FROM THE EDITORS VIRTUAL DESK
Over the past few weeks the news has been dominated by the Spectre and Meltdown security flaws in CPUs. This has posed a problem for many customers as it is one of those issues that really does affect almost everyone. One of my tasks as a TAM is to assist my customers with issues such as this, and to make sure they have all of the relevant information to remediate. This does not always come in a single KB or other information source, as is the case in this example. Often it is a lot more complicated, where you need to take into account the systems and version of software being used, the underlying hardware, as well as the customers security posture and potential upgrade plans. All of these and other items are considered as we work together with our customers to make the understanding of how the issue affects their systems, and how best to work through the issue to a successful outcome. This is one of the many activities that VMware TAMs work on with their customers every day.
I wish you a fantastic week ahead, please note that there will be no newsletter next week.
Virtually Yours
VMware TAM Team
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NEWS AND DEVELOPMENTS FROM VMWARE
- How Multi-Cloud Adoption Will Change Your Entire Organization
A recent survey from MIT Technology Review Custom and VMware posed a question to companies from around the world and across major industries: “What did you learn about multi-cloud infrastructure adoption that surprised you?” While many of the responses focused on specific technical difficulties su... - Bask Iyer on How to Manage a Multigenerational Workforce
Bask Iyer, CIO for both VMware and Dell Technologies, has long thought about the value of different generations in the workplace. A diverse workforce may bring together a variety of thoughts and lifestyles, but what can different generations learn from each other to create a more vibrant workplace? ... - Study Shows Cloud Adoption Tests and Transforms Companies
New research, conducted by MIT Technology Review Custom and sponsored by VMware, surveyed 1,350 IT and business leaders worldwide about the drivers of cloud adoption and the challenges faced by implementation. The answers reveal that the first year of adoption, in particular, is marked with diffic...
- VMware Releases Dispatch, an Open Source Serverless Framework
VMware announced its serverless initiative at VMworld 2017, where a Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) demo using Apache OpenWhisk, an existing open source FaaS technology, was presented. Since then, the serverless team has been working to define what a serverless framework by and for a VMware-based infr... - Moving to Open Source: First Impressions of a Proprietary Software Engineer
by Vladislav Valtchev, VMware Open Source Technology Center Until two months ago, my whole professional experience was as a proprietary software engineer. Here at VMware, I spent the last 4.5 years working in vSphere as a C++ platform engineer, but I used open source software my whole life. Slackwar... - Project Clarity: 1 Year of Open Source Success & a New Year of Design Innovation
Project Clarity all started with a need: All our VMware applications had different looks and feel. Because of this, our teams and our customers had so many different ways of doing the same things. To meet this need, our goal was pretty simple: standardize the visual and mic-interactions driving the ...
- Virtually Speaking Podcast #67 Resource Management
Two weeks ago Pete Flecha (a.k.a. Pedro Arrow) and John Nicholson invited me to their always awesome podcast to talk about resource management. During our conversation, we covered both on-prem and the features of VMware Cloud on AWS that help cater the needs of your workload. Being a guest on t... - It’s Not Too Late to Get the Scoop on vSphere 6.5
Just before the new year, the VMware Community Roundtable podcast covered key insights to vSphere 6.5 in a live episode. In case you missed it, moderator Eric Nielsen discussed reasons to upgrade to vSphere 6.5 with the “dynamic duo” of vSphere: featured guests Himanshu Singh and Martin Yip. Sing... - vSphere VM Encryption White Paper now available
I’d like to announce the availability of a new white paper for VMware vSphere VM Encryption! VM Encryption is a feature that was introduced in vSphere 6.5. The audience for this white paper is the Manager/Director/C-level folks who want to understand how vSphere VM Encryption differs from other vir...
- Free 5-Part Webcast Series on NSX
Mark your calendars now for this free VMware NSX: Things You Need to Know webcast series presented by VMware Education Services. Each 60-minute session is delivered by VMware Certified Instructors and offered at 3 different times so you can choose what works for your schedule. Feb 1: Simplif... - VMware NSX for vSphere 6.4 Eases Operations, Improves Application Security with Context
Summary: Generally available today, VMware NSX for vSphere 6.4 raises the bar for application security and planning, and introduces context-aware micro-segmentation For those working in security, thinking and talking about the cyber threats in the world is a constant, a necessary evil. So, for a mo... - NSX-T: OpenAPI and SDKs
Nowadays everything is about automation. Organizations are moving away from the traditional static infrastructure to full automation and here the need of NSX is significant. There are many use-cases for NSX, but the common in all of them is that they all need to be automated. VMware is investing he...
- New Multi-Site vRealize Operations – Federation Management Pack – David Davis on vROps #48
Let’s say that you have multiple datacenters around the world, or even just around the United States. Each datacenter (even if it’s a relatively small vSphere-powered datacenter) needs monitoring of performance, capacity planning, and trouble remediation, should the unexpected happen. In the past, y... - vRA 7.x – Debug Tips – Part 1
vRA Entitlements and Approvals – Debug Entitlements and Approvals are part of governance in the self-service platform vRA. Entitlements determine which users or groups can request catalog items or perform specific actions on requested items. Approval policies attached to entitled catalog items o... - Assess performance impact of Spectre and Meltdown patches using vRealize Operations Manager
I want to share some quick tips and tricks which can help you monitor the performance & capacity of your environment using vRealize Operations during the patching process for Spectre & Meltdown. Make sure you also refer to the following KB Articles from VMware about Spectre & Meltdown. https://k...
- Containers and Kubernetes: The Time Is Now
By Art Fewell, Senior Technical Product Manager Kubernetes is poised to be the most impactful infrastructure technology of 2018. The system offers a rare and powerful set of capabilities that enables enterprises to streamline and automate complex operational processes and deliver a cloud-like user ... - vSphere Integrated Containers 1.3 Makes Deployment Easier
We are pleased to announce the release of vSphere Integrated Containers 1.3. This newest version enhances stability and delivers a new graphical-user interface to guide users through the creation of a Virtual Container Host (VCH). What’s New: Create and Delete Wizard With more and more custome... - A Look Back at KubeCon 2017
By Ryan Clair, Senior Systems Engineer The community around Kubernetes is blossoming. Attendance for this month’s KubeCon in Austin doubled last year’s audience to hit more than 4,200 attendees. That impressive number is made all the sweeter due to VMware’s participation in KubeCon 2017 as a platin...
VMware End-User Computing Blog
- Introducing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in VMware Identity Manager 3.2
The Importance of Identity Management RBAC Role-based access control (RBAC) allows you to segment what type of access is granted to administrators in different functional roles. It’s important to provide access to enough tools for an administrator to do their job, without granting the keys to the k... - Digital Workspace Journey: How Do You Get There?
Conclusion: Exploring the Map for the Digital Workspace Journey Click here for Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. During this series on exploring the map for the digital workspace journey, you’ve learned why the status quo is unstainable, how to reimagine end-user computing and what you need to know befor... - 3 Steps to Ensure Data Security with Desktop & App Virtualization
Happy New Year! (It’s still January so I can say that …) With the holidays behind us, most employees have come back to the office after trips to grandma’s house, ski holidays or even beach vacations. But while most of us were taking time to recharge, for many the work never stopped. Sales reps tryi...
- New KB articles published for week ending 28th January 2018
VMware vRealize Automation “Error processing ping report” messages in logs in vRealize Automation 7 Date Published: 2018/1/21 vRealize Automation Appliance 6.2.x Workaround for CVE-2017-5753, CVE-2017-5715, CVE-2017-5754 (aka Spectre and Meltdown) Date Published: 2018/1/24 VMware SDDC Manager ... - New KB articles published for week ending 21th January 2018
VMware SDDC Manage VMware Cloud Foundation Upgrade fails because of HA agent issues Date Published: 2018/1/15 VMware Cloud Foundation Upgrade fails because of NSX Service Deployments Date Published: 2018/1/15 How to hide the speculative-execution control mechanism for virtual machines in a VMwa... - Top 20 vSAN articles for December 2017
Component metadata health check fails with invalid state error vSAN Build Recommendation Engine Health fails Best practices for vSAN implementations using Dell PERC H730 or FD332-PERC storage controllers Replacing SSD disk on a vSAN cluster Status of TLSv1.1/1.2 Enablement and TLSv1.0 Disablem... - Top 20 NSX articles for December 2017
Troubleshooting vShield Endpoint / NSX Guest Introspection Guest Introspection memory usage spikes to 90+% or you see the error: “Lost communication with ESX module” in NSX-V 6.3 Deploying NSX Controller fails in NSX-v 6.3.3 and 6.3.4 ESXi 5.5 and 6.0 hosts fail with a PSOD: VMCIEventDelayedDis... - Top 20 vSphere articles for December 2017
vCenter Appliance root Partition 100% full due to Audit.log files not being rotated “invalid credentials LDAP Error 49” error when starting Inventory Services in vCenter Server 6.x Unable to log in to the root account of vCenter Server Appliance Important information before upgrading to vSphere...
- Patching and updates made easy with VMware Cloud Foundation
Its official, VMware released the latest version of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), 2.3. At the core of VCF is a fully automated, hyper-converged software stack that includes compute, storage and networking. Completing an upgrade of all of the components of an SDDC without VCF would typically take so... - Connecting IP-Based (NFS or ISCSI) External Storage To VMware Cloud Foundation
VMware Cloud Foundation is based on a modern hyper-converged architecture that extensively leverages VMware vSAN – a vSphere-native software-defined storage platform that delivers flash-optimized storage for the software-defined data center (SDDC). While vSAN is the primary storage platform for Clo... - Introduction to VMware Cloud Foundation 2.3
On Dec 5th, 2017, VMware announced the upcoming release of VMware Cloud Foundation 2.3. This release comes with many new capabilities to help further simplify the tasks of deploying, operating and maintaining a VMware based hybrid cloud. In this post, I will introduce you to some of the more notab...
EXTERNAL NEWS FROM 3RD PARTY BLOGGERS virtuallyGhetto
- Automating Intel Sighting remediation using PowerCLI (SSH not required)
In case you may not be aware, Intel recently notified VMware that certain Intel Broadwell and Haswell CPUs are affected by Intel Sighting after applying the latest microcode update to remediate against the Spectre vulnerability. VMware has published the following KB 52345 which provides more details... - Verify Hypervisor-Assisted Guest Mitigation (Spectre) patches using PowerCLI
VMware recently published a new knowledge base (KB) article 52085 that outlines instructions for enabling the Hypervisor-Assisted Guest Mitigation (CVE-2017-5715), also known as the Spectre vulnerability. This KB also provides steps to verify the updated microcode (included in the ESXi patch) has be... - Identifying ESXi boot method & boot device
There was an interesting discussion on our internal Socialcast platform last week on figuring out how an ESXi host is booted up whether it is from local device like a disk or USB device, Auto Deploy or even boot from SAN along with its respective boot device? Although I had answered the question, I ... - Cross vCenter Clone with vSphere 6.0+
Similar to the Cross vCenter vMotion (xVC-vMotion) feature that was introduced in vSphere 6.0, Virtual Machine cloning can also be performed across two different vCenter Servers, regardless of their deployment type or SSO configurations. If vCenter Servers are part of an Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM), ... - Quick Tip - NSX-T 2.1 upgrade gotcha, use NSX Manager IP Address vs Hostname
NSX-T 2.1 was released right before the holiday break and one of the biggest enhancement is support for VMware's upcoming Pivotal Container Service (PKS) which you can read more about here. Right before I took some much needed time off with the family, I had attempted an upgrade of my existing NSX-T...
- 3CX Phone System Free vs Paid
Over the past few years, I’ve been following 3CX Phone system software development. Their product has matured over the years, packed with more features, Linux and Windows platforms do have feature parity as well. Today we’ll have a look at 3CX Phone System Free vs Paid version, in order to see wheth... - Top 3 VM Replication Software for VMware vSphere Environments
This post will highlight some of the known replication software for VMware VM replication. We will focus on Top 3 VM Replication Software for VMware vSphere. There are a lot of backup/replication vendors out there, but in this post, we’ll pick just 3 of them (including VMware) and highlight some of ... - VCP6.5-DCV Objective 8.2 – Create and Deploy Host Profiles
Today’s objective is VCP6.5-DCV Objective 8.2 – Create and Deploy Host Profiles. Host profiles are part of VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus licensing. Host profiles have been criticised back in a day for the bugs and inconsistencies, but vSphere 6.5 brought some significant improvements in host profil... - Veeam PN Generaly Available – Free Software
If you follow Veeam, you have certainly not missed quite a few blog posts about Veeam PN (Powered Network) software. Already during VeeamON 2017, we could see a functional demo, but the solution was not GA at that time. Now Veeam has finally released the final version of Veeam PN and it’s available ... - What is StarWind Deduplication Analyzer Free Tool?
StarWind Deduplication Analyzer Free Tool allows you to evaluate deduplication ratio for a drive/volume. StarWind Deduplication Analyzer makes this without the need to move large amounts of data, taking up a minimal time to estimate deduplication results. The tool is a simple executable, no need to ...
- Registering the Pure Storage VASA Provider
Hot on the heels on Pure Storage’s recent announcement on Virtual Volume (VVol) support, I wanted to take a closer look at their VVol implementation for myself. Thanks to the support team over at Pure, they were able to very quickly update our lab array to the latest release that has support for VVo... - Big news from Pure Storage
There was lots of big news yesterday from our friends over at Pure Storage. First of all, we had an announcement about their Virtual Volume (VVol) implementation going GA. This is very exciting for me, and I look forward to testing it out in our lab. The implementation is a VASA 3.0 implementation, ... - A new vSAN training class – vSAN Production Operations – now available
A short post today to let you know about a new VMware training class that I helped to create. This new class is called VMware vSAN Production Operations, and is a new 3 day class delivered by our Education Services division. As you can imagine from the title, this class is geared towards administrat... - A first look at vFile – Sharing a persistent volume between containers
Regular readers will have noticed that I have been doing a bit of work recently with docker swarm, and what you need to do to get it to work on VMs running on vSphere. The reason why I had taken such an interest is because I wanted to look at a new product that our Project Hatchway team have been co... - Validating overlay network when docker swarm running on Centos VMs on vSphere
I got a chance to revisit my docker swarm deployment this week after a bit of a break. I was a little curious about my setup because when I spoke to some of our ‘Project Hatchway‘ engineers, I was told that I should be able to launch a single instance of Nginx in Docker Swarm (“docker service create...
- Using Docker Machine with Azure
I’ve written about using Docker Machine with a number of different providers, such as with AWS, with OpenStack, and even with a local KVM/Libvirt daemon. In this post, I’ll expand that series to show using Docker Machine with Azure. (This is a follow-up to my earlier post on experimentin... - An Update on Using Docker Machine with Vagrant
As part of a project on which I’m working, I’ve been spending some time working with Docker Machine and Vagrant over the last few days. You may recall that I first wrote about using these two tools together back in August 2015. As a result of spending some additional time with these tool... - Technology Short Take 93
Welcome to Technology Short Take 93! Today I have another collection of data center technology links, articles, thoughts, and rants. Here’s hoping you find something useful! Networking Matt Klein breaks down service mesh components, using terms networking professionals know well, like &ldqu... - Experimenting with Azure
I’ve been experimenting with Microsoft Azure recently, and I thought it might be useful to share a quick post on using some of my favorite tools with Azure. I’ve found it useful to try to leverage existing tools whenever I can, and so as I’ve been experimenting with Azure I’v... - Issue with VMware-Formatted Cumulus VX Vagrant Box
I recently had a need to revisit the use of Cumulus VX (the Cumulus Networks virtual appliance running Cumulus Linux) in a Vagrant environment, and I wanted to be sure to test what I was doing on multiple virtualization platforms. Via Vagrant Cloud, Cumulus distributes VirtualBox and Libvirt version...
- A new job for me and reflecting on 2017
2017 was a bit of a tough year for me mainly due to the major surgery that my daughter Sophia had and the subsequent very painful recovery from it. I’d have to say that was one of the most difficult and stressful things that I have been through in my life and I am very … Continue readin... - 2017 VVols year in review
I tend to write a lot about VMware VVols these days as I believe VMware’s new storage architecture has many benefits and VVols is the future of storage for vSphere. In this post I thought I would highlight and recap some of the posts that I did in 2017 related to VVols and you have … Co... - A new update on VVols customer adoption
It’s been a while since I last reported on the customer telemetry data that we capture to track VVol adoption with 3PAR customers and wanted to provide an update. Before I share that I want to relay what I’ve seen and heard around VVols adoption in general. VVols adoption is trending upw... - How Pat Gelsinger saved VMware
I ran across this recent article in the SF Business Times and thought I would share it along with my thoughts. The article highlights VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger as one of the most admired CEO’s and how he helped right the VMware ship adrift in stormy seas during his tenure. You can read ... - 30 Must-Read Small Business IT Blogs 2017
I was recently honored to be included in a list of 30 must read SMB IT blogs and wanted to say thank you to BizTech for including me in that list. I looked through the blogs in that list and there is a lot of diversity in it with everything from credit card blogs to … Continue reading » ...
- What a start to the year...
It's been a crazy couple days on a couple fronts, but the most material front has certainly been Spectre and Meltdown. There are lots of sources, and the trick is that while distinctly the root cause lies in the CPU domain and with the CPU manufacturers- the impact touches nearly everything. It's b... - To allTHANK YOU for 2017, and lets dream of 2018!
To all my readers, all our customers and partners, all my colleagues, all my friends – heck my competitors, thank you for everything in 2017. It was a year filled with change for me in the middle of a massive integration through the Dell acquisition – with a ton of learning, a ton of personal d... - Looking forward to 2018: Vertical Stack Wars are upon us.
This is part 3 of a 3-part blog series on things that I’m thinking about going into 2018. Warning – remember, Virtual Geek post are my musings, not an official company position. They are officially my opinions – which means they aren’t worth more than 2 cents. They aren’t authored by anyone... - Looking forward to 2018Part 2: Hint, its not about infrastructure.
If you’re just catching up, this is a part of a multi-blog post epic saga (ha!) with some things that are on my mind as I reflect towards 2018. I’d encourage you to read the first part here, which discussed the way I see the HCI market choosing between “build” and “buy” choices, and reflected on h... - Looking forward to 2018Part 1: Buy to Buy and HCI (and more)
The ongoing evolution of HCI – 2017, 2018 and beyond – in three parts. In 2016, EMC (and then Dell EMC) and VMware started with several goals – one of which was to become #1 in the HCI market by the end of 2017. That mission was accomplished mid-year 2017, so check. That said, as the calendar com...
- VMware NSX for vSphere End-User Computing Design Guide 1.2
This guide highlights design and deployment considerations when using NSX to implement network virtualization, create a secure end user environment, and load balance Horizon infrastructure. The intended audience is virtualization, networking, and security architects who are interested in depl... - VMware vSAN 6.6 - Number of votes and witnesses explained
I got a question from a fellow VCI asking me why a vSAN policy with FTT=1 and SW=2 doesn't need any witnesses and why a policy with FTT=2 and SW=1 needs two witnesses. He was also confused by the number of votes the components got. There's a simple answer for this, please keep in mind that com... - Demo of the VMware NSX 6.4 Context-Aware Firewall
Context- aware firewall enhances the visibility at the application level and helps to override the problem of application permeability. Visibility at the application layer helps you to monitor the workloads better from a resource, compliance, and security point of view. Firewall rules cannot... - VMware NSX 6.4 - Application Rule Manager Enhancements
With the release of VMware NSX 6.4, we have made several enhancements to the Application Rule Manager including improved context awareness, automatic recommendations for firewall rule sets, and easier and faster time to value for Day 2 operations. In this video, we’ll go through the enhancem... - NSX 6.4 Troubleshooting Guide
The NSX Troubleshooting Guide describes how to monitor and troubleshoot the VMware NSX for vSphere system by using the NSX Manager user interface, the vSphere Web Client, and other NSX components, as needed. This manual is intended for anyone who wants to use or troubleshoot any problem for NS...
- Homeserver - ESXi on HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10
After Hewlett Packard Enterprise has missed offering a Microserver in their 9th Generation, it is now back in Gen10. The Microserver series provides affordable servers intended to be used in SMB and as home servers. Due to its low price and …Read more »... - Fix for FreeNAS on HPE MicroServer Gen10 X3216 Stuck Console Issue
When you try to install FreeNAS 11 on the new HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 X3216, the installer stops booting and appears to be stuck at: pcib0: <ACPI Host-PCI bridge> port 0xcf8-0xcff on acpi0 pcib0: _OSC returned error 0x10 pci0: <ACPI PCI …Read more »... - Get- and Set-VMLatencySensitivity PowerShell Function
The Get-VMLatencySensitivity, Get-VMLatencySensitivityBulk and Set-VMLatencySensitivity PowerShell functions configure can return and set the latency sensitivity level of a virtual machine. You can adjust the latency sensitivity of a virtual machine to optimize the scheduling delay for latency sensi... - Critical Patch for All-Flash vSAN with Deduplication (6.0 and 6.5)
VMware has released a critical patch for vSAN 6.0 and 6.5. This patch contains a fix for a highly critical vSAN issue that might cause IO read errors and in some cases severe symptoms such as inaccessible VMs, host failures, or stuck resyncs. The issue …Read more »... - Get-VMHostVersion and Get-VMHostLatestVersion PowerShell Function
The Get-VMHostVersion and Get-VMHostLatestVersion PowerShell functions are aimed at helping you to identify the version at which your ESXi is currently running, and whether updates are available. Both are using a JSON based ESXi Build database which is also the backend …Read more »...
- Mastering VMware vSphere 6.5 book feedback
One months ago, the Mastering VMware vSphere 6.5 book has been published and we already have some interesting feedback. Considering that it’s the first book experience (not only for me, but also for the other co-authors), and that neither of us it’s a native English speaker, we are reall... - Technology Live 2018!
Technology Live! is a one-day event where up to four vendors showcase their technologies in action to a group of technical journalists, bloggers and analysts. A combination of presentations and demos allows each company to present its solutions with a much higher level of detail than is usually poss... - Nutanix software options on Dell-EMC PowerEdge
Nutanix platform has been extended from the origina offer (appliance based single vendor only) to add more flexibile options… with more nodes options (also storage or compute only) and with different hardware vendors (including Dell-EMC, Lenovo, Cisco, HPE). Starting with Cisco and HPE the opt... - VMware Tools installation remains pending
There are some cases where the VMware Tools installation, if you run it from the vSphere platform, remain pending and you cannot end this task anymore. Also if VMware Tools are up and running properly. It’s something boring because may block you in several other tasks. For example you cannot m... - Resize a Linux filesystem without LVM
Increse the VM disk size in a virtual environment it’s so easy, on almost all hypervisor. But maybe it’s not so easy or fast increase the partition and the filesystem inside the guest OS. For Windows OSes, starting with 2008 (Windows Server 2008 and Vista) it’s quite easy. For Lin...
DISCLAIMER
While I do my best to publish unbiased information specifically related to VMware solutions there is always the possibility of blog posts that are unrelated, competitive or potentially conflicting that may creep into the newsletter. I apologize for this in advance if I offend anyone and do my best to ensure this does not happen. Please get in touch if you feel any inappropriate material has been published. All information in this newsletter is copyright of the original author. If you are an author and wish to no longer be used in this newsletter please get in touch.
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