Only two days before I am flying to Barcelona, I am really looking forward to VMworld. The bad things is that it will probably be over before we know it as well. One of the new flings from last month has been renamed, one new was posted and six received updates. Kubernetes eXtensible Desktop Client (KXDC) was renamed to Kubewise and the Virtualized High Performance Computing Toolkit is the new fling posted. Updated flings are vRealize Operations REST Notifications Helper, vSphere Mobile Client, Workspace One UEM Workload Migration Tool, Virtual Machine Compute Optimizer, vRealize Build Tools and the vSAN Performance Monitor.

New releases

Virtualized High Performance Computing Toolkit

The toolkit helps you in performing High Performance Computing

High Performance Computing (HPC) is the use of parallel-processing techniques to solve complex computational problems. HPC systems have the ability to deliver sustained performance through the concurrent use of distributed computing resources,and they are typically used for solving advanced scientific and engineering problems, such as computational fluid dynamics, bioinformatics, molecular dynamics, weather modeling and deep learning with neural networks. Due to their extreme demand on performance, HPC workloads often have much more intensive resource requirements than those workloads found in the typical enterprise. For example, HPC commonly leverages hardware accelerators, such as GPU and FPGA for compute as well as RDMA interconnects, which require special vSphere configurations. This toolkit is intended to facilitate managing the lifecycle of these special configurations by leveraging vSphere APIs. It also includes features that help vSphere administrators perform some common vSphere tasks that are related to creating such high-performing environments, such as VM cloning, setting Latency Sensitivity, and sizing vCPUs, memory, etc. Feature Highlights: Configure PCIe devices in DirectPath I/O mode, such as GPGPU, FPGA and RDMA interconnects

Configure NVIDIA vGPU

Configure RDMA SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization)

Configure PVRDMA (Paravirtualized RDMA)

Easy creation and destruction of virtual HPC clusters using cluster configuration files

Perform common vSphere tasks, such as cloning VMs, configuring vCPUs, memory, reservations, shares, Latency Sensitivity, Distributed Virtual Switch/Standard Virtual Switch, network adapters and network configurations

Update flings

vRealize Operations REST Notifications Helper

vRealize Operations REST Notifications Helper helps vRealize Operations Manager users improve and customize the REST notifications of alerts. It collects the most useful information about an alert, creates a new payload by user configuration, and sends it to third parties.

Changelog

Version 1.3.0

Added a configuration for preferred HTTP request type

Added severity mapping configuration

Enabled blacklisting with resourceName property

Arranged the endpoint configuration structure for different behavior based on alert trigger states

Added symptoms as a single string (like recommendations)

Minor fixes

vSphere Mobile Client

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.

Changelog

Version 1.6.0

Hosts can now be rebooted from the UI

Recent tasks can now be viewed in tasks view (running/in-progress)

Redesigned cards: VM card, host card, cluster card, task card

Quick actions can now be easily accessed with a tap on the card

VM cards display a screenshot which can be enlarged by taping on it

A feedback portlet has been added to the dashboard, you can know provide feedback from within the app

Performance charts are now available for hosts

Navigation menu items are now larger to faciliate taping on those

Supports mobile devices using Android version 4.4 (KitKat) or newer

Supports mobile devices using iOS version 10 or newer

No other mobile operating systems are currently supported

For Notification Appliance – 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 14 GB storage

An existing VC (version 6.0 or newer) installation (VCSA or Windows).

Application is tested on the vCenter VCSA 6.5 GA release.

Hosts can now be rebooted from the UI

Recent tasks can now be viewed in tasks view (running/in-progress)

Redesigned cards: VM card, host card, cluster card, task card

Quick actions can now be easily accessed with a tap on the card

VM cards display a screenshot which can be enlarged by taping on it

A feedback portlet has been added to the dashboard, you can know provide feedback from within the app

Performance charts are now available for hosts

Navigation menu items are now larger to faciliate taping on those

Workspace One UEM Workload Migration Tool

The Workspace One UEM Workload Migration Tool allows a seamless migration of Applications and Device configurations between different Workspace One UEM environments. With the push of a button, workloads move from UAT to Production, instead of having to manually enter the information or upload files manually. Therefore, decreasing the time to move data between Dev/UAT environments to Production.

Changelog

Version 2.0.1

Fixed Baseline Migration issue

Fixed Profile Errors not displaying in the UI

Virtual Machine Compute Optimizer

The Virtual Machine Compute Optimizer (VMCO) is a Powershell script that uses the PowerCLI module to capture information about the hosts and VMS running in your vSphere environment, and reports back on whether the VMs are configured optimally based on the Host CPU and memory. It will flag a VM as “YES” if it is optimized and “NO” if it is not. For non-optimized VMs, a recommendation is made that will keep the same number of vCPUs currently configured, with the optimal number of virtual cores and sockets.

Changelog

Version 2.0.1

Corrected Get-OptimalvCPU.ps1 where sometimes cluster information would show as System.Object[].

Version 2.0.0

Priority of the findings are captured

Details on the findings are included

Cluster information is captured to determine if Host HW is not consistent across the cluster

Report if a VM spanning pNUMA nodes actually has the pNUMA exposed to the guest OS

Report if advanced settings have been changed on the VM or host level to expose pNUMA to the guest OS

Reports if the number of vCPUs for a VM exceeds the physical cores of the host (using hyperthreads as vCPUs)

Ability to use the stand alone “Get-OptimalvCPU” function for more flexibility

vSAN Performance Monitor

The vSAN performance monitor is a monitoring and visualization tool based on vSAN Performance metrics. It will collect vSAN Performance and other metrics periodically from the clusters configured. The data collected is visualized in a more efficient and user-friendly way. The vSAN performance monitor comes with preconfigured dashboards which will help customers evaluate the performance of vSAN clusters, identify and diagnose problems, and understand current and future bottlenecks. The dashboards are heavily inspired by vSAN Observer.

Changelog

Version 1.2

Fixed issues with the fling while CA certificates

Minor tweaks to the data collection agent

Removed anonymous statistics collection by influxdb

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.

Changelog

Version 1.7.1

Further enhanced the TypeScript projects support (still experimental)

Bug fixes