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Direct playback & download URLs for all VMworld US 2016 sessions

09.08.2016 by William Lam // 17 Comments

Thanks to Duncan Epping who shared the awesome news the other day in which ALL VMworld US 2016 sessions are now freely available to the general public regardless if you attended VMworld or not! This is definitely fantastic news and kudos not only to the VMworld team for doing this but also having it done right after a US holiday. To access the playback videos, you simply just need to register at http://www.vmworld.com/en/sessions/2016.html. Once you have done that, you will be taken to the page shown below with all the VMworld sessions since 2010.

UPDATE: With a bit more hacking around, I have now also created a second list of all the VMworld sessions with their respective download URLs. Please have a look at the Github repo for more info https://github.com/lamw/vmworld2016-session-urls

Although the site allows you to search and filter the content, I personally prefer just a simple list of the titles and direct playback URLs. In the past, I have scraped the VMworld site to build such a list and figure I do the same this year. Luckily, this year it was not as difficult as it was in the past as it looks like some of the data is JSON encoded which makes it trivial to parse into the format I want.

With that, I have published all 539 sessions with direct links to the playback URLs on the following Github project: https://github.com/lamw/vmworld2016-session-urls which you can easily bookmark and hopefully allow Google to also index for searchability in the future. Enjoy!

VMware PowerCLI for Mac OS X, Linux & More? Yes, please!

09.06.2016 by William Lam // 10 Comments

There were a several announcements at last weeks VMworld US Conference, but one of the most exciting piece of news in my opinion was from Alan Renouf, Product Manager for all things API/SDK/CLI at VMware. During Alan's What's New PowerCLI session, he announced that PowerCLI is finally coming to both Mac OS X as well as Linux! As you can imagine, the news was very well received from customers and partners. In fact, after I had tweeted the update here & here, I literally had folks pinging/IM'ing/DM'ing me non-stop about when they could get access 🙂

UPDATE (10/18/16) - PowerCLI Multi-Platform (MP) for Linux and Mac OS X has now been released as a VMware Fling. Please find the download here and provide any feedback in the comments section.

This exciting update was only possible with the help of our friends over at Microsoft who had recently open sourced both .NET Core & PowerShell. Once that news broke, Alan and the PowerCLI Engineering team have been working hard on porting over the existing PowerCLI code which uses the Windows .NET library over to the new .NET Core which is now open sourced. I have been very impressed at how fast the PowerCLI team have already made available many of the default cmdlets as well as the Get View cmdlet which exposes the entire functionality of the vSphere API.

Now, before you get too excited, this new version of PowerCLI is currently not available yet. As Alan mentioned in his session, we plan to release an early Tech Preview of PowerCLI for both Mac OS X and Linux as a VMware Fling shortly after VMworld. It is also very important to note that Microsoft PowerShell for Mac OS X & Linux which PowerCLI uses is just at an Alpha release milestone. There is still much work to do on both sides but I am really looking forward to enabling our customers with the choice of platform when it comes to consuming PowerCLI.

A few of us have been quite fortunate to have been involved in the early development of this new version of PowerCLI. In fact, we even built a simple Docker Container for PowerCLI which will allow you to easily access PowerCLI from any system that can run Docker. Here is a quick screenshot of spinning up a PowerCLI Docker Container which will also be part of the Fling release.

Lastly, we want customers to be able to quickly and securely set up a persistent PowerCLI environment in which they can use to manage and configure their VMware-based products that support PowerCLI. With that, we have also built a PowerShell package for Photon OS which is VMware's minimal Linux container host distribution. Not only is it free to download and use, but it literally takes a few seconds to install (tdnf -y install powershell) and even less time to boot up and import the PowerCLI module. This was literally done the week before VMworld by the Photon team and huge kudos for their support! As you can see, not only do we want to provide choice for our customers but also simplifying how you might consume PowerCLI whether its natively on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Docker Container or running on top of VMware Photon OS. I hope you are excited as I am and stay tuned for more details on the Fling release!

If you have any feedback or what you are most excited regarding this news, please leave a comment and I will make sure it makes it way back to our Product Manager.

Quick Tip - How to retrieve the ESXi Update Level using the vSphere API?

08.17.2016 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

Using the vSphere API, it is very easy to extract the version and build of all your ESXi hosts. This information is exposed in the Product property of an ESXi host. For example, Product.Version will return something like 6.0.0 and Product.Build will return something like 3029758. However, one thing that is not available in this property is the Update Level information for an ESXi host such as Update 1 or Update 2.

Historically, customers would have to rely on ESXCLI to pull the Update level information using the following command: esxcli system version get and though this can be run remotely or integrated into PowerCLI as shown in the example below, it would be ideal if this information was just available using the vSphere API.

	$esxcli = Get-EsxCli

	### To retrieve Major/Update version number of ESXi via ESXCLI

	PS C:\Users\lamw\Desktop> $esxcli.system.version.get().version + " Update" + $esxcli.system.version.get().update
	6.0.0 Update1

	### To retrieve all version information from ESXi via ESXCLI

	PS C:\Users\lamw\Desktop> $esxcli.system.version.get()

	Build : Releasebuild-3029758
	Patch : 17
	Product : VMware ESXi
	Update : 1
	Version : 6.0.0

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This exact same question was brought up internally again today and Etienne Le Sueur actually shared an awesome tidbit on how to retrieve this information using the vSphere API. You can find the ESXi Update Level information in an ESXi Advanced Setting called Misc.HostAgentUpdateLevel

Below is a quick PowerCLI example which exercises this vSphere API to retrieve the Version, Build and Update Level information:

$vmhost = Get-VMHost -Name nuc.primp-industries.com

$esxi_version = $vmhost.ExtensionData.Config.Product.Version
$esxi_build = $vmhost.ExtensionData.Config.Product.Build
$esxi_update_level = (Get-AdvancedSetting -Entity $vmhost -Name Misc.HostAgentUpdateLevel).value

Write-Host "$vmhost" 
Write-Host "`tVersion: $esxi_version"
Write-Host "`tUpdate: $esxi_update_level"
Write-Host "`tBuild: $esxi_build"

Here is a screenshot of the output for my ESXi host which is running latest vSphere 6.0 Update 2 (including the recent patch release).

Its great to hear that the ESXi Update Level information is available through the vSphere API, although I would have liked to have seen it exposed within the Product property. Perhaps its time to file an internal Feature Request? 🙂