<strong>Flish Picks</strong>  - Top 10 Absolutely Free vSphere Application and Utilities chosen by yours truly.

Number 8 – VMware Documentation Down Loader by Extravirt

As engineers we here at eGroup are constantly reading and referring to tech manuals.  We breed a culture of RTFM!  As such, we need access to the latest and greatest documentation from vSphere.  Now  we could always down load one document at a time from VMware, but where is the fun in that?

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The <a href="http://xtravirt.com/vmware-documentation-downloader">VMware Documentation Downloader</a> script from Xtravirt puts a <strong>local copy on your PC </strong>of all he HTML pages and PDF documents referenced on the VMware Documentation pages at  <a href="http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/index.html" target="_blank">http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/index.html</a>,  including those for previous product versions.

This is especially useful inside secure data centers where one may not have access to the internet.

Below is a screen shot which shows the access to documentation complete with the same HTML front end as the vSphere web site.

<a href="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/vSphereDocumentationDL1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-7114" src="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/vSphereDocumentationDL1-300x256.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="256" /></a>

To run the script you need to download a free utlity called wget.exe.  You must place this .exe file in the same directory as the script (.bat file) before you start the download.

<a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/">http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/</a>

<a href="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/vSphereDocumentationDL2.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-7115" src="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/vSphereDocumentationDL2.jpg" alt="" width="269" height="236" /></a>

So, what’s cooler than having a local copy of all of VMware’s documentation on your PC?  How about dumping it all to a VMware Octopus share and being able to access all of it on the go from any device!

<a href="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/vSphereDocumentationDL3.png"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-7116" src="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/vSphereDocumentationDL3-225x300.png" alt="" width="225" height="300" /></a>

For those that don’t know, VMware Project Octopus is a complete on premise file management and sharing utility that is available for desktop and mobile platforms.  Think Drop Box but hosted in your own private (or public) cloud, completely controlled and managed by IT.   I will have a follow up blog article that goes in depth more about Octopus (Horizon File Manager?).

Stay tuned as we count down the rest of the <strong>Flish Picks</strong>  - Top 10 Absolutely Free vSphere Application and Utilities.