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RSS feed for VMware release notes

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Staying up to date with the latest VMware product releases can be a challenge and with something like VMware Cloud on AWS, which is delivered as a service, it can be even more tricky as new updates are constantly being made available. Historically, there has not been a consistent method for how customers can get notified of new releases and this has also come up from our VMware Cloud on AWS customers.

We posed the challenge to our Information Exchange (documentation) team to see how we can help our VMware Cloud on AWS customers and the team came back with an initial implementation of providing a standard RSS feed which you can now find at the upper right hand corner of the VMware Cloud on AWS release notes page. You can subscribe using your favorite RSS reader, I personally use Feedly and when a new release of the SDDC and/or service, you will get notified via your RSS reader. For those that want a different delivery mechanism such as email for example, you can use the free If This, Than That (IFTTT) service which I also personally use and setup an email notification or any other type of notification that IFTTT supports.


Although this initial requirement was driven by the VMware Cloud on AWS product team, we definitely wanted to see this capability delivered across all VMware products and services which is what the team has done as well. When you navigate to a specific product and/or service release notes, you will now see the additional RSS feed that you can subscribe to.

Here are just a few of the popular RSS feeds that I know folks will want to subscribe to. For a complete list of all VMware product/services, please take a look here.

I think this be a great first step in helping our customers easily get notified of new releases, so that can start reviewing the release notes and start planning. I know many of you have also asked for other methods such as programmatic access to release notes updates or even having a specific changelog for things like our APIs. If folks have any feedback in this area, feel free to leave a comment and I will be more than happy to share this with our documentation team.

All vSphere 6.7 release notes & download links

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vSphere 6.7 has officially GA'ed! Below is an aggregation of all the related release notes and downloads for this vSphere release. I have also created a short URL which you can use to access this exact same page using vmwa.re/vsphere67

Note: Not all links are live yet, but they should be available later this morning. Please be patient and in the meantime, you can check out all the vSphere 6.7 collateral which has been published and can be accessed here.

vSphere 6.7

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Quick Tip - Locating SRM Placeholder VMs using the vSphere API

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I had received a question the other day from a reader where they were trying to distinguish between the running VM and its placeholder VM due to their use of VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). Since the VM name is exactly the same in both vCenter Servers, it was not clear how to identify between the two. As mentioned in my reply to the reader, there are a couple of ways. You could use the SRM API in-conjunction with the vSphere API (in his case, he was using PowerCLI) to be able to check whether the VM in question was the placeholder VM or not.

Another option is to simply use the vSphere API and querying for the managedBy property which is populated when SRM and/or other solutions are associated with managing a set of VMs. In the case of SRM, you will see an extensionKey with value of "com.vmware.vcDR" and type with value of "placeholderVm" which tells you that the VM is an SRM Placeholder VM, pretty easy, right!? 🙂

Since I did not have an SRM environment handy, the next best thing was to check out VMware Hands-On-Lab environment which anyone can access for free. Lab HOL-1705-SDC-1 was exactly what I needed and here is a quick screenshot of the vSphere MOB showing you what the managedBy property looks like in the vSphere API.

To demonstrate the use of this vSphere API, I wrote a quick PowerCLI function called PlaceholderVMs.ps1 and below is an example of running the Get-PlaceholderVM command: