Intro

I decided to make this almost monthly post a bit wider and just post updates and new releases of all flings in that month. There are four flings that have been updated at least once this month.

New Flings

There has been one new release this month:

DRS Lens

During the development fase at some point DRS Lens was named DRS Goggle so if you talk to me irl it might be possible that I call it that way. What this Flings does is give you insight in DRS activity. In several dashboards it will help the user visualize why DRS did or maybe didn’t move those vm’s you are so attached to.

As VMware vSphere DRS has become more widely adopted now, more and more users are interested in knowing how it works. They need more insights into DRS activity and actions. They want to know the value that DRS provides to their clusters. DRS Lens is an attempt to provide a UI-based solution to help understand DRS better. DRS Lens provides a simple, yet powerful interface to highlight the value proposition of vSphere DRS. Providing answers to simple questions about DRS will help quell many of the common concerns that users may have. DRS Lens provides different dashboards in the form of tabs for each cluster being monitored.

Changelog

Version 1.1

Added login compatibility to 5.5 vCenter

Fixed VC certificate parsing bug found with some 5.5 vCenters

Updated flings

These Flings have received one or more updates during this month.

Horizon Toolbox 2

The Horizon toolbox 2 has been updated to version 7.2 and since Horizon 7.2 itself now contains a Remote Assistance feature in the helpdesk part this has been removed from the fling. This is stil one of my favorite flings that has functionality that should be in Horizon itself!

Changelog

2017 Jul 17

New Features

Support Horizon 7.2. Horizon Toolbox uses the same version as the latest supported Horizon.

Support end users’ actions auditing (agent side), including USB storage, Client Drive Redirection and Clipboard.

Support vSphere Console Access to all Parent Images.

Bug Fixes

Fix one bug which caused the number of concurrent sessions not accurate.

Fix one bug which caused missed domains in login page.

Removed Features

Remote Assistance is part of Horizon 7.2 production (in Help Desk). So we have removed this feature from Horizon Toolbox.

vSphere html5 web client

The updates for this really great fling don’t get a date but a build number. I could find that 3.16 was released early July so I decided to take that one as the oldest for the changelog of the vSphere html5 web client.

Changelog

Fling 3.18 – Build 6163115

Improvements

Upgrade distributed switch wizard now supports the upgrade of LACP to Enhanced mode and the upgrade of Network I/O Control to version 3.

View settings of link aggregation groups on a distributed switch

Fling 3.17 – Build 6088028

New Features

Create VM Storage Policy (limited) Migrate Host Networking to a Distributed Switch Configure default gateway address on VMkernel adapters (ESX 6.5 only) Network I/O Control v3 – configure shares, reservation and limit for the different types of system traffic Customize hardware options when cloning VM or deploying VM from template Create VVol Storage Policies



Improvements

Warn when about to edit the settings or perform snapshot operations on VM managed by a solution

Warning message when uploading files bigger than the datastore free space

Known Issues

Import Item into Content Library is not working.

Bug Fixes

Fixed the bug on import workflow in content library

Fling 3.16 – Build 5956761

New Features

Create VM Storage Policy (limited) Create vSAN Policy (without Tags) Create Policy with Tags and Common rules

Distributed Switch Manage physical network adapters at the host level LACP support – view the link aggregation groups created on a distributed switch Upgrade distributed switch wizard

SR-IOV support – enable/disable SR-IOV on physical network adapters that support it

Content Library Tags, notes, subscription/Publication portlet Edit settings on the content library Delete Content Library Synchronize Library



Improvements

Select TCP/IP stack while creating new VMkernel network adapter

Known Issues

Import Item into Content Library is not working.

HCIBench

HCIBench is a tool developed for benchmarking the hyper-converged infrastructure. It not only works for VSAN but for all kinds of hyper-converged solutions. Again this tool has no build date but version but the Internet Waybackmachine found for me that 1.6.1 was released back in february.

Changelog

Version 1.6.2

Integrated with vSAN Performance Diagnostic of vSphere_6.5U1/vSAN_6.6.1.

Added DHCP Service validation.

Added Vdbench workload profile validation.

Removed the root password expiration policy.

Changed results display to show full file names.

Changed easy-run calculation from host basis to disk-group basis.