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Charlotte VMUG vOpenData Presentation Posted + New Stats

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Last week I had the privilege to attend the Carolina Users Summit and from what I hear, it is one of the larger VMUGs in the US. I was asked to give a presentation on a recent community project that I collaborated with Ben Thomas on called vOpenData. The presentation goes into some background on the how the project got started, a deeper look at how it works and a live demo including some interesting stats that have not been shared before (CLTVMUG exclusive!).

I would like to thank everyone who attended the session and the great questions that were brought up. For those of you who missed it or could not attend, I have posted the presentation online and you can download it here. I hope everyone enjoyed it and hopefully you will contribute your data as well as help spread the word about vOpenData! Both Ben and I have been quite swamped with work and changes lately, so hopefully we will have some a nice update for everyone real soon!

Even if you know what vOpenData is, I think it is still worthwhile to check out the presentation as it contains a bunch more stats that have never been shared before. Here is a sneak peak of two that I am sure both Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman would be quite proud of:

Clusters w/vSphere HA Configured:

Clusters w/vSphere DRS Configured:

Lastly, I would like to give a big thanks Charlie Gautreaux for inviting me out to the Charlotte VMUG! I had a great time and met a lot of really cool people!

Which Vendor Has A vSphere Web Client Plugin?

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It's no secret that going forward, VMware's new vSphere Web Client will be the primary graphical interface for interacting with vSphere and other solutions within the vCloud Suite. This is regardless of whether the interface is using FLEX, HTML5 or some other framework, that is not the the topic of discussion, so please do not ask 🙂

VMware has also made this very clear in the recent vSphere 5.1 release notes:

In vSphere 5.1, all new vSphere features are available only through the vSphere Web Client. The traditional vSphere Client will continue to operate, supporting the same feature set as vSphere 5.0, but not exposing any of the new features in vSphere 5.1.

vSphere 5.1 and its subsequent update and patch releases are the last releases to include the traditional vSphere Client. Future major releases of VMware vSphere will include only the vSphere Web Client.

The vSphere Web Client was first introduced with the release of vSphere 5.0 with limited virtual machine and host capabilities. In vSphere 5.1, it was completely revamped to bring the large majority of functionality that we have all been used to in the vSphere C# Client and VMware will continue to close this gap and bring other improvements with future releases of vSphere.

As with any major change, this will not happen overnight and will take time for VMware, customers and partners to transition over. Just take a look at the transition from classic ESX to ESXi, it took several years for that to really sink in through the various updates and it is no longer a question or concern anymore.

A common request that I have heard from customers regarding the new vSphere Web Client is the availability of 3rd party vendor plugins. I have found it quite difficult to find all the plugins that are available and I bet customers would love to see a consolidated list in one place that they can search through. Well, I decided to do some research as well as leverage my Twitter followers to help me build out the complete list of vSphere Web Client plugins. I have broken the list by VMware, Partners, Scripted (legacy) and Unreleased vSphere Web Client plugins. I have also tried to include links to each of the 3rd party plugins so you can easily get more information about each of them.

If you are a customer and you do not see a specific vendor plugin, I highly recommend you reach out to your vendor and provide them feedback, this includes VMware. The more feedback our partners receive, the better chance you will get a vSphere Web Client plugin or any other feature for that matter!

If there are other vSphere Web Client plugins that you know of, please leave a comment or reply back on twitter with #webclientplugin and I will update the blog post.

VMware vSphere Web Client Plugins

3rd Party Vendor vSphere Web Client Plugins

Scripted vSphere Web Client Plugins (not "native" plugins but legacy C# Scripted method)

Unreleased vSphere Web Client Plugins

Community vSphere Web Client Plugins

If you are interested in learning more about the new vSphere Web Client including videos and demos or looking to develop your own vSphere Web Client, please take a look at the additional resources below.

New Adventures

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Today, I will be embarking on a new adventure as I join the VMware R&D Organization as part of the Integration Engineering team. In this new role, I will be working alongside my team to help provide feedback directly to VMware engineering on how we can better integrate and simplify our products both from an operational and architectural standpoint. Needless to say, Automation will play a key role to help ensure that we have the proper interfaces (API/SDK/CLI) to interact with all of VMware’s products and help enable VMware’s vision of the Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC). In addition, I will also have the opportunity to research and explore new and interesting ways of leveraging VMware products which is something I am very much excited about!

I have been very fortunate to have been part of the Cloud Infrastructure Technical Marketing team here at VMware and had the opportunity to work with some of the most talented folks in the industry. I want to thank all of my Technical Marketing colleagues for all the innovative and fun projects we have collaborated on.

I am very excited for the new opportunity within Integration Engineering and I am looking forward to getting started!