message queue handler was found. This might be something from Horizon 7.5 since I haven’t updated my lab yet.

GatewayAccessUserOrGroup

This one is easy, it creates, deletes, gets and lists remote access users. You can expect a function for this in the near future since it looks easy to build.

JwtToken

According to my sources this is a SSO token between the flex and html5 clients.

LogonTiming

This obviously is created to pull logon timing as the name suggests. I have put a session ID in a variable but sadly the data is not usable from PowerCLI. WHat it seems to be is the api call the Helpdesk client uses to pull the logon time. I didn’t have the timing profiler turned on initially and neither the helpdesk tool or this call gave my any information. Disconnected sessions also don’t give any information and when reconnected it gives the reconnection time not the initial logontime for when the session started. This is the same behaviour as the helpdesk tool.

Apparently the output is in a json format and for now I doubt if it will be usable in a function.

While the session itself has this information.

NetworkProxyConfiguration

No idea yet why there is a networkproxy configuration in here.

Performance

This gets some performance data using a session id as also visible in the helpdesk tool.

RemoteApplication

Gives per session information on the Skype 4 Business pairing mode.

RemoteAssistantTicket

100% sure related to the remote assistance function in the helpdesk tool.

RemoteProcess

Looks like this one gets some information from a query and then kills the process, will have to dig into it some further later on. This for sure is a function in the helpdesk tool.

ViewClient

Again from the helpdesktool, this gives the client version of a session.

Conclusion

For now I only see the DesktopTask and GatewayAccessUserOrGroup ending up in a function in the vmware.hv.helper. The first one will need some digging on how it exactly works but it has the looks of a usable call. The latter on can be in there pretty fast if I find the time to do so. The other ones

 

Update

Already received some extra information about some calls.

New experimental functions for the vmware.hv.helper on github

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While working on my presentation for the 2nd vEUCtechcon event in Utrecht (The Netherlands) on may 28th I have added a list of new functions to the vmware.hv.helper module. While I haven’t had the time yet to clean them up to be proper coded scripts I have decided to already publish them on Github. All of them work but might be missing a feature or two and almost all of them are get-hv* or new-hv* type functions. Since the presentation is all about building an environment I have decided to build the remove parts later on. You might have already seen some screenshots on twitter recently:

Added functions that are not in the official module yet:

  • register-hvvirtualcenter
  • set-hveventdatabase
  • set-hvlicense
  • get-hvlicense
  • new-hvinstantcloneadministrator
  • New-HVRole
  • Get-HVRole
  • Get-HVpermission
  • New-HVPermission
  • Get-HVVirtualcenter
  • Get-HVInstantCloneAdministrator
  • Get-HVPod
  • Set-HVPod
  • Get-HVHomeSite
  • New-HVHomeSite

 

Wouter’s five vCommunity tips for visiting VMworld

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While this year will only be my third visit to VMworld I still think I have some tips to share with the vCommunity. Yes offcourse you need to keep hydrated all the time, have good footwear and don’t party to hard if you have sessions early in the morning but there’s more to VMworld then just that: the vCommunity itself!

Tip 1 : engage strangers

This his already been said at other blogs but don’t be afraid to engage strangers in conversation. If you hear a good conversation going on, don’t be afraid to listen to it, ask questions or even voice your own opinion. If you do this politely no-one will think badly of you. This also counts when heading our for breakfast or lunch, only take a seat at an empty table if you have to. I have made some good contacts after just joining them at their breakfast table. This also counts for the evening parties, I prefer the ones where you can actually have a decent conversation above those where you need to shout to understand each other.

Tip 2 : Join the Hackathon

You don’t need to be an experienced coder or scripter to join the hackathon. Last year I had an almost complete noob (Sorry Hans!) at my team and at the end of the evening he was able to create a small script of his own. This makes him stand very high on my ranking above people who are very experienced and only do their usual trick but just a bit different. Also don’t be afraid that you might make a mistake, we all do all the time and it’s the best way to learn how those script you might have partially copied from the internet actually work.

Tip 3 : Visit the community booth & area

For me both previous years the community booth and the area around it where the highlights of the show. Not only is there awesome content to be found at the communities/vBrownbag theatre, it also seems to be the place where lots of smart people gather to drink a coffee, have fun and share knowledge. This year there it will have an even greater presence with the addition of another theatre for VMware {code}!!

Tip 4 : look for the smaller stands at the solution exchange

You probably already know most of the big brands showcasing their latest and greatest at the solution exchange. To the sides at the smaller and simpler booths you might find some startups that might have a new and awesome product that you didn’t know yet. There’s a good chance you might find a vcdx or vExpert at these booths that really know what they are talking about.

Tip 5 : join the UX Design studio sessions

You might have met them already at your local VMUG but did you know that they also had feedback sessions during both VMworlds in 2017? In these small and sometimes one on one sessions you really have the chance to have an impact on future products of VMware. I did several last year and these where really good. It’s their job to listen to you while you think out loud about how something looks. This can be in the form clicking inside an actual product, powerpoints with visuals or even drawings that they came up with recently.

Bonus tip: be selective on the swag

If you go all out on swag this will fill up your suitcase pretty damn quick and you will come home with at least 60% junk that ends up in the bin because it’s unusable or already broken. So be picky on the shirts and socks you accept, why accept it if you wouldn’t want to wear it anyway? Also make sure to bring some rubberbands to roll the shirts in. I was picky my first two times but still managed to fill up a suitcase each time, just look at the pictures below.

VMworld US 2016:

Top right is a stack of 17!! t-shirts almost all rolled up

VMworld EU 2017

This time I didn’t really roll those shirts.

 

Hopefully I will see you at VMworld!

The VMware Labs flings monthly for May 2018

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It’s June already, time flies when you are having fun right? This month there have been three new and five updated flings. In the category new there is an ESXi Compatibility checker, DRS Entitlement viewer and the Cellular Module User Space USB Driver on ESXi. In the updated category we have the eternal HTML5 vSphere web client, I/O Analyzer, Desktop Watermark, Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility and last but not least Blockchain on Kubernetes.

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ESXi Compatibility Checker

This is a new fling that makes it easier to check if you’re hardware is still supported by VMware. It does require python to be installed.

The ESXi Compatibility Checker is a python script that can validate VMware hardware compatibility and upgrade issues of ESXi.

VMware hardware compatibility and product interoperability need to be validated when new hardware is installed on an existing ESXi or when a VC/ESXi version needs to be upgraded. Unfortunately, it is not a trivial task as the compatibility information is scattered in multiple web pages. The user needs to understand the data and validate them one by one manually. This process is tedious, laborious and often prone to error when done at scale.

This Fling will provide a simple and easy way to collect server and IO device details from ESXi and provide a command line interface to validate their VMware compatibility and upgrade issues. Users no longer need to understand compatibility details or manually compare the dataset to find out compatibility or upgrade issues. The Fling can generate a compatibility report for many ESXi managed by a VC with a simple command.

Changelog

  • first release May 15, 2018 v1.0 – Build 8532763

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DRS Entitlement Viewer

This HTML5 client plugin shows entitled resources per VM and resource pool.

DRS Entitlement Viewer is installed as a plugin to the vSphere client. It is currently only supported for the HTML5 based vSphere client. Once installed, it gives the hierarchical view of vCenter DRS cluster inventory with entitled CPU and memory resources for each resource pool and VM in the cluster.

Entitled resources can change with VMs’ resource demand and with the VM’s and resource pool’s reservation, limit and shares (RLS) settings. So, customers can get the current entitlements based on the VMs’ current demand and RLS settings of the VMs and resource pools.

DRS Entitlement Viewer also provides 3 different What-If scenarios,
1. Changing RLS settings of a VM and/or resource pool
2. What-If all the VMs’ resource demand is at 100%
3. Both 1 and 2 happen together

Customers can pick one of the 3 scenarios and can get new entitlements without actually changing RLS settings on the cluster.

Finally, DRS Entitlement Viewer also provides an option to export the new RLS values from a What-If scenario as a vSphere powercli command which customers can execute against their vCenter to apply the new settings.

Changelog

  • First public release May 29, 2018 v1.0.2

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Cellular Module User Space USB Driver on ESXi

The Cellular Module User Space USB Driver on ESXi provides you with a driver so you are better able to use a cellular module form ESXi.

IoT is growing rapidly so many users would like to enable ESXi on their IoT devices. Driven by VMware’s virtualization technology, which can help them address some challenges like security issues, fragmentation, multi-tenancy, etc. The reality is that many of those IoT devices have a variety of devices and busses that ESXi does not support. The Cellular Module is one of those devices in the case of IoT. Typically, these devices have to communicate with their own remote management center.

This Fling provides a driver to enable deployment on ESXi on their IoT devices. Note that this driver is running in UserSpace mode. While many widely used IoT Edge Gateways are equipped with a cellular module, ESXi does not have a driver to activate that cellular module. So our cellular module userspace USB driver can enable that hardware module to communicate with a remote cloud server.

Changelog

  • First release May 07, 2018 v1.0

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vSphere HTML5 Web Client

The fat client’s already gone, the flash client is on its way out so better get used to the vSphere HTML5 Web Client!

Changelog

Fling 3.38 – Build 8535804

New Features

  • Guest OS User Mappings for VMs
  • Serial port support for VMs
  • Improved search including
    • New redesigned search results page
    • VM search results has filters such as power state, guest os, host, clusters, datacenter
    • Save search

Improvements

  • VM Quick power operations

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I/O Analyzer

The I/O Analyzer doesn’t get a lot of updates so you might not have heard of it. Like the names says it’s a very usable tool to test your storage performance.

VMware I/O Analyzer is an integrated framework designed to measure storage performance in a virtual environment and to help diagnose storage performance concerns. I/O Analyzer, supplied as an easy-to-deploy virtual appliance, automates storage performance analysis through a unified interface that can be used to configure and deploy storage tests and view graphical results for those tests. I/O Analyzer can use Iometer to generate synthetic I/O loads or a trace replay tool to deploy real application workloads. It uses the VMware VI SDK to remotely collect storage performance statistics from VMware ESX/ESXi hosts. Standardizing load generation and statistics collection allows users and VMware engineers to have a high level of confidence in the data collected. Please post comments and questions regarding this fling to the I/O Analyzer Community.

Features

  • Integrated framework for storage performance testing
  • Readily deployable virtual appliance
  • Easy configuration and launch of storage I/O tests on one or more hosts
  • Integrated performance results at both guest and host levels
  • Storage I/O trace replay as an additional workload generator
  • Ability to upload storage I/O traces for automatic extraction of vital metrics
  • Graphical visualization of workload metrics and performance results

Changelog

New in version 1.6.2u1

  • Support vSphere 6.5 onward
  • Upgrade to OpenSSL 1.0.2o
  • Hot patch script to live upgrade existing 1.6.2 VMs

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Desktop Watermark

Desktop Watermark is a tool that adds a visible or invisible watermark to a VDI Desktop. This can be used for auditing for example.

Changelog

Build 20180510

  • Added support for multiple monitors.

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Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility

I used the Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility myself this week when I wanted to clone my golden image to the not linked vcenter servers in my lab. Yes it can also clone besides just moving the servers. I might end up putting up a seperate blog post about this.

Changelog

Version 2.0, May 4, 2018

  • Added support to select individual host as the placement target
  • Added support for migrating VMs with shared datastore
  • Added clone functionality in addition to relocate
  • Added resource summary details for placement targets
  • Added a prompt to verify site thumbprint during SSL verification
  • Added a link to refresh vm list in the inventory view
  • Updated REST APIs to add operation type parameter

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Blockchain on Kubernetes

Not a blockchain person myself (yet) but this is the former Blockchain on vSphere fling that has been renamed to Blockchain on Kubernetes

Blockchain is an emerging technology which has been gaining traction globally throughout the past few years. Industries like finance, logistics, and IoT are actively working on research and pilot projects using blockchain.

Fabric is a sub project under Hyperledger (a LinuxFoundation project), it is probably the most mature blockchain solution available now for business use cases.

The mission of Blockchain on Kubernetes (formerly named Blockchain on vSphere) is to provide an end-to-end blockchain solution, from IaaS, to Blockchain platform and Blockchain applications. It allows organizations to quickly collaborate and evaluate the new business models and processes by using the decentralized blockchain technology.

By using BoK, blockchain developers can use BoK command line tool or a GUI tool provided by BoK PCF Tile to quickly set up an environment to build and test their blockchain applications.

Changelog

May 3 2018, BoK 2.0

  • Provide a new PCF Ops Manager Tile to deploy Hyperledger Fabric. It supports creating Kubernetes cluster via PKS Tile and deploy Hyperledger Fabric in the Kubernetes cluster.
  • Add a central config file bok.yml to specify all BoK configuration. No more manual code change is needed.
  • Support kafka as consensus mode.
  • Other enhancement for stability.
  • Verified against Kubernetes 1.9.7.