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You are here: Home / Automation / Enhancements to VMware Tools 12 for Container Application Discovery in vSphere 

Enhancements to VMware Tools 12 for Container Application Discovery in vSphere 

03.02.2022 by William Lam // 2 Comments

VMware Tools 12 was just released and it adds a number of new features including support for Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022, Salt Stack Minion deployment and the use of OpenSSL 3.0 library to just name a few.

One additional feature that is quite interesting is the enhancement to the Application Discovery feature that was shipped with VMware Tools 11 which provides organizations with additional visibility of the running processes within a VM.

With VMware Tools 12, we now have a more granular method for discovering container-based processes (Docker or Containerd) running within a Linux VM, which is pretty cool if you ask me!


Similiar to the Application Discovery feature, a new VM guestinfo variable has been introduced called guestinfo.vmtools.containerinfo that will be populated with the list of running containers. By default, the polling interval is every 6 hours with a default of listing the first 100 containers, these and other settings can be adjusted which you can find in the official VMware documentation.

Simliar to the Application Discovery feature, I have also updated my PowerCLI function Get-VMApplicationInfo.ps1 to include this additional functionality for users that would like to extract this information and I have created a new function called Get-VMContainerInfo, which you see how it functions in the screenshot above. In addition to console output, you can also save the information in both CSV and JSON format.

More from my site

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  • Quick Tip - Suppress in-guest VMware Tools update notifications
  • Quick Tip - Using PowerCLI to query VMware Tools Configuration at scale 
  • New detailed GuestOS data in vSphere 8.0 Update 2
  • vSphere Pods using VDS based Supervisor in vSphere with Tanzu?

Categories // Automation, Cloud Native, Kubernetes Tags // container, Kubernetes, vmware tools

Comments

  1. *protectedBob Morrison says

    03/02/2022 at 4:25 pm

    I’m glad they added support for Windows 11 in VMWare Tools 12.

    Reply
  2. *protectedAaron Patten says

    03/28/2022 at 8:03 am

    Looks like VMTools 12 is just for Windows and MacOS from what I can tell from the release notes. Linux is still using the 10.x versions. Any idea when open-vm-tools package will get this functionality?

    Reply

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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