The future looks bright for VMware Flings

For the last few years, VMware engineers have been turning out a number of free experimental tools that operate within the company’s server virtualization platform. Dubbed Flings, these VMware Lab creations are defined by VMware as “a brief casual relationship” intended to be “a short-term thing.” While these interesting freebie tools are not part of any official product offering, they have been well received within VMware’s community of virtualization users.

There is one important aspect to these Flings — useful though they may be — that needs to be mentioned over and over again: VMware clearly states that these tools are intended to be played with and explored, but they do not come with VMware support and therefore shouldn’t be used in production environments.

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That said, you might be asking yourself whether VMware really intends to stand behind these tools once the goodwill gesture runs out.

While we can’t predict the future with any certainty, we do know Flings have been going strong for more than three years and VMware has amassed a list of 46 different Flings currently available online for download. I would argue that these tools have been proven useful by the community, and they’re probably here to stay.

Not only are VMware engineers still coming out with new and interesting takes on Flings, but VMware is still putting its full faith and effort behind them as well.

Recently, one Fling graduated from short-term status to a longer-term and fully supported product component. In February 2011, scientists at VMware thought it would be fun and useful to allow VMware administrators to gain visibility and management capabilities within a Microsoft Hyper-V environment from within their VMware vSphere Client. To make that possible, they created the vCenter XVP Manager and Converter Fling.

Fast- forward nearly two years later and that Fling has become the first fully supported product, called VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager (MHM). Much like XVP Manager, MHM has introduced many of the same key capabilities provided by the Fling:

• Third-party host management support including add, remove, connect, disconnect and view the host configuration
• The ability to edit virtual machine settings
• Automatic discovery of pre-existing third-party virtual machines
• The ability to perform power operations with both hosts and virtual machines
• The ability to connect and disconnect DVD, CD-ROM, and floppy drives and images to install operating systems

Along with full support from VMware, MHM also adds a few new features where XVM Manager left off:

• The ability to create and provision virtual machines on third-party hosts
• Providing an integrated vCenter Server authorization mechanism across ESX and third-party host inventories for privileges, roles, and users
• Improved security and HTTPS secured communication between third-party hypervisors

As further proof of VMware’s commitment to Flings, the company recently finalized its first ever Open Innovation Fling Contest, which invited the virtualization community to submit their best and most innovative Fling ideas. Community members submitted more than 120 ideas, with the contest winner receiving a free pass to VMworld 2013 and the winning idea — something called “Proactive DRS/DPM w/ vCenter Operations” — being sent to the VMware Labs to be worked on by VMware engineers.

The winning idea shows just how valuable one of these Flings can become to a virtualized environment. The winning submission was defined as follows:

Some sort of appliance/script that can hook into both the vCenter Operations APIs as well as the vSphere APIs and merge these two technologies together. By interpreting vCenter Operations predictions for what is going to happen within your environment and then leveraging vMotion/DRS/DPM to prepare for this before it happens we could be left with a more proactive approach. (I.E. Historically VM1 will utilize 100% CPU at 4am in the morning, let’s be sure these resources are available on the host at 3:45 by migrating other VMs off, rather than waiting for DRS to kick in at 4:05 – At 6am everyday my workload normally increases to the point where DPM kicks in and turns on some hosts, let’s turn these on based on the vCenter Operations stats rather than having to manually configure a setting to do so).

VMware interprets this as “the software-defined data center that learns usage patterns, anticipates demand and acts in advance.” Calling this a hard nut to crack — rightly so — VMware engineers are prepared to give this new Fling a shot, but make no promises as to the final result.

In the end, Flings remain a community fan favorite. They remain extremely useful and, perhaps best of all, they remain free. And judging by its latest track record, it certainly looks like VMware will keep them around for the foreseeable future.

What’s the next Fling to make it into production? If VMware engineers are able to pull it off, I’d bet that contest-winning idea will be at the top of the list.

This article, “The future looks bright for VMware Flings,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.