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How To Pronounce Some Of VMware's Acronyms

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VMware's announcement last week on the new vCloud Hybrid Services offering generated quite a bit of buzz and excitement. One thing that I had noticed on Twitter during the announcement as well as the days following was discussions around the pronunciation of the vCloud Hybrid Services acronym (vCHS). There were couple of "ways" that folks have heard it pronounced and I thought I write this fun little post and share what the "official" ways of pronouncing some of these acronyms are (at least from my understanding working at VMware)

Disclaimer: I have no comments on us putting little v's on everything 😉

Below are the top VMware products/features that I have heard multiple acronyms for and the controversial on how to properly pronounce each of them. I have also provided a link to Google translate which provides a nice text-to-speech (lower right bottom) so you can listen to each of the official pronunciation. If there are other pronunciations that you have heard or any corrections, feel free to leave a comment.

Product Official Other
vSphere OpenStack Virtual Appliance (VOVA) vo-va (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/vo-va) N/A
VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) v-san (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-san) N/A
vSphere Flash Read Cache (vFRC) v-f-r-c (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-f-r-c) N/A
vCloud Air (vCA) v-c-a (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-c-a) N/A
vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) v-chess (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-chess) v-cheese v-c-h-s
vRealize Air Compliance (vRAC) N/A N/A
vRealize Operations Insight (vRI) N/A N/A
vRealize Operations (vROPs) vee-rops (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/vee-rops) N/A
vCenter Operations Manager (vC Ops) v-c-ops (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-c-ops) v-cops
vRealize Automation (vR / vRAuto) v-ra (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-ra) vr-auto (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/vr-auto) N/A
vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) v-cake (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-cake) v-c-a-c v-cac
vRealize Business (vRBus) N/A N/A
vRealize Log Insight (vRLI) N/A N/A
vCenter Log Insight (vC Log) v-c-log (http://translate.google.com/#en/es/v-c-log) Log Insight
vRealize Code Stream (vRCS) N/A N/A
vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) N/A N/A
vRealize Hyperic (vRH) N/A N/A
vRealize Application Services (vRAS) N/A N/A

VMware Tools For Apple Mac OS X Guests?

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With the release of vSphere 5, virtualizing Apple Mac OS X as a guest OS was possible and fully supported from VMware. To do so, you would need to be run ESXi on Apple hardware either the now deprecated Apple XServe 3.1 or an Apple Mac Pro. A comment that came up yesterday on Twitter was that VMware Tools did not exists for Mac OS X guests and this would make it difficult to manage Mac OS X guests on vSphere. I guess it may not be that well known or just an assumption, but VMware Tools does in fact exists for Mac OS X guests and it is also documented in the VMware Tools installation guide.

It is still amazing to me to see the number of guest OSes the vSphere platform supports and perhaps virtualizing Mac OS X is still relatively new for folks and hence the initial assumption about VMware Tools not being available. In any case, I thought I take you through a few screenshots of installing VMware Tools for a Mac OS X 10.7 guests running on my Apple Mac Mini.

In the screenshot below, we can see that VMware Tools is not detected in the guest OS and we have a option to install VMware Tools, so we go ahead and click on that.

This will mount the darwin.iso to the VM from the vmimages directory of the ESXi host and you can proceed with the VMware Tools installation.

Upon finishing the installation, you will be asked to reboot the guest OS and now when we take a look at the VM summary view, we can see VMware Tools is now running in our Mac OS X guests.

Note: For instructions on installing Apple Mac OS X as a guest OS on vSphere, please refer to this tech note.

Patching VMware Virtual Appliances Using vamicli

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Last week I wrote an article about creating offline update repository for VMware virtual appliances and demonstrating the use of the VAMI web interface for updating and upgrading a VMware virtual appliance. However, from an automation perspective, the web interface is probably not the right tool for the job and this where the vamcli can help.

Usage: vamicli [options]
may be:
network          Network Configuration
update           Update Management
version          Version Information
service          Service Management

Use vamicli to see a list of options.

The vamicli is a command-line tool that is available on all virtual appliances built using VMware Studio and it provides a subset of the functionality of the VAMI web interface. Using the "update" operation, you can check for available updates as well as performing the installation of an update.

To check for the latest update just like you would using the VAMI web interface, you would run the following command:

vamicli update --check

To install the latest update, you would run the following command:

vamicli update --install latest --accepteula

Here is a screenshot example of going through both of these commands on a VIN 1.2 virtual appliance and then upgrading to VIN 2.0:

As you can see the process is pretty straight forward and this allows you to easily automate the updates of your virtual appliances without having to resort to the VAMI web interface.

For those of you who read my previous article and wish to configure a custom update repository without using the VAMI web interface, you can add the following configuration to /opt/vmware/var/lib/vami/update/provider/provider-runtime.xml where value specifies the HTTP address to your update repository as you would configure using the VAMI web interface.

If you would like to configure additional authentication properties such as username and password, then the /opt/vmware/var/lib/vami/update/provider/provider-runtime.xml should look like the following: The password value is encoded using base64, so to generate the encoding you can use the following python snippet (where password is the password you wish to encode:

python -c "import base64; print base64.b64encode('password')"

Note: The configuration changes above go into effect immediately and you can then use vamicli to perform both check and install operations.