Today during the weekly VMware Communities Roundtable, a weekly online forum for VMware experts where we get together and talk about virtualization topics, the VMware flings were mentioned and how they are not as well known or advertised as they should be. I am going to attempt to rectify this mistake and share this with the community.
VMware flings are tools created by VMware labs. These engineers work on these flings Why flings? A fling is a short-term thing, not a serious relationship but a fun one. Likewise, the tools that are offered here are intended to be played with and explored. None of them are guaranteed to become part of any future product offering and there is no support for them. They are, however, totally free for you to download and play around with them!
Today during the roundtable we talked about the the VDSPowerCLI fling, I recently blogged about PowerCLI here and this new fling has cmdlets to manage your VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch. This is a great addition that the community has been asking for. For more information about this particular fling, check out Alan Renouf’s blog.
I have had some experience with several of these flings, here are a few of my favorite flings.
- PXE Manager for vCenter
- Thinapped vSphere Client (I keep this on a USB drive)
- vCMA Appliance (appliance required to manage your environment with Smartphones/Ipads)
- Inventory Snapshot (backup your vCenter config and inventory, I have migrated vCenter instances with this tool)
There are many great flings so keep an eye out. I will post some here as new ones come out that catch my eye. Some of these products get integrated in new versions, some never go any further.
Links
VMware Flings
