If you need to check VMware product interoperability on <interopmatrix.vmware.com> often and have difficulty selecting individual products each time, Solution Designer may be able to help reduce the labor of manual selections. 

The Solution Designer provides a way to check the interoperability of multiple VMware products with a graph format while also providing direct links to the official VMware interoperability site (interopmatrix.vmware.com). If you need to find the interoperability of the same product list multiple times, please check this out. You will still need to add the product list from Solution Designer once, but won’t need to do it again. 

Here are the details.

Solution Designer access: vsd.esp.vmware.com
Solution Designer Fling: https://flings.vmware.com/solution-designer

• Login and select ‘Interoperability’ in the menu header. 
• Select a base product version or ‘No Solution’ if you want to select VMware product from scratch. Then, move to the next step by clicking ‘ADD VMWARE PRODUCTS’.
  
• Select a product and release from the “VMware Product” panel and add it to the list by clicking the ‘ADD’ button.
  
  
• Verify the interoperability of selected product releases by clicking the ‘VERIFY INTEROPERABILITY’ button.  It will show the interoperability of the selected product releases in a graph format.  
• The table below the graph includes links to <interopmatrix.vmware.com>.
  
   
• You can also access the <interopmatrix.vmware.com> link by selecting one of the products in the interoperability graph and clicking the link button in the right panel.  When clicking on the link button, it will open the <interopmatrix.vmware.com>  and autofill the selected product in the “Compare” selection and add the rest of the products in the “With” selection. 
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• If you want to save your product list, simply click on the “CREATE SOLUTION” button to create a custom solution that contains the your selected product list. 
  
• In the future, if you need to check the same product interoperability, you can start from ‘My Solutions’ and the product list will be selected automatically.
   

The demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3HPD77pKcI

 

 

 

A new VMware fling, Solution Designer, has been released this week.  It’s a SaaS version of ESXi compatibility checker and much more.   Building a custom VMware solution involves many challenging tasks. One of the most difficult is continuous manual verifications: checking the interoperability of multiple VMware products and performing compatible hardware validations.  

The Solution Designer fling tries to resolve these issues by 

• collecting scattered resources
• automating repetitive manual validations
• manage comprehensive custom solution data in the cloud

The fling is accessible from https://flings.vmware.com/solution-designer 

Please let me know if you have any questions!

ESXi Compatibility Checker 

The ESXi Compatibility Checker is a fling released in 2018 available from https://flings.vmware.com/esxi-compatibility-checker.  

The tool is a Python script that can validate VMware hardware compatibility and upgrade issues of ESXi. This tool is my first fling release, and it was a good experience for me to interact with users directly.

I don’t think this tool is still popular as it has been a while, and some features are integrated into the recent vSphere releases. But for anybody who wants to use the ESXi compatibility checker, here is some information:

• Download the tool from https://flings.vmware.com/esxi-compatibility-checker
• Python 3.6 or above is required, refer to the install on Windows from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ataRS4I4dvs 
• Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJUC3HwVVpE 

Feel free to add a comment if you have any questions!

VMware has been releasing some useful tools from https://flings.vmware.com/.

The flings are applications and tools built by VMware engineers created to address a specific issue or provide a feature that is not available in VMware products. The flings 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. However, the fling owners take questions and feedback from the fling website and respond to raised issues.  

They are free to download, so play around with them!