Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) 6.5.The latest vmware-utils now contains the following: If there are other tools or packages you think that are useful and wish to contribute back, feel free to clone the repository and submit a pull request! I have already submitted a pull request for my changes here.

I wanted to enhance the awesome work that Alan had done with couple more VMware open source tools that I thought might be useful to VMware Administrators, which I actually wrote about here in my List of VMware CLIs, SDKS and DevOps Tools article. Wow could this be further simplified and automated? Well, enter vmware-utils a Docker Image that allows you to automatically build a new image that contains some of the most popular and widely used VMware Utilities. However, not everyone is comfortable with this idea. I personally have no problem building my own VM appliance that contains the various VMware packages, utilities and scripts that I use on a daily basis. When I talk to customers about their use of vMA, most used it because it was just there, but the majority prefer to use their own harden distribution of Linux and install their own admin utilities and packages which may also include non-VMware tools. Even if you decide to ignore support and install custom packages, I have often seen this break existing dependencies. In my opinion, vMA is pretty limited and you can not install additional packages without voiding official support. vMA is nothing more than a stripped down version of SLES that has the vSphere CLI (vCLI) pre-installed. Some customers in the past have built similar offerings by using a free VMware Appliance called vMA (vSphere Management Assistance). We also plan to make this new version of the Docker Image available on Docker Hub, so stay tuned for those details shortly.

UPDATE (11/23/16)- The Docker Container has now been updated with all the latest vSphere 6.5 SDK/CLI/Tools. He came up with a nifty idea to create a Docker Image that would house a bunch of useful VMware tools which included several VMware open source projects as well. He was interested in learning more about Docker and thought the best way to learn about something new was by using it, which is normally how I learn as well. Last week during lunch I learned about a cool little project that my colleague Alan Renouf was working on in his spare time at night.

Docker for mac check for new version