VMware Flings have been around us for a long time and have always been a space to check for interesting tools, especially when they focus on making daily operations easier like the Cross vCenter Migration tool.
In this post I share a selected list of Flings I believe are good to try.
What is a VMware fling?
A VMware fling is an unsupported tool created by a VMware engineer created to address a specific issue or provide feature that is not available in a VMware product.
These projects are made available for free on the VMware Flings website, where users can provide feedback and suggestions.
In some occasions these tools come from VMware research projects and could be productised.


Many Flings were productised overtime after positive feedback from the community. A good example is Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility, allowing users to easily migrate virtual machines in bulk from a graphical user interface between vCenter servers using the Cross-vCenter vMotion feature.
VMware Flings selection
vRealize Orchestrator Parser | vRealize Orchestrator Parser parses vRO workflow XML files and extracts programming language code (Javascript, Python, Powershell, etc) and stores it as discrete files, that can then be checked into a source code control system, and or edited directly as discrete programming language source code from a traditional text-based source code editor, such as Visual Studio Code. These discrete files can also be consumed by other, third-party CI/CD systems like Maven and Jenkins. They can be edited, and they can be imported back into vRO workflow XML files |
vRealize Build Tools | vRealize Build Tools provides tools to development and release teams implementing solutions based on vRealize Automation (vRA) and vRealize Orchestrator (vRO). The solution targets Virtual Infrastructure Administrators and Solution Developers working in parallel on multiple vRealize-based projects who want to use standard DevOps practices. This Fling is focused on code quality, code reusability, unit testing, dependency management and parallel releases of vRealize projects. In practice, it is a set of Maven extensions, packaged in a Maven repository format, that support the use of IDE (via Maven) and CLI to develop, test and deliver vRA and vRO-based solutions. It includes a vRO plug-in that exposes autocomplete information for standard and third-party scripting objects and actions and CLI that can deploy packages to vRO and vRA via the standard APIs. |
SDDC Import/Export for VMware Cloud on AWS | Enables you to save and restore your VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) networking and security configuration. There are many situations when customers want to migrate from an existing SDDC to a different one. While HCX addresses the data migration challenge, this tool offers customers the ability to copy the configuration from a source to a destination SDDC. A few example migration scenarios are: SDDC to SDDC migration from bare-metal (i3) to a different bare-metal type (i3en) SDDC to SDDC migration from VMware-based org to an AWS-based org SDDC to SDDC migration from region (i.e. London) to a different region (i.e. Dublin). Other use cases are: Backups – save the entire SDDC configuration Lab purposes – customers or partners might want to deploy SDDCs with a pre-populated configuration. DR purposes – deploy a pre-populated configuration in conjunction with VMware Site Recovery or VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery |
NSX Mobile | Focus of the app is to provide instant notifications when something goes wrong and side by side ability to monitor the network & its security from a smartphone. |
vSphere Mobile Client | vSphere Mobile Client enables administrators to monitor and manage vSphere infrastructure directly from any mobile device. Whether you want to check on the current or historical resource consumption; you want to get notifications on long running tasks; or you want to check the currently running tasks – the vSphere Mobile Client is there to help |
vCenter Plugin for vRealize Network Insight | The vCenter Plugin for vRealize Network Insight brings relevant information from Network Insight, directly into vCenter. It allows the virtual infrastructure admins to view networking focused data and statistics in the same interface as where they manage their workloads, without having to have 2 interfaces open. Additionally, this plugin also helps add vCenter as a data source to Network Insight and set up incoming network flows. |
Easy Deploy for NSX Advanced Load Balancing | Easy Deploy for NSX Advanced Load Balancer (formerly Avi Networks) Fling is a virtual appliance that helps you deploy Avi in a handful of clicks! This will enable you to leverage the power of multi-cloud application services platform that includes load balancing, web application firewall, container ingress, and application analytics across any cloud. No extensive knowledge required as it’s meant to make demo, training and proof-of-concept (POC) easy! |
VMware Event Broker Appliance | The VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Fling enables customers to unlock the hidden potential of events in their SDDC to easily event-driven automation based on vCenter Server Events and take vCenter Server Events to the next level! Extending vSphere by easily triggering custom or prebuilt actions to deliver powerful integrations within your datacenter across public cloud has never been more easier before. |
Hillview: Distributed Data Visualization | Hillview is a simple cloud-based spreadsheet program for browsing large data collections. The data manipulated is read-only. Users can sort, find, filter, transform, query, zoom-in/out, and chart data. Operations are performed using direct manipulation in the GUI. Hillview is designed to work on very large data sets (billions of rows). |
Sample Data Platform Deployment on Virtualized Cloud Infrastructure | Leverage your VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 with vRealize Automation deployment and stand a sample data platform based on vSphere Virtual Machines in less than 20-minutes comprising of Kafka, Spark, Solr, and ELK. |
Wrap-up
I encourage everyone to sign up for the newsletter for updates on VMware Fling and start experimenting with the ones you find most interesting.
If you use VMware Flings and you are creating something you will like to share with the community check our post on Code Repository and share.
What kinds of content would you like to see more on this blog?