At VMware, our engineers work on lots of pet projects in their spare time, and are always looking to get feedback on their projects, recently we started a new area of the VMware Labs site to allow them to share these with you. We call 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 in the flings area 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!
InventorySnapshot
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Balaji ParimiWorks in the Ecosystem Engineering group. |
Ravi SoundararajanWorks in the Performance group |
A recent fling which has just been released by the above two engineers is called InventorySnapshot, this fling allows a user to "snapshot" a given vCenter inventory configuration and then reproduce it. The "inventory" includes the Datacenter folders, datacenters, clusters, resource pools, vApps, hierarchy, roles and permissions, configuration settings, and custom fields. In other words, if you have an inventory with a given set of hosts and VMs organized into a group of clusters, we can faithfully reproduce this environment, including the cluster settings and custom roles you may have defined.
As a simple example, suppose you have an inventory with one datacenter (DC A), one cluster (Cluster A), and two hosts (Host A and Host B). At a high level, the fling emits a PowerCLI script that, when executed, does the following:
- Creates Datacenter “DC A.”
- Creates cluster “Cluster A.”
- Adds host “Host A” to “Cluster A.”
- Adds host “Host B” to “Cluster A.”
Notice that this can be helpful for a variety of reasons. For example, suppose you’ve spent a lot of time creating a development vCenter environment, and now you wish to deploy it in production. Using this fling, you can snapshot your “dev” environment and then run it against the “production” vCenter server, saving you the task of laboriously adding each host, creating the proper clusters and resource pools, etc.
Watch the following video to learn more about the power of this fling or head over to the InventorySnapshot page for more information.
