vSphere 7 has officially GA'ed this morning and with folks starting to download ESXi and the vCenter Server Appliance, do not forget about all the supporting tools such as the latest PowerCLI 12.0 release which includes a number of enhancement as well as the various vSphere Management and Automation SDKs.

🚀 #vSphere7 is now GA 🚀 Start your downloads (RN’s still staging) & make sure to tune in to launch later this morning! 🔸VCSA RN:https://t.co/d6hr8ndAiG

🔹ESXi RN: https://t.co/d6hr8ndAiG 🔸VCSA Download: https://t.co/FbYluRI9te

🔹ESXi Download: https://t.co/bfHRAzzS43 — William Lam (@lamw) April 2, 2020

One of my most frequently used tools on a daily basis, some times even more than PowerCLI is OVFTool which is now at version 4.4 which officially supports vSphere 7 but it also includes a number of really awesome enhancements and bug fixes.

While looking over the OVFTool release notes, I noticed a few interesting tidbits that I thought was worth calling out:

OVF Tool now can upload disk files to the host in parallel, and download disk files from the host in parallel. OVA is unsupported. Parallelism is limited by the number of CPUs. See the --parallelThreads=N option in the OVF Tool User's Guide for details.

This is a most welcome feature for customers with extremely large VMs where upload and/or downloads of OVAs can take a considerable amount of time as only a single CPU thread is used. With this feature, you can now enable multiple CPU threads with the --parallelThreads parameter which should really with performance! Even for smaller size VMs, you can still benefit if you have additional CPU resources to allocate and something I will be using going forward!

For multi-disk virtual machines, OVF Tool now includes the --multiDatastore flag to specify datastore per disk. See the OVF Tool User's Guide for details.

This is another welcome feature for customers where you might have an OVA that contains multiple VMDKs and want to explicitly place them on specific datastore.

The ARM64 architecture on Linux is now supported.

Finally, I thought this was very interesting to see that OVFTool has been ported over to ARM64 for Linux which means we can run now run OVFTool on a Raspberry Pi or even an Amazon A1 EC2 Instance! This might come handy in the future and I wonder if OVFTool for ESXi would be the next logical step? 🙂

I highly recommend you check out the rest of the release notes as it contains many more enhancements and fixes, many of which I have reported from the community and/or by our customers. I think this is certainly one of the tools you can upgrade immediately as it has great backwards compatibility with older vSphere releases but you can also take advantage of all the new features mentioned above immediately. If there are other OVFTool improvements or enhancements you really would like to see, feel free to leave a comment along with the use case and I will past that on to Engineering.