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Can you spare a few minutes for some feedback on VMware Documentation?

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I am always looking for ways in which we can improve our products and documentation should be no different. In fact, documentation should be treated just as important as the product feature itself. I am very interested in your thoughts and comments and this will also help with a project I am doing internally at an upcoming R&D offsite.

With that, I had recently published a very short 8-question survey on Social media asking for feedback regarding VMware Documentation which you can access in the URL below:

https://goo.gl/forms/cLaUhTMRAeZGpLxz1

If you have any feedback, good or bad, please take a few minutes to fill it out. We can only improve or continue to do what we are doing if we get feedback from our customers.

Several of you mentioned you were interested in the results and to be transparent, I am sharing the current results that are non-free form text (that gets a bit tricky for obvious reasons). As of writing this article, there have been a total of 118 responses submitted and the preliminary results can be seen below. Does this match up to your experiences of using VMware documentation? If not, please consider providing your feedback. Also, feel free to forward this survey to others as well and thank you for your time and support.

1. Where do you normally go to find information about VMware products (e.g. how to, configuration, etc)? [multiple choice selection]


2. Are you normally able to find what you are looking for when using VMware documentation?


3. Please rate VMware documentation on the level of technical details provided [1 - Not Enough, 5 - Exactly Right]


7. Do you find it easy to provide feedback on VMware documentation?


8. If VMware documentation was collaborative, would you consider contributing content back (e.g. enhancements, typos, etc)?

Project USB to SDDC - Part 1

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A couple of weeks back, Alan Renouf and I co-presented at the Sydney and Melbourne VMUG UserCon, here are some great write-ups about the events here and here. We were very honored to have been invited out and to also deliever the closing keynote. Having traveled halfway around the world, we thought it was only fitting to share something really special.

For the last couple of months, we had been working on a small pet project that I personally had been referring to as the "vGhetto SDDC". This was not something we had not shared with anyone before and thought the VMUG UserCon was the perfect venue to demo our new project. For the session, we decided to rename the project/session to USB to SDDC (better ring than the previous title) which might give you a hint on what the project might be about.

The inception for this project really stemmed from the work we did at last years VMworld Hackathon which was another idea that both Alan and I had came up and worked with the VMware Code team to deliver at both VMworld US and Europe. Like all great Automation stories, the motivation for this project was born out of pure laziness. With the huge success of the Hackathon at VMworld US, there was a huge demand for us to also deliver it again at VMworld Europe.

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How to determine when a Virtual Machine is ready for additional operations?

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This might sound like a pretty simple and basic question, right? However, the answer will actually depend on what you are trying to do. The motivation for this blog post actually stemmed from a conversation I had with one of our Engineers who works over in our core Platform Management Infrastructure which includes VMware Tools, Guest OS Customization, Guest Operations, etc. Although I was aware of some of these methods in determining when a VM was ready, I came to learn about a few new other methods that I was not aware of before. This is really one of the things I love about my job, constantly learning new things and diving deeper into our technologies and sharing that back with our customers to help enable them and their business.

So, what does it even mean for a Virtual Machine to be "ready"? Is it when the VM is powered on? Is it when the VM obtains an IP Address? Is it when the GuestOS is fully customized or is it when I can SSH or RDP to the system? Depending on what you are trying to accomplish, the answer will vary. In addition to that, there are two distinct VM states to consider. The first being the actual Virtual Machine state and the second being the GuestOS state.

Virtual Machine State

The VM state is pretty straight forward, it describes the "Hard" power state of the VM which can either be powered on, powered off or suspended. As you can probably guess, you will need to make sure the VM is powered on before you attempt to check whether the GuestOS is ready 🙂

Using the vSphere API, you can find the VM powerState under:

VirtualMachine->Runtime->powerState

Here is a PowerCLI snippet using the out of box cmdlet to get the power state for a VM named "air":

Get-VM -Name air | Select PowerState

Here is a PowerCLI snippet that uses the vSphere API via Get-View to retrieve the exact same information:

$vm = Get-View -ViewType Virtualmachine -Property Name,Runtime -Filter @{"name"="air"}
$vm.Runtime.PowerState

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