Another month, another year, welcome to 2018 where I will continue this monthly series about updated and new VMware labs flings. This month there where two new fling: The Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility and Simple Natural Language Processing for iOS plus three updated flings: VMware OS Optimization Tool, vSphere HTML5 Web Client, and last but not least the App Volumes Backup Utility. Some familiar faces and some not so familiar let’s see what changed:

Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility

The first Fling is the brand new Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility, previously one had to go command line to move VMs across vCenter servers but now the less CLI inclined people (or lazy people like me sometimes) can do it via a gui. This can be done within the same SSO domain but also across SSO domains. WIlliam Lam also wrote a good post about it.

Key Features

Completely UI-driven workflow for VM migration

Provides REST API for managing migration operations

Works with vCenter not a part of the same SSO domain

Support for batch migration of multiple VMs in parallel

Supports both live as well as cold migration of VMs

Performs storage vMotion, not requiring shared storage

Flexible network mappings between source and destination sites

Simple Natural Language Processing for iOS

To be honest: i have no clue what Simple Natural Language Processing for iOS is for, looks like something to use in your code to talk to the voice processing in iOS without cost and privacy concerns for using cloud based solutions.

Simple Natural Language Processing for iOS provides developers with a convenient framework for integrating Natural Language Processing (NLP) into their iOS Apps. When the developer provides a set of training phrases, Simple NLP will use Naïve Bayes Classification to predict the intent of an unfamiliar phrase and extract parameters such as a person’s name and dates. While numerous cloud based solutions already exist to provide similar functionality, they may have associated cost and privacy concerns. With Simple NLP for iOS, your data won’t be sent to a server or cloud service for prediction. All NLP functionality is constrained to the device and processed natively. We hope that you will find this Fling easy to use and beneficial to your project.

VMware OS Optimization Tool

Just a short update for the OSOT this month, more tools have been coming out that can do this but this one is stall my favorite OS Optimizer.

Changelog

December 14, 2017

Template update. Detailed change log for each template is in the online version of each template (accessed from Public Templates tab)

App Volumes Backup Utility

As far as I know this is still the only way to backup those Appstacks and writable volumes and using a fling for that might be a risk.

Changelog

Version 2.0

Updated to use only PowerCLI to connect to vCenter/vSphere. Previous versions used the vSphere SOAP API along with PowerCLI which locked the application to a specific version of PowerCLI. Versions 2.0 and later of this application will work with any version of PowerCLI (6.0 and later). This change improves the speed of enumerating vCenter items

Added additional checks for PowerCLI and PowerShell

Additional optimizations and minor bug fixes

vSphere HTML5 Web Client

Like always the HTML5 Web Client received multiple updates, two to be exactly in december.

Changelog

Fling 3.31 – Build 7343373

New Features

Performance charts counter selection can be persisted. The counter selection are persisted per object type. The data is persisted in browser local storage.

Bug Fixes

Resume fault tolerance in manual DRS cluster will show DRS recommendations.

Fling 3.30 – Build 7271216

New Features

View License assets (Host/Cluster/Solutions)(Read-only)

License and Products features details

VC and Host License details (Configure > Licensing)

VDS health checks

Improvements

Warning dialog when the file download is blocked by the Browser’s Pop-up blocker

Bug Fixes

Issue where host advanced settings filter doesn’t work in edit is resolved.