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Instant Clone Microsoft Windows & VM Keystroke VMworld demo and code posted

01.08.2019 by William Lam // 2 Comments

Apologies for the delay in getting my VMworld 2018 demo and code posted online, I know a number of you have been asking about the Windows Instant Clone samples to get an idea on how to create your own customization scripts for managing more "recent" Microsoft Windows releases 😉 and perhaps you might even consider submitting a pull request to share with the community. I have posted both the videos and code samples below. Enjoy and happy Automating!

Instant Clone Microsoft Windows

To demonstrate the power of the newly re-architected Instant Clone feature in vSphere 6.7 and to help make the point clear that the Instant Clone feature is really Guest Operating System agnostic, meaning you can Instant Clone any to Virtual Machine that can run VMware Tools, I thought it would be fun to see how old of a Microsoft OS that I could Instant Clone. After a bit of trial/error, that turned out to be Windows 98 and Windows 2000 🙂

Windows 98 Demo


Windows 2000 Demo


[Read more...]

Categories // PowerCLI, vSphere Tags // instant clone, keystroke, PowerCLI, vmworld, vSphere API

Direct playback & download URLs for all VMworld 2018 Europe Sessions

11.09.2018 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

It has been less than 24 hours since VMworld Europe 2018 has concluded and the awesome VMworld team has already published most of the VMworld 2018 Europe session recordings! Similar to past years, I have put together a nice summary page that contains all the session recordings links separated out by the different  categories which you can find by visiting http://vmwa.re/vmworld2018.

As of writing this, there are a total of 389 sessions with369 published with recordings. I have also posted some initial viewing statistics on the top 20 VMworld Europe sessions, huge congrats to the Chris and Daniel's ESXi on ARM session, I think it is going to be hard to beat this session (which I still need to watch myself :)). I will check back in a week or so in case more videos and/or PPT decks are posted. Please enjoy, especially for those that were not able to attend VMworld this year.

Note: For those wanting to directly download the actual video files from github repo (browser or through automation), you will get an access denied. It turns out the client performing the download must include a referer within the request (which is automatically done for you when you click open the link in my github but not the case using wget/cURL or other tools. Below are a few examples on how to include the referer for automated downloads which has changed from VMworld US.

Here is wget example:

wget --referer https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/26950 https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/vmworld-europe-2018/CTO3509BE.mp4

Here is cURL example:

curl --referer https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/26950 https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/vmworld-europe-2018/CTO3509BE.mp4 -O CTO3509BE.mp4

Here is PowerCLI example:

$headers = @{"referer" = "https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/26950"}
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/vmworld-europe-2018/CTO3509BE.mp4 -Headers $headers -Outfile CTO3509BE.mp4

In addition, I have also published eu.txt file which contains the name of the session + download URL which can then be used by this quick PowerShell script called downloadSessions.ps1 to automatically download. You can edit the us.txt file to only include sessions you want downloaded (make sure its copied from the original file) since it contains "#" symbol as a delimiter for the title and the download URL.

Categories // Explore Tags // vmworld

Direct playback & download URLs for all VMworld 2018 US Sessions

08.31.2018 by William Lam // 14 Comments

It has been less than 24 hours since VMworld 2018 has concluded and the awesome VMworld team has already published most, if not all VMworld 2018 US session recordings! Similar to past years, I have put together a nice summary page that contains all the session recordings links separated out by the different  categories which you can find by visiting http://vmwa.re/vmworld2018.

As of writing this, there are a total of 585 sessions with 570 published with recordings. I will check back in a week or so in case more videos and/or PPT decks are posted. Please enjoy, especially for those that were not able to attend VMworld this year.

UPDATE 1 (09/01/18) - It looks after publishing the streaming URLs, folks found that it included a direct download link to the .MP4 file. Thanks to Jorge de la Cruz from the community who was able to extract this from my original github repo. I have gone ahead and also updated my repo to include both the streaming and download URL for folks who just want to download individual sessions. There are a number of ways to "Automate" the download including using wget or Invoke-Webrequest.

UPDATE 2 (09/03/18) - If you try to download the files without going through my github repo (browser or through automation), you may noticed you get a 404 error message. It turns out the client performing the download must include a referer within the request (which is automatically done for you when you click open the link in my github but not the case using wget/cURL or other tools. Below are a few examples on how to include the referer for automated downloads.

Here is wget example:

wget --referer http://www.vmware.com https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vmworld-usa-2018/VIN2527BU.mp4

Here is cURL example:

curl --referer http://www.vmware.com https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vmworld-usa-2018/VIN2527BU.mp4 -O VIN2527BU.mp4

Here is PowerCLI example:

$headers = @{"referer" = "http://www.vmware.com"}
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vmworld-usa-2018/VIN2527BU.mp4 -Headers $headers -Outfile VIN2527BU.mp4

In addition, I have also published us.txt file which contains the name of the session + download URL which can then be used by this quick PowerShell script called downloadSessions.ps1 to automatically download. You can edit the us.txt file to only include sessions you want downloaded (make sure its copied from the original file) since it contains "#" symbol as a delimiter for the title and the download URL.

Categories // Explore Tags // vmworld

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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