For many years now, VMware engineers have been churning out free "experimental tools" known as "Flings."  These VMware Lab creations are developed to be a relatively short-term thing.  But that fact doesn't take away from their oftentimes extreme usefulness.  And although these interesting freebie tools are not part of any official product offering, they have been well received over the years by VMware's community of virtualization users.

If you aren't already familiar with Flings, there is one important aspect that you should be aware of before going down the proverbial path of installation and usage: VMware clearly states that these tools are intended to be played with and explored, but they do not come with VMware support and therefore shouldn't be used in production environments.  But then again, if you aren't adventurous, you may miss out on some of the low risk, high reward scenarios.

The VMware Lab engineers are at it again.  This time, the latest Fling is called the SDDC Discovery Tool -- and it provides users with a holistic view of their SDDC deployment, reminding many of the old map view provided by the vCenter Client.

So how does it work?  By collecting vCenter server credentials from the user, the tool is able to discover all of the products installed in the deployment by recursive probing.  It starts with vCenter server by discovering registered products, and then subsequently probes each of those products recursively to gather as much information as possible.  Upon successful discovery, the results are presented to the user in an easy to consume list and topological views.

VMware Lab Engineers describe the benefits as:

Any customer who would like to see the complete picture of all the products installed in their deployment or get specific product information like version, IP address, VM name etc., can use this tool. The tool persists all the discovery results so that the user can see what has changed in their deployment over a period of time. Users can also toggle between ‘VC view' which shows what products are managed by what product and 'Host view', which shows which host each of the products is running on.

Learn more and download the SDDC Discovery Tool.