The timing of VMware’s latest update is uncanny. I had just written the other day about the VMware HCL and product documentation. Yesterday, VMware launched a new Hardware Compatibility Guide portal making it easier than ever to find out out if your system, peripheral, storage, thin client, etc. hardware is compatible with VMware Virtual Infrastructure or VMware View. The portal replaces the VI HCL document library previously maintained here and in fact, all of the HCL documentation has been removed from that page and replaced with a link to the new portal.
Leary of varying query based search engine usefulness, I tried the portal out for myself this morning by searching on “dl585“. I was pleasantly surprised by the results. Instead of indexing the HCL by VMware product platform (as was the case with the previous .pdf documentation library where there was a separate HCL document for each major generation of VI), the portal returns a list of results indexed by my hardware query displaying all versions of ESX that the dl585 hardware is compatible with. In my opinion, this is much more efficient.
I then ventured over to the VMware View tab and searched on “chip pc” and was presented with a good sized list of Chip PC thin clients compatible with VMware View. Another search on “chip” produced the same query results, however a search on “chippc” produced no results. The query engine could use some polishing to showcase a more Google-like web 2.0 friendliness (Did you mean chip pc?)
Adding to a documentation junkie’s pleasure (that would be me), the portal also allows us to download the full version of the compatibility guides in .pdf format from the right side menu of the portal web page. If that’s your thing, you still have the option to maintain your own offline .pdf repository. This is one of the habits I do follow and I hope that VMware continues to notify us via RSS feed when an HCL has been updated, providing me with a direct link to the .pdf in the RSS feed so I can easily right click and “save as” into my offline document repository.
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