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ATTO's ESXi Thunderbolt Driver is now officially on VMware HCL

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Last week I had received some great news from our friends over at ATTO Technology that their ESXi Thunderbolt to Fibre Channel Driver has passed the VMware Certification process and is now officially listed on VMware's HCL. I had known the team was planning to certify their driver but was not aware of their timelines and whether it would actually get accepted given the fact that this was for a Thunderbolt-based device, which is the first of its kind for the VMware HCL.

Funny enough, it was roughly around this time last year that ATTO released a Beta of their ESXi Thunderbolt to Fibre Channel Driver which I had shared with my readers here. I was not surprised by the demand given the fact that no official solutions exists for customers who would like to take advantage of their existing SAN-based storage infrastructure when virtualizing Apple macOS (iOS development, etc) on vSphere. ATTO has certified two of their ThunderLink devices, customers have the option of using either the TLFC2082 which provides 20Gb/s Thunderbolt 2 (2-port) to 8Gb/s FC (2-Port) Device or the TLFC2182 which provides 20Gb/s Thunderbolt 2 (2-port) to 16Gb/s FC (2-Port) Device which is supported from ESXi 5.5u3 all the way up to latest 6.5u1 release.


Click here for the direct link to VMware HCL.

Huge congrats to the ATTO team for getting this on the VMware HCL and partnering up with VMware to provide a solution for our customers who virtualize Apple macOS using vSphere!

Lastly, if you are going to be at VMworld and you are interested in learning more about this solution, be sure to drop by the ATTO booth.

VMware Fusion 2017 Tech Preview adds REST API support

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In case you have not heard the news, the VMware Fusion and Workstation team just released their 2017 Tech Preview releases which you can read more about it here and here. A couple of years back, VMware had released a slimmed down desktop Hypervisor based on VMware Fusion called AppCatalyst which was optimized for developers wanting to run Docker Containers. Although the feedback for AppCatalyst was positive, the large majority of customers preferred to see the AppCatalyst specific features such as the RESTful API to just be included natively within Fusion rather than having a separate product.

Although it could not be said at the time, the feedback was heard loud and clear and the plan was to pull in the AppCatalyst REST API directly into Fusion. With the Fusion 2017 Tech Preview, you will now be able to interact with your Virtual Machines running on Fusion using the new Fusion REST API which also includes some additional new capabilities that was not there with the AppCatalyst REST APIs such as network and port forwarding management.

UPDATE (09/27/17) - VMware Fusion 10 has just officially GA'ed and there have been number of updates and enhancements since the Tech Preview. From an Automation/API standpoint, there have been several major updates that I would like to call out.

First, there are several new command-linen options to the vmrest utility including support for both HTTP and HTTPS API endpoints, credentials are also now supported so you can setup a shared username/password and ensure that only authorized folks can login to the API and lastly, the default port is now also configurable. Along with these widely requested features during the Tech Preview, there is also a nice debugging option while using the Fusion UI for troubleshooting purposes.

Secondly, the Fusion Swagger REST API docs has received a total re-vamp in terms of organization and cleaned up documentation. Below is a screenshot of the Swagger interface for the GA version of Fusion 10 which should make it even easier to consume the REST API.

Getting Started

Step 1 - Once you have installed the Fusion 2017 TP release, you will need to start the REST API endpoint which is provided by /Applications/VMware Fusion Tech Preview.app/Contents/Public/vmrest You can just type vmrest and it should automatically start or if you prefer to run it in the background, just type the following:

vmrest &

Here is screenshot of starting the Fusion REST API endpoint:


Note: The default port for the REST API is 8697

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Native OVF support for Fusion/Workstation 2017 Tech Preview 

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The VMware Fusion and Workstation team just released their 2017 Tech Preview releases and there is a ton of new and awesome capabilities which you can read more about here and here. One of the exciting new features, which I was very fortunate to have been involved with is finally here, native OVF property support! Although customers have had the ability to import OVF/OVAs for some time now, if they included OVF properties, they would be ignored and often times this would result in a failed deployment as those properties are required for the initial setup.

A great example of this is trying to run the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) on either Fusion or Workstation. Today, the only workaround is to manually edit the VMX file and supplying the correct OVF properties which I have blogged about here. With the latest TP release of Fusion/Workstation, when you import an OVF/OVA that contains OVF properties, the UI will automatically render the required information directly into the UI without needing users to manually touch the VMX files.

Here is a screenshot of deploying the latest VCSA 6.5d OVA (jump to bottom for some additional VCSA tidbits when deploying to Fusion/Workstation):

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