VMware has quietly released a mobile app to manage its core vSphere product.
The app runs on Android only and is a “Fling” – VMware’s notation for code it developed in its labs and thinks is ready for real-world use, but doesn’t sell or officially support.
This one gets an extra warning - as described here it is merely “a technical preview release and as such it only has a limited subset of the intended functionality.”
mobile vSphere app. Click for larger view
But the post announcing the app also mentions “releasing updates with new features regularly”, so this looks like something VMware will flesh out in the future.
For now, the tool has the following functionality:
- VM overview that allows status review of VMs, for things such as whether it is powered on or off, resource usage and configuration information;
- VM management that allows turning VMs on or off, or restarting them;
- Search to find VMs to work on;
- Task monitoring that lets admins subscribe to a running task and receive a notifications on completion;
- Performance monitoring, with shiny graphs, to present info on measures like usage of CPU, memory, storage and network performance, in real-time or historically.
This tool will probably be welcomed by many VMware partners, especially MSPs who dedicate staff to work on-call.
Their enthusiasm will be tempered by the fact that this is just a Fling and has no roadmap for the arrival of a full-featured client.
But VMware has taken stuff from Fling to product in the past: the current vSphere Web Client started as a Fling, as did the vCenter Server for Windows to vCenter Server Appliance migration tool that became necessary once the company made vCenter a standalone appliance instead of a Windows application.
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