Great flings and a contest!

When you heard about VMware flings for the first time (if ever) you probably wondered what this is: Flings are short-term projects that VMware engineers work on - supposedly in their spare time, just for fun -, and they result in software that is not officially supported by VMware, but serve a specific purpose and address challenges that you might have when using VMware products - in a very handy way. They are published by VMware Labs that also do some very interesting academic research and publications.

VMware releases vSphere 5.5 Update 2 - What's new and how to update free ESXi

It looks like yesterday the whole IT Community was pretty much focused on the much anticipated Apple Live event, so you might have missed an important VMware announcement: vSphere 5.5 Update 2 was released. Besides the usual bug fixes there was one important new functionality added that will make a lot of VMware Admins happy, especially those who do not like the new Web Client.

Before going into some details here are the relevant links to downloads and release notes:

Between VMworlds 2014 ... See you in Barcelona?

Unless you have been living under a rock during the last two weeks you will know that VMworld 2014 US took place in San Francisco. I have not been there, but enjoyed the summer vacation with my family in a rural area of Germany with very poor mobile network coverage. Anyway the constant never-ending stream of VMworld news and buzz could not completely elude my attention ...

Again, this was a great conference with exciting announcements - No worries, I will not repeat here what the crowd of well-known virtualization bloggers has already shouted out. But I am somewhat concerned that there is no more good news left for the yet upcoming VMworld 2014 Europe conference in Barcelona (Oct 14th to 16th) that I will be happy to attend again.

The ESXi MAC learning network filter fling - and how to install it from the V-Front Online depot

With all the ongoing VMworld buzz there is at least one news over at William Lam's VirtuallyGhetto blog that did not get the attention that it deserves: VMware has released a new fling for ESXi that implements a MAC learning network filter. That is an important one and highly recommended for all the folks that use nested virtualization on top of ESXi.

Why?