To remind some of whom have had previous experience with flings, or to explain flings to newbies if there still are any, in a few words Flings are apps and tools built by VMware engineers that are intended to be played with and explored. Even more, they are cool ideas worked out in cool apps and tools. Which are not only to play with but are very useful.

And, with no official production support from VMware.

This doesn’t mean the fling will tear a hole in the space-time continuum or your environment will randomly blow up at places, just be a little cautious when using a fling untested in production. Like with everything in production. Not official supported doesn’t mean the engineers stopped working on the products as soon as it is published on the Flings page. They do often respond to comments and with updates to make their cool ideas even better. And at times a fling makes it to the product like the vSphere HTML5 Web Client or ViewDBChk in Horizon.

Tools?

Anyway. Below is a list of my five most used EUC flings. Because well… it is an often overheard question: what do you or other customers use? And a listing disclaimer, don’t stop at number five, there are other very cool flings out there and new emerging ones coming. So keep an eye out. Hey I won’t stop at 5 either…..

VMware OS Optimization Tool aka OSOT

Guest OS systems are often designed for other form factors than virtual machines thus being very bloaty to include every variable choose and iniminie little device supported. When running these in virtual machines we have to optimize the OS so it won’t waste resources on unneeded options, features or services. Optimize to improve performance. One of these use cases is Horizon VDI or published. But personally I would like to see server components a bit more optimized as well.

With VMware OS Optimization Tool you can use templates to analyze and optimize Windows templates. Use the provided templates, make your own or use the public templates to share knowledge with the community. Made an oops and there is a rollback option.

Get the VMware OS Optimization Tool here: https://labs.vmware.com/flings/vmware-os-optimization-tool.

Horizon Toolbox

The Horizon Toolbox is een set of helpful extensions to the Horizon Administrator page. The tools are provided at a Tomcat Web portal that is installed next to the Horizon Administrator. There the downside is visible straight away, yet another portal/console in the spaghetti western of the Horizon suite consoles. But the extensions for operations and no flash are worth it.

The Horizon Toolbox adds:

Auditing of user sessions, VM snapshots and used client versions.

Remote assistance to user sessions.

Access to the desktops VM remote console.

Power policies for Horizon pools.

Get the Horizon Toolbox here: https://labs.vmware.com/flings/horizon-toolbox-2.

VMware Access Point Deployment Utility

When we have use cases that need external access we have a design decision to use the Access Point in the DMZ to tunnel those external access sessions. The Horizon Access Point is an appliance that is deployed via a OVF. With the deployment you can use several methods to add the configuration options to the appliance, Web client, ovftool and Powershell for example. Another option is to use the Access point Deployment Tool fling. Especially when redeploying the appliance is faster than debugging or reconfiguring.

The VMware Access Point Deployment utility is a wrapper around ovftool. The utility let’s you input configuration values in a human friendly interface and PEM certificate format. It will create the ovf string, and will execute that string and deploy and configure Access Point. It will export the certificate and keys to the required JSON format. And it allows your input to be saved to XML and imported at a later time. This minimizes the amount of re-input required, and in result the amount of failures with reconfiguration or redeployment.

Get the VMware Access Point Deployment Utility here: https://labs.vmware.com/flings/vmware-access-point-deployment-utility.

App Volumes Backup Utility

App Volumes Appstacks are read only VMDK’s that are stored on a datastore and attached to a user sessions or desktop VM that has the App Volumes agent running. When we need to back up the appstacks we have the option to use a backup solution that backs up the datastore. But not all backup solutions have this option. A lot of VADP compatible backups look at the vCenter inventory to do their backup. Appstacks, and writeable volumes for that matter, are not available as direct selectable objects in the vCenter inventory. The Appstacks are only attached when a session or desktop is active, and non persistent desktop are not in the backup in the first place.

App Volumes Backup Utility to the rescue. In short what this tool does is connect App Volumes and vCenter, create a dummy VM object and attach the App Stack and writable volumes VMDK’s to that VM. And presto backup tool can do its magic. A little heads up for writable volumes, be sure to include pre and post actions to automatically detach, and re-attach any writable volumes which are in use while the backup is running. Utility for that is included in the fling.

Get the App Volumes Backup Utility here: https://labs.vmware.com/flings/app-volumes-backup-utility.

VMware Logon Monitor

VMware Logon Monitor fling monitors Windows 7 and 10 user logons. It reports a wide variety of performance metrics. It is firstly intended to help troubleshoot slow logon performance. But it can also be used for insights if you happen to miss vROPS for Horizon for example. Or when you want to find out how your physical desktop is doing in this same process when assessing the environment.

Some of the metrics categories include logon time, shell load, profile, policy load times, redirection load times, resource usage and the list goes on and on and on. VMware Logon Monitor also collects metrics from other VMware components used in the desktop. This will provide even more insight in what is happening during the logon process. For example what is that App Volumes AppStacks adding to the logon process……

Install Logon Monitor in your desktop pool and let the collection of metrics commence. Note that the logs are locally stored and not on a central location. The installer will create and start VMware Logon Monitor service.

VMware Logon Monitor will log to C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Logon Monitor\Logs.

Get the VMware Logon Monitor here: https://labs.vmware.com/flings/vmware-logon-monitor.

And there’s more where that came from…..

And probably some that make your order of appearance a little bit different. Just take a look a https://labs.vmware.com/flings/?product=Horizon+View for the Horizon View tagged flings. And be sure to also check without this tag as for example the App Volumes related flings are not in this tag listing.

– Enjoy the flings!

Sources: labs.vmware.com/flings