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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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Visualizing live network traffic on the vCenter Server Appliance using net-glimpse

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Last week I came across a really interesting OSS project called net-glimpse which allows you to easily visualize your network traffic in real-time and making that available using any standard web browser. I thought it would be neat to see what this might look like running on the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). I got it up in running in just a couple of minutes and even shared the results on Twitter as you can see from the tweet below:


I had couple of folks ask about the setup and I figure I would post a quick write up. While looking at the project, I found that net-glimpse includes quite a bit of customizations in the colors, data collection and how data is displayed. Specifically, rather than relying on the well-known ports that have already been pre-defined, you can also add additional custom ports and specify the label that it should automatically used. This gave me an idea, instead of a generic visualization of the VCSA, we could get specific service information and have those label automatically get displayed.

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VMware 2017 Cycling Kit

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I know many of you have reached out over the years and have expressed interest in the VMware Cycling Kits which I have written about here & here. In fact, I still get pinged about this topic every couple of months even though the last time we had ran an order was back in 2014! Obviously, the demand is still high and who can blame you, the kits look freaking amazing 🙂

Earlier this week, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that we were working on a new 2017 VMware Cycling Kit! Kasey Linden, who works in our Federal team was leading this effort and was gauging interests internally. I was definitely interested and I had also suggested that we open this up to the general public as historically it was kept internal for logistical purposes. Not only did Kasey love the idea, but he plans to have the cycling kits available directly on the VMware Merchandise Store for anyone to purchase, which is huge if you ask me!

As of right now, the designs are currently being worked on with the vendor and once that has been approved, it will go live on the VMware Store. We are hoping this should happen around mid to late September.

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