vSphere for Mobile

Earlier this month VMWare releases a fling called vSphere Mobile Client. If you are unfamiliar with VMWare Flings, let me get you up to speed.

A fling is an application or add-on that is created by VMWare Engineers that often solve a specific problem with the VMWare stack. Most flings will end up being converted to product feature sets. The HTML5 client is a great example of that! Some of the more popular Flings allow the following:

• Cross vCenter vMotion (Link)
• Horizon Toolbox (Link)
• Native USB Network Card Driver (Link)

Lets get back to vSphere Mobile. vSphere Mobile is exactly what it sounds like. Its vSphere for Mobile Devices! This app, available on both the App Store and the Play Store, allows you to monitor and complete simple tasks from your mobile device.  You will have to join Test Flight or the Alpha Group to download it.

When opening the application you are prompted for you FQDN, Username and Password. The screen looks something like this.

After login you will be able to see some preliminary stats about your virtual machines like used Memory, CPU and Disk compared to allocated.

As you can see, almost all my servers have the storage bar completely full and red. This is because al those VMs (with exception to VOICE4) are thick provisioned. Swiping to the left on a VM gives you power options as well as a button to look at performance.

If you click the Performance Button, there is the option to look at CPU, Memory, Disk and Network usage/latency in great detail. There is even support for real time polling!

You must be thinking that for an Alpha application this app has a lot of great features for monitoring your VMWare environment from your mobile phone but where are the notifications? Don’t worry the engineers have you covered and have provided a Spring Boot Application that you can run within Docker. I presume this was to keep the application size down or streamline the build process.

I highly recommend checking vSphere Mobile. I would love to have an official application tell me when my exchange server needs consolidation or VM Tools updated.  The official fling is located here.