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VMware Cloud on AWS 1.13 adds support for VMRC vCenter Proxy

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VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS) 1.13 was just released and although it is an optional release, it does introduce a pretty interesting capability that I think our customers will really appreciate and benefit from, especially when this capability also makes its way into an on-premises vSphere release.

VMware Remote Console (VMRC) vCenter Proxy​

  • VMware Remote Console connections will now be proxied through the SDDC’s vCenter, and clients no longer require connectivity to ESXi hosts.  This simplifies connectivity requirements, and allows for the use of VMRC over VPN when a DX or vTGW is also being used with the SDDC.

Historically, when you wanted to interact with a Virtual Machine using the vSphere UI in vCenter Server, you had two options. You can either use the HTML5 Remote Console within your browser or you could use the standalone VMware Remote Console (VMRC) application. For basic functionality, the HTML5 console is generally preferred but for cases where you might need to mount a local device from your computer such as a USB, bluetooth or CD-ROM device, you had to use the VMRC client.

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Intel NUC with 512GB memory

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Yes, you read that correctly. 512 gigabytes of memory on an Intel NUC. Not only is this pretty 🤯 but this is actually possible today with an already released Intel NUC!

A few months back, I was made aware of some really cool technology from Intel called Intel Memory Drive Technology (IMDT) which leverages Intel Optane SSDs to extend memory of a system beyond its physical memory (DRAM) capacity. This technology is made possible with their IMDT software, which is a purpose built Hypervisor whose sole purpose is to just manage memory and this Hypervisor runs on top of the Intel Optane SSD. You can think of this like a Software-Defined Memory (SDM) solution. In fact, SDM was actually coined in this performance white paper evaluating IMDT with scientific-based applications back in 2018.

Note: This should not be confused with Intel Optane and its Datacenter Persistent Memory (PMEM) solution which vSphere already supports today.

The target use case for this type of technology is for memory intensive applications such as SAP HANA, Oracle, Redis, Memcache and Apache Spark to just name a few. These workloads can easily gobble up 10's of terabytes of memory that can bring a number of challenges when needing to scale up these solutions. High capacity memory DIMMS are not only expensive, but once you exhaust the number of physical DIMM slots, your only option for scale up is to add additional servers which is very costly.

Using IMDT, customers can expand their physical DRAM capacity from 8x to 15x, which can significantly improve cost, performance but also the operational overhead in managing  additional systems. Putting aside the in-memory based workloads, I think there is also huge potential for general purpose workloads that can also get the exact same benefits, especially when you think about constraints like power, cooling and location such as Edge or ROBO locations. Since this solution works on an Intel NUC, a really interesting use case for this technology that immediately came to mind was for a vSphere/NSX/vSAN homelab environment.

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Programmatically interact with the VMware Product Lifecycle Matrix

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I recently came across a really cool automation solution from Dale Coghlan who built a PowerShell module to interact with the VMware Configuration Maximum (Config Max) Tool.

Although the Config Max tool does not currently provide an API, there is still a way to interact with it programmatically. Behind the scenes, the application uses JSON for its payload which can then be retrieved programmatically using PowerShell or any other language for that matter to perform an HTTP GET. I also know the Config Max team quite well, as I had worked with them to incorporate the VMware Cloud on AWS configuration maximums which also required a few enhancements to the tool. If you have any feedback, feel free to drop a comment and I will be happy to share it with them and one of my first asks when I met the team, was to provide a public REST API 🙂

After sharing Dale's tweet, I saw a question about doing something similiar for the VMware's Product Lifecycle Matrix, which is a website that helps customers understand the support lifecycle of a given VMware product/solution. The product lifecycle site has also been recently revamped and although it also does not have a public API, using Chrome Developer Tools (super useful tool) to quickly inspect, it looks like you can also programmatically grab the payload which also happens to be using JSON 🙂

Disclaimer: The VMware Product Lifecycle Matrix does not provide a public API, this also means there are no guarantees or compatibility that the trick outlined below will continue to work going forward. This is why you want to have a public, documented and supported API.

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