FROM THE EDITORS VIRTUAL DESK
Hi everyone, this past week I was thinking about how TAMs connect customers with valuable VMware resources. A case in point, a customer is looking at upgrading to vSphere 6.5 and has done a fantastic job of discussing the solution and architecting what their upgrade will look like. Everything seems to be perfect but then a number of additional requirements and third party solutions surfaced and we were not 100% certain. This inflection point for the team meant that we must remove all of the uncertainty. This is one of the times that having a TAM really makes a difference. We were not just looking for a simple answer, but rather a full review of the existing architecture, taking into account the current and new requirements. I am pleased to report that this particular scenario is not uncommon and that as a TAM we are always there to support our customers and ensure that they are provided with the best advice and recommended practices for all of their solutions.
I wish you all a fantastic week ahead, enjoy this weeks news.
Virtually Yours
VMware TAM Team
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NEWS AND DEVELOPMENTS FROM VMWARE
- Moving Toward an Enterprise Culture of Employee Trust and Empowerment
Command and control used to be IT’s modus operandi. Not anymore. Employees, tired of being directed to use approved technology that doesn’t meet their expectations, are taking matters into their own hands. They’re now choosing emerging technologies that enable them to work better and smarter, and th... - Software Reshapes the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Market
Recently, Gartner, Inc. recognized VMware as a leader in its inaugural Magic Quadrant for Hyper-converged Infrastructure based on its ability to execute and completeness of vision. The research firm revised its model to place greater emphasis on the underlying software that powers HCI solutions, a t... - Report: The Impact of a Digitally Empowered Workforce
Today’s enterprises are transforming at a rapid pace: digital ambassadors are replacing tellers in bank branches; HR teams are improving the hiring process by engaging prospective employees earlier and more often; clinicians are updating patient charts at hospital bedsides. With unprecedented acces...
- Diligence, Grit and Passion Rewarded | Rupa Dachere — Women in Open Source Nominee
“That’s an hour I’ll never get back,” said no volunteer ever – especially if you’ve devoted your energies toward something you’re passionate about. Weary from a day at work, you step into your “other self” and suddenly find new energy. At VMware, those passionate personal projects are encouraged – t... - 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...
- 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...
- Introducing VMware NSX-T Reference Design
Available now is the VMware NSX-T Reference Design Guide, a deployment path to adopting NSX with diverse multi-domain workload requirements – multi-cloud (private/public), multi-hypervisor, and multiple application frameworks (VMs, PaaS and containers). Since VMware acquired Nicira almost five... - Context-Aware Micro-segmentation – Remote Desktop Session Host Enhancements for VMware Horizon
In a previous post my colleague, Stijn, discussed the enhancements to how NSX for vSphere 6.4 handles Remote Desktop Session Host, RDSH, systems with the Identity-based Firewall and Context-Aware Micro-segmentation. Remote Desktop Services is an underlying technology from Microsoft that many vendor... - Context-Aware Micro-segmentation – an innovative approach to Application and User Identity Firewall
Summary: With Context-awareness, NSX for vSphere 6.4 enables customers to enforce policy based on Application and Protocol Identification and expands the Identity Firewall support to Multiple User Sessions. A few weeks ago, VMware released version 6.4 of NSX for vSphere. The 6.4 release brings man...
- Extending vRealize Operations with Collaboration Tools, RESTful APIs, and Webhook Shims — David Davis on vRealize Operations Post #50
vRealize Operations doesn’t live or work on an island in the datacenter. Recently, I learned how vRealize Ops can integrate with any tools that support a RESTful API – which includes just about every modern collaboration tools in the world today. There are so many cool use cases for extending and i... - Two leading hypervisors, one pane of glass
Two leading hypervisors, one pane of glass Is your organization one of the growing number that run both VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V? It’s not uncommon for Enterprise Infrastructures to contain multiple virtualization platforms, the two most common being VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V. Most a... - Managing SDDC as Code – Development at Scale
The software development process for large application teams is evolving in an effort to reduce overall project time and improve schedule accuracy. Projects are more complex than ever, especially when you include the mix of deployment options for a modern enterprise application. With Agile software ...
- Announcing Pivotal Container Service General Availability
By Narayan Mandaleeka, Senior Product Line Manager Today, VMware and Pivotal are excited to announce the general availability of Pivotal Container Service (PKS). PKS is a Kubernetes-based container service designed to meet the needs of operators and developers by providing native Kubernetes combine... - Uncorking Fine Wine by Using an IoT Pipeline with Kubernetes on vSphere
By Tom Scanlan, Emerging Technologies Practice, Professional Service Introduction The AMER PSO Cross-Cloud team and the PS ERD Emerging Technologies team (which I am a part of) have been developing the following demonstration application to facilitate discussions around Internet of Things (IoT) an... - Join VMware at This Year’s DeveloperWeek Conference
By Susan Wu, Senior Product Marketing Manager Every spring, more than 8,000 developers from 40 different countries make the trip to the San Francisco Bay Area to participate in one of the world’s largest fanfests: DeveloperWeek. VMware will be the lead sponsor of this year’s DeveloperWeek, and we h...
VMware End-User Computing Blog
- Empowering the Digital Workspace: How the City of San Antonio Does It
With 1.4 million people, San Antonio, Texas is the seventh largest city in the United States and a digital workspace pioneer. Faced with an aging and cumbersome Citrix XenDesktop environment, the city began to implement several digital workspace initiatives using VMware solutions. Now any computer-... - Securing the Digital Workspace & Putting #EmployeesFirst
As an employee at VMware, I use my own digital workspace for access to my apps and data every day. Our internal IT staff has deployed VMware Workspace ONE to help deliver a secure digital workspace to tens of thousands of my colleagues, giving each of us access to our apps and data according to our ... - [Video] Overcoming Challenges Facing Enterprise IT With the Digital Workspace
When it comes to enabling users with applications, the world of enterprise IT has never been more challenging. If we go back only a few years, organisations primarily used not only Microsoft Windows devices but also Windows applications. Enterprise mobility and the consumerisation of IT led to a hug...
- Top 20 vSphere articles for January 2018
“The transaction log for database ‘VIM_VCDB’ is full” error on a Microsoft SQL DB server ESXi 5.5 Update 3b and later hosts are not manageable after an upgrade “Host IPMI system event log status” alarm in vCenter Server Determining where growth is occurring in the vCenter Server database ESXi host... - Top 20 NSX articles for January 2018
Troubleshooting vShield Endpoint / NSX Guest Introspection Status of TLSv1.1/1.2 Enablement and TLSv1.0 Disablement across VMware products Collecting diagnostic information for the NSX Guest Introspection MUX VIB Deploying NSX Controller fails in NSX-v 6.3.3 and 6.3.4 Slow VMs after upgrading VMwar... - Top 20 vSAN articles for January 2018
Status of TLSv1.1/1.2 Enablement and TLSv1.0 Disablement across VMware products Component metadata health check fails with invalid state error Best practices for vSAN implementations using Dell PERC H730 or FD332-PERC storage controllers vSAN Build Recommendation Engine Health fails “Host cannot c... - New KB articles published for week ending 4th February 2018
VMware NSX for vSphere VDS Operation failed errors after moving a host to Non-NSX cluster in NSX 6.3.x Date Published: 2018/1/29 VMware Horizon H264 Decode on NVIDIA latest driver crashes with multimonitor Date Published:2018/1/30 VMware vCenter Server Appliance DNS resolution of Windows Active Dir... - 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 SDDC M...
- 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...
- How To do an Offline Update of Turbonomic
Sometimes you don’t have an internet connectivity within your data center so to update your different appliances needs to be done an Off-Line way. This is possible for all VMware products appliances, such as vCenter server or ESXi, and also for vendor’s products, such as the one from Turbonomic. So ... - Stratoscale Symphony Runs Natively Or On The Top of VMware vSphere
Public cloud strategy might work for some but might not work for others. If you the one who perhaps invested a lot of money and work into cloud-native apps that now works only in AWS, you might seem to be “locked in” this situation forever. You might be paying astronomical bills for using the AWS [&... - Zerto Virtual Replication 6.0 With Any2Any Multi-Cloud
In it’s latest release, Zerto announces a major one with multi-cloud support and some important new features, including useful enhancements of current features. Zerto Virtual Replication 6.0 is a major release of their flagship product. Besides new Azure to Azure replication, Zerto can now do Azure ... - Opvizor Performance Analyzer and Starter Troubleshooting Dashboards for VMware vSphere
Opvizor Performance Analyzer is a performance monitoring product for VMware vSphere environments. Performance analyzer can monitor vSphere environment as a whole, starting with core infrastructure (ESXi, vSphere) to finish with VMs. When firefighting bad performance of an environment, you need to se... - LibreOffice 6.0 Released
An unusual topic today, but why not. It’s been over a decade since free Office Suites exists (perhaps even longer). Since 2010 that this-this Free Office Suite, driven by the community, was brought to life. Available in 110 languages, and free of charge. A few days back, the version 6.0 of LibreOffi...
- Catch me at a VMUG in early 2018
Well, I’m delighted to have been invited to present at quite a few VMUGs recently, so I thought I’d share the details of them with you here. I’ve been working on my presentation which is called “What is happening in the world of VMware Storage?”. In fact, there is a lot going on, not just in the wor... - 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...
- Some Tools to Help Learn Kubernetes
Kubernetes is emerging as the clear leader in the container orchestration space. This makes it an important technology to know and understand. However, like other distributed systems, learning something like Kubernetes can be challenging due to the effort involved in getting Kubernetes up and runnin... - Technology Short Take 94
Welcome to Technology Short Take 94! Ready for another round of links, articles, and thoughts on data center technologies? (Who knows, maybe I’ll throw a rant or two in there.) OK, enough rambling…here’s the good stuff! Networking Amit Aneja has a two-part series (so far) expla... - Running OVS on Fedora Atomic Host
In this post, I’d like to share the results of some testing I’ve been doing to run Open vSwitch (OVS) in containers on a container-optimized Linux distribution such as Atomic Host (Fedora Atomic Host, specifically). I’m still relatively early in my exploration of this topic, but I ... - 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...
- 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...
- Free e-learning course - VMware AirWatch Fundamentals
This course is an introductory product training that presents the basic architecture and demonstrates the features that deliver on the most common use cases. After completing this course, you should be able to: Explain the role AirWatch plays in the digital wokspace. Choose the best AirWatc... - High Availability and Disaster Recovery with VMware vSAN and VMware Site Recovery Manager
In this session, we will learn how a vSAN stretched cluster and vSphere HA provide resiliency against entire site failures. VMware will also cover the ease of integrating vSphere Replication and Site Recovery Manager to provide reliable, automated disaster recovery. VMware vSphere, vSAN, and... - VMware NSX for vSphere 6.4: Multi-Session Identity Firewall
In this video, VMware demonstrates how the Multi-Session Identity Firewall feature in NSX for vSphere 6.4 enables per user-session security for customers use Remote Desktop Services through VMware Horizon RDSH or Citrix XenApp. Augmenting the existing Identity Firewall feature, Multi-Session... - 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...
- How to Install VMware vSphere Perl SDK on Debian 9 (stretch)
Download the latest Perl SDK for your vSphere version from code.vmware.com and copy it to the system. The download is free, but an My VMware account is required. vSphere Perl SDK for vSphere 6.5 vSphere Perl SDK for vSphere 6.0 vSphere …Read more »... - 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 »...
- Meltdown and Spectre: far from the solution?
In June 2017, a team constituted of independent researchers, university research labs, and some of Google’s Project Zero members and cyberus technology discovered two security vulnerabilities enabled by the widespread use of speculative execution in most of the CPU. The problem was also independentl... - Using Linux Kernel 4.15 to minimize Meltdown and Spectre
Linux Kernel 4.15 has been released on 28 Jan 2018 and, thanks to the entire Linux Kernel development team, this release contains the latest code to deal with Meltdown and Spectre issues and minize the related risks. The Kernel is the core code in the operating system managing low level tasks. In th... - Rubrik acquires Datos IO
Rubrik has announced that it has agreed to acquire Datos IO, a market leader in backup and recovery for NoSQL databases and big data file systems. Datos IO is the application-centric data management company for the multi-cloud world. Datos IO delivers a radically novel approach to data management, h... - New Dell-EMC PowerEdge servers with AMD EPYC
On May 2017, Dell EMC announced the next generation of PowerEdge servers: the new 14th generation, the first with the new Dell-EMC logo. After less than 3 years from the introduction of Generation 13 of PowerEdge series, the newly designed 14th generation of the Dell EMC PowerEdge server portfolio f... - Per VM license in Veeam products
Veeam licenses software in a variety of ways depending on the specific product and/or use case you are interested in. This includes licensing by the number of CPU sockets on a managed server (or host), as well as by the number of VMs, physical servers, workstations, cloud instances and/or users bein...
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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