Tag: vExpert

The VMware Labs flings monthly for June 2019

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Wow there are already six months gone in 2019. Both my kids passed passed their schoolyears and this month there have been three new fling releases and four that have received updates. The new ones are: vSphere Mobile Client, Workspace ONE UEM SCIM Adapter and FlowGate. The ones that received updates are USB Network Native Driver for ESXi, HCIBench, IOBlazer and the Horizon DaaS Migration Tool.

New Releases

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vSphere Mobile Client

I already posted a short blog about this fling over here.

vSphere Mobile Client enables administrators to monitor and manage vSphere infrastructure directly from any mobile device. Whether you want to check on the current or historical resource consumption; you want to get notifications on long running tasks; or you want to check the currently running tasks – the vSphere Mobile Client is there to help.

Features

  • VM overview: Review the status of your VMs including state (powered on/off), resource usage and configuration information
  • VM management: Change the power state of a VM or restart it. Locating the virtual machine to operate on can be done through search.
  • Task monitoring: Subscribe to any running task and receive a notification on your mobile device upon task completion, even when your device is in-active or you have another application running on the foreground.
  • Performance charts: Monitor the resource usage of a VM in real time or a day, week, month or year back. Counters include CPU, Memory, Storage and Network.

NOTE: vSphere Mobile Client is currently available for Android and iOS devices and vCenter 6.0+ deployments. Check the “Requirements” tab for more details. Access to vSphere infrastructure may require a secure access method such as VPN on a mobile device.

This is a technical preview release and as such it only has a limited subset of the intended functionality. The team would be releasing updates with new features regularly, but our main task is to gather feedback so please do not hesitate to reach out to us.

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Workspace ONE UEM SCIM Adapter

Workspace ONE UEM SCIM Adapter provides SCIM user/group management capabilities to Workspace ONE UEM. The middleware translates the System for Cross-Domain Identity Management, SCIM, to a CRUD REST framework that Workspace ONE UEM can interpret. This capability allows Workspace ONE UEM to synchronize cloud-based identity resources (users/groups/entitlements) without the need for an LDAP endpoint (service to service model). Examples include Azure AD, Okta, and Sailpoint.

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Flowgate

The Flowgate fling is all about linking IT & Facility systems with each other.

In enterprise data centers, IT infrastructure and facility are generally managed separately, which leads to information gaps. Collaboration between facility and IT infrastructure systems are limited or manual, and virtualization adds more complexity.

The goal of Flowgate is to make facility awareness in IT management system and make IT operations management and automation better on high availability, cost saving and improved sustainability, with more information on power, cooling, environment (e.g. humidity, temperature) and security.

Built-in adapter for multiple DCIM and CMDB system integration:

  • Nlyte
  • PowerIQ
  • Infoblox
  • Labsdb
  • IBIS(TODO)
  • Pulse IoT Center (TODO)
  • Open for other facility system integration

Built-in adapter for multiple IT stack systems:

  • vCenter Server
  • vRealise Operation Manager
  • Open for other IT stack integration. More systems will coming soon.

 

  • UI based Integration process: One click integration.
  • Role based access control: API level access control support.
  • RESTFul API support: Provide unified facility information querying services. APIs for all operations and data query make it easy to integrate with other systems.

Updated flings

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USB Network Native Driver for ESXi

Are you building an awesome homelab but received some funky USB Network adapters? The USB Network Native Driver for ESXi might just have the correct drivers for you.

Changelog

June 17, 2019 – v1.1

  • Added support for 9 additional USB NIC devices including USB 2.0 RTL8152 & TPLINK (see Requirements page for complete list)
  • Added support for Jumbo Frames (up to 4K) for RTL8153 & AX88179
    ESXi670-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-24524132-offline_bundle-13958648.zip
    ESXi650-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-24599816-offline_bundle-13964320.zip

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HCIBench

HCIBench is one of two benchmarking utilities that received an update.

Changelog

Version 2.1

  • Switched UI to dark theme
  • Redesigned VMDK preparation methodology, which can complete much faster using RANDOM on deduped storage
  • Added VMDK preparation process update
  • Added Graphite port check into prevalidation
  • Added vCenter/Host password obfuscation
  • Added “Delete Guest VM” button
  • Fixed Grafana display issue
  • Fixed FIO blank results issue
  • Bug fixes
    MD5 checksum of HCIBench_2.1.ova: d37e6f164ed962a6e7ccbe104ba9eaec

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IOBLazer

It looks like the IOBlazer fling was first released in 2014(!!!!) as a tool to benchmark all kinds of storage systems. Since I haven’t posted about it here yet let me give you the overview:

IOBlazer is a multi-platform storage stack micro-benchmark. IOBlazer runs on Linux, Windows and OSX and it is capable of generating a highly customizable workload. Parameters like IO size and pattern, burstiness (number of outstanding IOs), burst interarrival time, read vs. write mix, buffered vs. direct IO, etc., can be configured independently. IOBlazer is also capable of playing back VSCSI traces captured using vscsiStats. The performance metrics reported are throughput (in terms of both IOPS and bytes/s) and IO latency.

IOBlazer evolved from a minimalist MS SQL Server emulator which focused solely on the IO component of said workload. The original tool had limited capabilities as it was able to generate a very specific workload based on the MS SQL Server IO model (Asynchronous, Un-buffered, Gather/Scatter). IOBlazer has now a far more generic IO model, but two limitations still remain:

  1. The alignment of memory accesses on 4 KB boundaries (i.e., a memory page)
  2. The alignment of disk accesses on 512 B boundaries (i.e., a disk sector).

Both limitations are required by the gather/scatter and un-buffered IO models.

A very useful new feature is the capability to playback VSCSI traces captured on VMware ESX through the vscsiStats utility. This allows IOBlazer to generate a synthetic workload absolutely identical to the disk activity of a Virtual Machine, ensuring 100% experiment repeatability.

Changelog

Updates in IOBlazer 1.01:

  • Added configurable IO alignment
  • Increased the robustness of the trace file parser in the face of spurious lines
  • Increased the robustness of the build process by automatically detecting target OS and arch within the Makefile
  • In the Windows version, changed the raw access mode from volume to physical drive to avoid unnecessary mount/unmount operations at every test run.

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Horizon DaaS Migration Tool

The Horizon DaaS Migration Tool is for the Horizon DaaS providers to migrate their customers to the latest version of Horizon DaaS.

Changelog

Version 2.1.0

  • Fix for the bug on “Requested Capacity” at the pool/assignment summary page showing inappropriate values.
  • Intelligently handling import of new VMs skipping previously imported VMs.

Small recap of the Belgian VMUG meet on 14-06-2019

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Last Friday it was time for my annual trip tot he Belgian vmug meeting. I consider this my home vmug away from home and have been visiting for years. This was the first time I could give back in Belgium since Hans & mine session was accepted in the call for papers.

Our session

Right after the keynote (from which we sadly had to miss a couple of minutes to get setup) we did our presentation in front of about 22-23 people in the attick of the building. Just like at the Dutch vmug we did it about flings & tools for Vmware Horizon. Luckily we could do some of our demo’s locally because the wifi & 4G weren’t delivering a good speed to connect to our labs.One thing is for sure we did the session in the brightest manner ever.

If you are interested in the slidedeck we partially used you can find it here.

Other sessions

Firts of all the keynote by Joe Baguley was great as always. His vision on how things works or should be done has been evolving over the years but always seems to around the same lines. The 2nd keynote bij Johan van Amersfoor about VDI by day,compute by night wasn’t the first time I have seen this session but it’s so good that I don’t mind watching it several times.

The session about Kubernetes by Eric de Witte contained some usefull information since I haven’t done a whole lot with kubernetes yet. The last two sessions for me where Luc Dekens talking PowerCLI (what else?) and Valentin Bondzio about the computational cost of security. Luc’s session was about his style of coding and steps he takes to write codes plus a bit about working with instant clones.

Conclusion

During the day Hans and I had great fun with the people from EG Innovations and 10Zig in the exhibition area. As usual at the BE vmug the day ended with a great BBQ, those belgians do know their food! While not as big as the Dutch vmug UserCon the Belgian vmug meets are always high quality so I will beep going if my schedule allows me too and yes if needed I will take a PTO day for it.

5 things I will be looking forward to at VMworld

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This year will mark my 4th (yes only 4) trip to VMworld. With San Francisco replacing Vegas I will return to Barcelona for what should be my ‘home’ VMworld since I live in the Netherlands. This post might look a bit like last year’s 5 vCommunity tips but hey, I love the community!

  1. vFootball

    Last year I took part in the first vSoccer at VMworld US and it looks like we might be organizing a vFootball in Barcelona as well, football being the correct name for the sport obviously. On Tuesday night after the vExpert party we went to an indoor sports center where we had 2 fields that we could use for approximately two hours. We had loads of fun in there despite one injured player (he headbutted a wall and had a nasty cut in his eyebrow) my fitness level was definitely not on par but I have started preparations for this year back in January.

  2. Presenting at the vBrownbag stage.

    Just like previous years I submitted a session for vBrownbag stage it will be about a couple of VMware flings for Horizon View. I thought I also submitted for a [Code] sessions but it seems like that was official sessions so I have no idea yet about the status of that. If you think you can fill a 10-12 minute (a bit less is acceptable as well) with something even a bit related I advise you to sign up over here).

  3. Hackathon

    I have no idea yet if I will be forming my own team. If I don’t I will definitely be joining another one in having a night of great fun. It doesn’t matter if you have coding experience, just join a team when signups are opened and I can guarantee that you will learn something new.

  4. Meeting up with old and making new friends.

    One of the best things about the vCommunity is having contact with each other over the interwebz. It even gets better when you can meet in real life for the first or the gazillionth time. I don’t care if it’s in a session, while waking up with a coffee or at a party with beer in hand I always have fun talking to people. The subject doesn’t really matter, it’s all about connecting with people.

  5. learning new things

    While I take it easy with my session schedule I always look to learn new things. This could be either in the Hands-on Labs, Instructor led labs, Solutions Exchange, vBrownbag, {Code}, regular session or someone from point 4. Knowledge gaining for me doesn’t need to be tech per se. Learning how people engage customers or projects is very interesting to me.

New fling: mobile vSphere management

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Every once in a while there’s a fling that looks too good to only be mentioned in my monthly updates. The vSphere mobile Client is one of those in my opinion. For years and years I have seen questions about apps to manage vSphere from your mobile device and there indeed have been a couple in the past. With the amount of available API’s some VMware engineers now have decided on creating a fling for it. Currently it’s only available for Android devices but it is an awesome step in the right direction.

vSphere Mobile Client enables administrators to monitor and manage vSphere infrastructure directly from any mobile device. Whether you want to check on the current or historical resource consumption; you want to get notifications on long running tasks; or you want to check the currently running tasks – the vSphere Mobile Client is there to help.

Features

  • VM overview: Review the status of your VMs including state (powered on/off), resource usage and configuration information
  • VM management: Change the power state of a VM or restart it. Locating the virtual machine to operate on can be done through search.
  • Task monitoring: Subscribe to any running task and receive a notification on your mobile device upon task completion, even when your device is in-active or you have another application running on the foreground.
  • Performance charts: Monitor the resource usage of a VM in real time or a day, week, month or year back. Counters include CPU, Memory, Storage and Network.

NOTE: vSphere Mobile Client is currently available for Android devices and vCenter 6.0+ deployments. Check the “Requirements” tab for more details. Access to vSphere infrastructure may require a secure access method such as VPN on a mobile device.

This is a technical preview release and as such it only has a limited subset of the intended functionality. The team would be releasing updates with new features regularly, but our main task is to gather feedback so please do not hesitate to reach out to us.

There are some screenshots on the fling site and the one below from my phone but once I am able to connect to my lab I will add some more.

The VMware Labs flings monthly for May 2019

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Originally I created this post with only 2 updated and one new fling. Some engineers though added two more new flings so 3 new ones and 2 have received an update. The new ones are the Distributed Trust Incident Reporting fling, vRealize Build Tools and Cloud Automation Services SDK for Python. while the Horizon Toolbox and Horizon Migration Tool have received updates.

New Releases

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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.

This Fling is focused on code quality, code reusability, unit testing, dependency management and parallel releases of vRealize projects. In practice, it is a set of Maven extensions, packaged in a Maven repository format, that support the use of IDE (via Maven) and CLI to develop, test and deliver vRA and vRO-based solutions. It includes a vRO plug-in that exposes autocomplete information for standard and third-party scripting objects and actions and CLI that can deploy packages to vRO and vRA via the standard APIs.

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Cloud Automation Services SDK for Python

The Cloud Automation Services SDK for Python is a set of Python classes to simplify automation against several aspects of the Cloud Assembly, Service Broker, and Code Stream API when using Python.

Note: The github repo will be public soon!

 

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Distributed Trust Incident Reporting

The Distributed Trust Incident Reporting fling is an  open source security incident tracker.

Security incidents are important to track so that all parties know the status of a breach and can respond in concert and with appropriate speed. Current methods to track incidents are generally paper-based manual processes. More recent systems are based on a centralized database with some web interface to interact with the record and response tracking.

We propose that this does not work well enough in the scenarios where:

  • security incidents may affect more than a single entity
  • where more than one entity must respond to an incident
  • some or all entities have no trust in the others
  • no party can or will be responsible for hosting the full system

For example, a security breach in the supply chain for a food manufacturer could result in several retail businesses with products on shelf that contain a pathogen. Current methods of notifying the proper authorities require a phone tree to call all the correct parties which then react as individuals or local committees. In addition the incident must either be initially submitted to each entity separately or one entity must take responsibility to notify the others.

This Fling:

  • allows all parties (e.g. retail, governmental, public) to see the incident via a single report transaction
  • allows all parties to respond in concert as required
  • allows automated systems to report incidents
  • allows transparency across all organizations

Updated flings

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Horizon Toolbox

The Horizon toolbox is an extension to the Horizon Admin Console giving all kinds of user and session information. It is no replacement for the Horizon Helpdesk (or the fling).

Changelog

May 28, 2019, 7.8.0

  • Fix some incompatible issues
  • Only support Horizon View 7.7 & 7.8

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Horizon Migration Tool

The Horizon Migration Tool helps you migrating from Citrix to an On-Prem Horizon Environment.

Changelog

Version 3.0.2

  • Updated the binary package and the document accordingly

[API]Resetting Desktops

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This is the first post in a series of shorts that I will be posting about various methods that you can use with the VMware Horizon API’s. This time it will be about resetting desktops. When looking at the API Explorer you’ll see that there are two ways do do this from the machine service.

So the first is for a single VDI desktop and the latter for multiple.

First we need to get a list of vm’s I will be using the machines in pod1pool02 as victims for this post.

$queryservice=new-object VMware.Hv.QueryServiceService
$defn=New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryDefinition
$defn.QueryEntityType="MachineNamesView"
$filter=new-object VMware.Hv.QueryFilterContains
$filter.MemberName='base.name'
$filter.Value="Pod1Pool2"
$defn.filter=$filter
$results=($queryservice.QueryService_Query($services1, $defn)).results

with this result:

From this we’ll make a variable with all of them and one with a single one

$singlevm=$results | select-object -first 1
$multiplevms=$results

Before I will reset the single VM I will show the state of all the vm’s.

($queryservice.QueryService_Query($services1, $defn)).results.base.basicstate

And now let’s reset the vm.

$services1.machine.machine_reset($singlevm.id)

Since this is an instant clone you’ll see provisioned and not reset. Now let’s reset the rest as well.

$services1.Machine.Machine_ResetMachines($multiplevms.id)

And this method will work for all managed vdi desktops full, linked or instant clones.

vExpert 2019? check! Why does it matter for me?

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Last week whilst on holiday in Disneyland Paris I received the email every aspiring and existing vExpert was waiting for.

This means that for the fourth consecutive year I have been named a vExpert.

What is a vExpert? (or any other community award like NutanixNTC)

Per the vExpert site the criteria for becoming a vExpert are:

If you are interested in becoming a vExpert the criteria is simple. We are looking for IT Professionals who are sharing their VMware knowledge and contributing that back to the community. The term “giving back” is defined as going above and beyond your day job. There are several ways to share your knowledge and engage with the community. Some of those activities are blogging, book authoring, magazine articles, CloudCred task writing, active in facebook groups, forum (VMTN as well as other non VMware) platforms, public speaking, VMUG leadership, videos and so on.

I totally agree on the above description, for me a real vExpert shares knowledge in one of many ways. But blogging, speaking, tweeting, podcasting, writing isn’t the only way. We answer questions online and offline and if we don’t know the answer than we have an awesome backstop to ask questions called the vCommunity. Is it technical only you might ask? Absolutely not! I have seen hundreds of job changes by now because of the vCommunity. People were helped with personal issues, hell even home deco tips and tricks are shared. I think it’s just in our nature to help one another.

Yes it’s also about advocacy but the sharing of information is all voluntary. Do you want to tweet or blog about stuff? No-one will force you but they do appreciate it if you share news.

One things advocacy program members are also good at is providing feedback. Not only to the software vendor but if you want some feedback about a possible blog post, presentation idea, news item or piece of hardware most of us will give you that feedback. Just be prepared because we can be brutally honest if it sucks!

But there are over 1700 vExperts, is it about quantity or Quality?

This is a point where I personally disagree on how the program is run. I have the idea that they want to grow just to grow and for me the selection criteria could be tightened quite a bit. I value growing but please do it by adding quality. If you look at smaller programs like some of the vExpert subprograms or others like the VMware EUC Champions or Nutanix NTC’s they are most times better managed, get more briefings, nda information and events. Not that the vExpert program is managed badly or doesn’t have an awesome party at VMworld but things just get more complicated at this scale.

But does the program still matter to you?

It certainly does! Through the vExpert program I have managed to grow personally and professionally but also made boatloads of friends online and offline. All the extra’s like licenses, swag and things like that are fun but nothing is as good as knowing you have some great people who are always happy to help you in any way possible!

I want in too, how do I become a vExpert?

Currently the sign ups are closed but until they open again (probably somewhere in June) you can start doing some things already:

  • Start a blog, most people do it as their own knowledge base. Write about what you experienced at work or a customer so you won’t forget it for next time.
  • Get a twitter account, follow a bunch of people and interact with them.
  • Help others out in places like VMTN, Reddit.
  • Present at a vmug or at your employer about things that could be interesting to others. This could be as basic as explaining how your homelab is setup.

If you need help or feedback on your blog or need help on how to build your presentation I am always happy to provide my 2 cents.

When the sign ups are opened again contact your local vExpert pro with how to tackle the application form. You can also ask me or any other vExpert you might know personally.

Setting maintenance mode for Linked Clones using API’s

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If you have used the VMware.hv.helper the title of this blog post might sound strange since the set-hvmachine already has a way to set maintenance mode. When Ryan Butler asked me the question this week though I didn’t think of that and dived into the api’s immediately. The machines.Machine_EnterMaintenanceMode method looked good to me and than I though of the vmware.hv.helper and noticed that with

Set-HVMachine -Maintenance ENTER_MAINTENANCE_MODE

it was also possible so set maintenance mode. The usage though made me think immediately that this was not actually using a proper api call but the update function. A quick look at the function itself confirmed this. It sets that status of the virtual machine by directly setting the status.

if ($Maintenance) {
      if ($Maintenance -eq 'ENTER_MAINTENANCE_MODE') {
        $updates += Get-MapEntry -key 'managedMachineData.inMaintenanceMode' -value $true
      } else {
        $updates += Get-MapEntry -key 'managedMachineData.inMaintenanceMode' -value $false
      }
    }
(this is just a snippet of the complete function)

If you are below version 7.5 of Horizon view it’s probably of no use to continue with the rest of this blog post. The api explorer only mentions the relevant functions since 7.5! They have been tried against 7.0.3 and 6.2 and there they don’t work.

So back to the drawing board it was and I needed to look at the API explorer, there are 4 relevant methods for maintenance mode.

As usual there are methods for multiple machines that use an array of id’s (with machines in the name) and methods for single machines id’s (without the machines in the name).

Since I usually use instant clones these days I created a small pool with three linked clones. With get-hvmachine I can show you their names and state.

(get-hvmachine -pool pod2_linked).base | select-object name,basicstate

Since I know that get-hvmachine will already give you the id of a machine it’s easy to do a one liner to set one system in maintenance mode.

 $services1.Machine.Machine_EnterMaintenanceMode((get-hvmachine -machinename p2lc001).id)

and exit maintenance mode.

 $services1.Machine.Machine_ExitMaintenanceMode((get-hvmachine -machinename p2lc001).id)

And the entire pool?

$services1.Machine.Machine_EnterMaintenanceModemachines((get-hvmachine -pool pod2_linked).id)

And exit maintenance mode for the entire pool.

$services1.Machine.Machine_ExitMaintenanceModemachines((get-hvmachine -pool pod2_linked).id)

Okay so we now know how this works but I don’t want to use to vmware.hv.helper module for this at all because I want to be able to use a list of machines or based on part of the name. That can be done using a query. The query entitytype to use is MachineSummaryView and if you use queryfiltercontains it’s also possible to use only a part of the name for a kind of wildcard selection. Combine several of these in with queryfilteror and it gives the opportunity to select them from a list.

$connectionserver="servername"
$hvserver1=connect-hvserver $connectionserver 
$Services1= $hvServer1.ExtensionData
$machines=get-content machines.txt
$queryService = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryServiceService
$defn = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryDefinition
$defn.queryentitytype='MachineSummaryView'
$filterset=@()
foreach ($machine in $machines) {
    $queryfiltercontains=New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryFiltercontains -Property @{ 'memberName' = 'base.name'; 'value' = $machine }    
    $filterset+=$queryfiltercontains
    }
$orFilter = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryFilterOr
$orFilter.filters = $filterSet
$defn.filter=$orFilter
$ids=($queryService.QueryService_Create($Services1, $defn)).results
$services1.Machine.Machine_EnterMaintenanceModeMachines($ids.id)
p2lc001
p2lc003

Now I replaced the names in the txt file with only p2lc00

$connectionserver="servername"
$hvserver1=connect-hvserver $connectionserver 
$Services1= $hvServer1.ExtensionData
$machines=get-content machines.txt
$queryService = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryServiceService
$defn = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryDefinition
$defn.queryentitytype='MachineSummaryView'
$filterset=@()
foreach ($machine in $machines) {
    $queryfiltercontains=New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryFiltercontains -Property @{ 'memberName' = 'base.name'; 'value' = $machine }    
    $filterset+=$queryfiltercontains
    }
$orFilter = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryFilterOr
$orFilter.filters = $filterSet
$defn.filter=$orFilter
$ids=($queryService.QueryService_Create($Services1, $defn)).results
$services1.Machine.Machine_ExitMaintenanceModeMachines($ids.id)

And back into maintenance mode

So this is a nice way to manage the machines and their maintenance state. Please remember that these scripts only work against horizon 7.5 and higher.

The VMware Labs flings monthly for November 2018

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The year’s almost over but for me it feels like it just got started, how does it feel for you? Time certainly flies! This month there was one new fling: vSphere PKS Plugin and five have received updates: Workspace ONE UEM Profile Migration Utility, HCIBench, ESXi Embedded Host Client, Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility and Workspace ONE Configuration Tool for Provisioning.

New

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vSphere PKS Plugin

The vSphere PKS Plugin provides a user interface for managing and monitoring Kubernetes cluster deployments for the PKS platform. Using the vSphere PKS Plugin you can view details about your Kubernetes clusters, including master and worker nodes as well as networking configuration.

Features

The vSphere PKS Plugin:

  • Provides a graphical interface to visualize the Kubernetes clusters deployed and managed by PKS
  • Provides visibility into underlying infrastructure such as VMs, network objects and storage objects that are created when a Kubernetes cluster is deployed in a vSphere environment
  • Provides a centralized launch point for viewing components deployed with the Kubernetes cluster, including nodes and network objects such as routers, logical switches, load balancers
  • Provides a simple user interface to get easy access to the cluster using the kubectl interface and the cluster Dashboard

Updated

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Workspace ONE UEM Profile Migration Utility

The Workspace ONE UEM Profile Migration Utility helps  in moving profiles between various WS One UEM Consoles.

Changelog

Version 1.6

  • Added a log file for more advanced troubleshooting and auditing. A new file in the folder called: WS1UEM-Profile-Migration-Utility-log.txt
  • Added logic to ensure the user has to hit Review button before Create
  • Fixed a bug where the Status wouldn’t clear if selecting a new Profile therefore the user was unable to tell if the new Create Profile was successful

HCIBench

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The HCIBench is a Hyperconverged Infrastructure Benchmark build around VDbench.

Changelog

Version 1.6.8.1

  • Fixed regression when datastore is in the datastore folder
  • Avoid checking connection to host directly and use tvm deployment instead
  • Added Vdbench version check in summary script

Version 1.6.8

  • Added resource pool and VM folder fields for VMC environment
  • Fixed easy-run disk size issue
  • Enhanced pre-validation error message handling
  • Changed the names of network interface from “Public Network” to “Management Network”, and “Private Network” to “VM Network”

ESXi Embedded Host Client

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While the ESXi embedded host client has been officially released for 5.5, 6, 6.5 and 6.7 the fling gets all the latest updates.

Changelog

Version 1.32.0 build 10692217 (Fling 22) – November 2, 2018

  • Import / Export
    • Iso files and nvram files can now be exported and imported (if suppored by the esx version)
    • Files can be individually selected when exporting
    • All advanced vm config options are exported by default
    • Several bug fixes related to the export wizard
  • General
    • Permissions previews now display correctly
    • Support Bundles are now generated on the fly
    • Domain user functionality has been restored
    • Fibre Channel WWNs are displayed in hex

Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility

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If you want to use a gui to move vm’s between different vCenter servers than the Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility is the tool to use.

Changelog

Version 2.5, November 5, 2018

  • Remember registered site information (without password)
  • Easily retry a previously attempted task in case of failures
  • Search box for keyword filtering of migration task history
  • Option to clear task history by removing completed tasks
  • Added documentation and other links under the help menu
  • Partial fix for an issue related to duplicate network names

Workspace ONE Configuration Tool for Provisioning

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The Workspace ONE Configuration Tool for Provisioning assists in building unattend.xml configuration files that can be used by Dell (or others when more provide the service) when delivering systems from the factory to set them up for your environment.

Changelog

Release Update – Version 2.0.0

Improvements

  • The version number is shown in the window title
  • The version number is shown as a comment in the generated XML
  • The product key is now validated to conform with the 11111-11111-11111-11111-11111 pattern
  • Split the locale settings into ‘Operating System Language’, and ‘Region and Keyboard Settings’.
  • ‘Operating System Language’ maps to the language of the operating system installation media, and ‘Region and Keyboard Settings’ maps to the locale settings available to the user during OOBE
  • ‘Operating System Language’ is now a required field as it is needed for certain customizations, such as adding a user to the administrators group
  • Removed the ability to set a custom computer name. The computer name now defaults to ‘*’, which causes the Windows OS to generate a random name, taking up to seven characters from the ‘Registered Organization’ field plus eight random characters. This change makes sure every computer has a unique name on the network.
  • The ‘Auto Admin Logon’ feature is no longer selectable. Instead, it will be activated when it is required by the deployment scenario.
  • All deployment scenarios now allow for the creation of a local user.
  • Moved the node from the ‘oobeSystem’ pass to the ‘specialize’ pass
    to be consistent with the node

Bug Fixes

  • Auto Admin Logon would only work with an unattend XML generated for an en-US installation image
  • Enabled the ASSIGNEDTOLOGGEDINUSER=Y flag to enable the WS1 agent to correctly enroll the user in the ‘Workgroup’ deployment scenario
  • Fixed an issue where the ‘Show Privacy Settings’ option would have no effect

Sending messages to users with the Horizon API’s

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I got the question today from Fabian Lenz if it is possible to send messages to end users using the Horizon API. I knew I had seen it somewhere already and here’s a quick explanation.

There are two method’s to do this, one for a single session and the other for a group of sessions. Both fall under the session service.

$services1.session | gm

You can see both the methods called session_sendmessage and session_sendmessages if we look at what’s required for both we see that the difference is a single sessionid or an array of session id’s.

Let’s see what the API explorer says what’s needed.

So the msgtype is a string that can have three values and the message is just a string, let’s test this.

I am lazy and will use get-hvlocalsession for the sessionid.

$session=get-HVlocalsession | select -first 1

I do the -first 1 so it isn’t an array but a single session.

Now let’s send a message.

 $services1.session.Session_SendMessage($session.id,"INFO","This is a test message for retouw.nl at 30-10-2018 19:13h")

And the result:

Now let’s do the same for multiple sessions.

$sessions=get-HVlocalsession
$services1.session.Session_SendMessages($sessions.id,"ERROR","This is a test message with multiple recipients for retouw.nl at 30-10-2018 19:25h")

And to show that this also works for global sessions (both where connected to pod2cbr1)

$sessions=get-HVglobalsession 
$services2.session.Session_SendMessages($globalsessions.id,"WARNING","This is a test message with multiple global recipients for retouw.nl at 30-10-2018 19:30h")

If you want to filter the sessions on user or machine name you can filter the $globalsessions on $globalsessions.namesdata.basenames

 $globalsessions.namesdata.basenames | select-object username,machineorrdsservername,clientname

With the localsessions it’s located in $sessions.namesdata

$sessions.namesdata | select-object username,machineorrdsservername,clientname

It’s also possible to filter this with the query service, take a look on my previous post on how to handle queries.

So now you know how to send messages to users. Not that they always read these messages but at least you can try warning them a bit faster now!