None less than eleven newly released and updated flings this month. This includes three that are directly aimed for End use computing including Horizon Reach about which I blogged earlier this week. The three new releases are Horizon Reach, VMware vSAN Live and vCenter Event Broker Appliance. The following received updates: Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as a Service on vRealize Automation Cloud, Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility, Infrastructure Deployer for vCloud NFV, Horizon View Events Database Export Utility, Horizon Helpdesk Utility, Kubewise, USB Network Native Driver for ESXi and HCIBench.

New Releases

Horizon Reach

As I said in the blog posts, Horizon Reach is one of the best tools for Horizon ever if not the best by giving the admin insight into the entire Cloud Pod Architecture.

Horizon Reach is a web based, monitoring and alerting fling for VMware Horizon On Prem deployments. Horizon Reach is designed to tackle the disconnect in Enterprise environments wherein each Pod in a Cloud Pod Architecture is its own technology domain and fault domain, or a customer is running multiple, disconnected pods, outside of a Cloud Pod Architecture, but would still like to treat them all as one unit of compute. Often when troubleshooting these fault domains, it can feel like a game of “Whack a mole” jumping from Pod to Pod trying to find a pertinent session, alarm or event to the problem your user is describing. Reach tackles this issue by performing health checking and gathering pertinent errors from each separate environment and displaying them all in a single place, creating an easy location for administrators to monitor the environment, along with providing a detailed first step in the troubleshooting process.

VMware vSAN Live

Did you like the vSphere mobile fling? Guess what there is a vSAN mobile fling now as well to give you all the insights while on the go. Personally I expect this one to be merged with the vSphere app at some point but as of now it’s a separate app.

VMware vSAN Live provides vSAN users with instant insights into their hyperconverged infrastructure environments from their mobile devices. Instead of stopping, signing into a laptop and then logging in remotely to view their vSAN environments, users can monitor their HCI clusters while on the go, troubleshooting in just a few clicks. What’s included in this release? Overview dashboard of vSAN clusters

Full-featured Health Checks

Cluster inventory view including Fault domain and host status.

Easily switch between different vCenter Servers

Cluster configuration view including vSAN settings and service status.

Full-featured Performance monitoring for VMs and Cluster

Full-featured Capacity monitoring VMware vSAN powers VMware’s hyperconverged infrastructure solution, which combines compute virtualization, storage virtualization and storage networking with unified management into a single system running on industry-standard x86 servers. VMware vSAN, primes businesses for growth through seamless evolution, industry leading deployment flexibility and hybrid-cloud capabilities. vSAN is native to the market-leading hypervisor, vSphere, simplifying HCI adoption by leveraging existing tools and skillsets. vSAN provides customers industry leading deployment flexibility with over 500+ ReadyNodes, or jointly-certified x86 servers, a turn-key appliance, Dell EMC VxRail, and native services with all of the top public cloud providers: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, IBM and Oracle. vSAN supports the most hybrid cloud uses cases and provides enterprise-grade, general-purpose infrastructure for VM and container-based applications.

vCenter Event Broker Appliance

This is quite a handy appliance when you want some event driven automation for your vSphere environment.

The vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) enables customers to easily create event-driven automation based on vCenter Server Events. For example, VEBA can drive basic workflows like automatically attaching a vSphere tag when a virtual machine (VM) is created. Even more powerful integrations between datacenter-internal enterprise services and cloud services, for example Slack and Pager Duty, can be created with VEBA out of the box. VEBA is provided as a Virtual Appliance that can be deployed to any vSphere-based infrastructure, including an on-premises and/or any public cloud environment, running on vSphere such as VMware Cloud on AWS or VMware Cloud on Dell-EMC. With this appliance, end-users, partners and independent software vendors only have to write minimal business logic without going through a steep learning curve understanding vSphere APIs. As such, we believe this solution not only offers a better user experience in solving existing problems for vSphere operators. More importantly, it will enable new integration use cases and workflows to grow the vSphere ecosystem and community, similar to what AWS has achieved with AWS Lambda. Continue the conversation with us on Slack: #vcenter-event-broker-appliance on VMware {code}

Updated flings

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as a Service on vRealize Automation Cloud

The Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as a Service on vRealize Automation Cloud fling gives you a tool to automate the end to end deployment of an Openshift Cluster.

Changelog

Version 1.1

Updated / Revalidate for Red Hat Enterprise Server 7.7

Updated / Revalidate for minor changes in bash scripts

Updated/ Revalidate for Ansible playbooks

Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility

If you need to migrate or clone vm’s between unlinked or even linked vCenters than the Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility is a very useful tool for you.

Changelog

Version 3.0, Novemember 5, 2019

New plugin UI integrated with the vSphere HTML5 Client and supported with both vSphere and VMware Cloud environments Full feature parity with the standalone XVM UI Supports migrations triggered by the host, cluster and resource pool actions from the vSphere Client inventory tree

Standalone UI is now deprecated but is still supported

Ability to migrate networks with the same name

Sorting and filtering of the list of VMs to migrate (plugin only)

Error reporting improvements

Infrastructure Deployer for vCloud NFV

Infrastructure Deployer for vCloud NFV is an automation-based deployment tool used for setting up the VMware vCloud NFV platform (NFV 3.2 VCD edition). It is based on VMware vCloud NFV 3.0 Reference Architecture design and targets greenfield deployments only. There are two components: The input text file – User enters all details of the environment and component products that need to be deployed, and

The power shell scripts – Executed to do the actual deployment of the products.

Changelog

None

Horizon View Events Database Export Utility

While I personally prefer to use the api’s to grab Horizon event logs I still think the Horizon View Events Database Export Utility could be very usefull for people, specially now it has been updated to work with the latest version of Horizon.

Changelog

Version 2.0

Added support for RDSH Pools

Returns desktop name now

Several bug fixes

Tested with Horizon 7.11

Horizon Helpdesk Utility

The Horizon Helpdesk Utility still is a 1000 times better than the official java or html5 interfaces and it keeps getting better and better.

Changelog

Version 1.5.0.11

Added Named user support in the views

Added support for VM image details

Added Global search on the overview

Added an option to disable the global mutex

Fixed numerous bugs

Version 1.5.0.9

Updated all binaries to be signed

Added full name support for search results

Added image status and details for machines view

Added a privacy setting to remove the windows title caption

Many Bug Fixes

Kubewise

Kubewise is a nifty multi-platform Kubernetes Desktop client. In case you don’t want to type kubctl this could be a replacement.

Changelog

Version 1.1.0

[ Features ]

Terminal command UI – users can now override the default command to open a new terminal window of their choice.

About Info UI – displays the version of currently installed kubectl

[ Bug fixes ]

Fixed an issue where Windows users cannot add a kubeconfig file

Fixed an issue where Linux users cannot list resources due to snap security policies

Switching to YAML format in the Inspect resource view loaded all resources of the same type

Surround path params of kubectl commands with double quotes

[ Misc ]

Save settings file pretty printed

Allign ‘trash’ icons in kubeconfig dropdown

Show loading spinner on application startup

USB Network Native Driver for ESXi

The USB Network Native Driver for ESXi is specially build for homelabs so people can have (fast) enough nic’s even when running smaller systems in the lab.

Changelog

November 27, 2019 – v1.3

Resolved USB device detection issue on Intel XHCI controller

Resolved packet record issue for ASIX USB network adapters

ESXi670-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-30899283-offline_bundle-15188556.zip

ESXi650-VMKUSB-NIC-FLING-30940032-offline_bundle-15188510.zip

HCIBench

The HCIBench received 2 updates this month but the second mostly was a bugfix.

Changelog

Version 2.3.1

Fixed static IP setting issue

Fixed reuse VMs on multi datastores issue

Fixed vm/tvm deployment issue

MD5 Checksum: 1b220f22575eacf62a965992a4c916e7 HCIBench_2.3.1.ova

Version 2.3.0

Upgraded to Photon 3

Integrated vSAN performance monitoring

Tuned disk preparation

Added HCIBench test report

Added DNS exception handler

Upgraded fio to 3.16

Bug fixes

MD5 checksum: b43c29e146b8a7efa08028e7d6699a6e

If you need to automate HCIBench, please look at:

https://code.vmware.com/samples?id=6502 for python2.7

https://code.vmware.com/samples?id=6588 for python3