Onyx is a tool I have been using for years, it’s a tool that sat between the vSphere C# Client or Windows Client and the vCenter server and intercepted the SOAP calls, it would inspect these SOAP calls and convert them into PowerCLI code. With the recent move away from the C# Client there is an obvious reason why the original Onyx Fling would not work anymore, its not like you can put it in between the web client and the vCenter service is it ?!

This tool was always a life saver for me as I’m not one to read API documentation, it was always a way to not only work out the code for me to alter and reuse but it was a great way for me to work out how VMware would do something, there is often multiple ways you can code something and if you can see what the C# client was doing to perform an action then that had to be a great place to start.

So up until now it has always been for the C# client, well today all that changes, just released is “Onyx for the Web Client” and it is awesome!

Firstly I want to thank the engineer who worked on it, Atanas Atanasov is a member of the PowerCLI team and was fantastic throughout the project taking feedback from myself and the internal testers at VMware (You know who you are and thanks!) and turning it around very fast to produce the end result which works fantastically.

So how does it work?

There are already some great blog posts out there on the official PowerCLI Blog, on Luc’s Site, Jonathans Site and on Roberts site which go into some detail so I thought I would do a quick video to show you how I like to use it.

In the video below I show how I do not know how to automate an advanced setting of a VM, I show how easy it is to record the action of changing that setting, take the code that the fling produces and then use it to firstly change a single VM to a different setting and then how easy it is to turn this into a function that can be used on all VMs in the environment. This shows how we can create repeatable code that can be used (and shared) to achieve the task we need all with little knowledge of the API.

Download it now!

Make sure you download and install the fling in your test environment from here.

Watch how to use the fling

-Alan

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