FROM THE EDITORS VIRTUAL DESK
Hi everyone welcome to another edition of the TAM newsletter, your regular dose of news from the world of VMware and virtualization. We have lots of news for you but I wanted to discuss some interesting new solutions from VMware that you may be interested in looking into specifically if you are a Hybrid cloud customer. We recently introduced, after previewing at VMworld, AWS Greengrass on vSphere. This is a fantastic solution for edge computing if you are an AWS and VMware customer and provides many features that our customers are looking for in the ever expanding world of edge computing. I urge you to take a look at this and I will keep you updated on anything new on this and other interesting and dynamic solutions that we arte bringing to market in an increasingly hybrid world. Please take a look herefor more info.
I wish you a fantastic week, please enjoy the newsletter.
Virtually Yours
VMware TAM Team
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NEWS AND DEVELOPMENTS FROM VMWARE
- Executive Perspective Podcast: Karen Egan, VP for Global Services and NSX Support
Karen Egan, VMware’s vice president for global services and NSX support, has a technical background and studied technology in school, but found her real passion was helping other businesses solve their problems. “What motivates me is talking to our customers,” says Egan. “I love sitting down, one-t... - Executive Perspective Podcast: Dom Delfino, SVP of Worldwide Sales and Systems Engineering
Dom Delfino is VMware’s senior vice president of worldwide sales and systems engineering for the software-defined data center. He spends about 75 percent of his time on the road meeting with customers, channel partners, and ecosystem partners. According to Delfino, the practical realities associate... - Accelerating Cloud Services Innovation through Strategic M&A
By Shekar Ayyar, Executive Vice President, Strategy and Corporate Development and General Manager, Telco NFV Group As we continue our journey towards bringing the best software infrastructure solutions spanning private and public clouds, today I’m excited to share with you two technology and talent...
- VMware Open-Sources Code Stream Plugin for Kubernetes
By Arihant Jain and Mohit Rajendra, VMware R&D VMware is happy to announce that the vRealize Code Stream plugin for Kubernetes is now available as an open source project! https://github.com/vmware/codestream-kubernetes-plugin In a short time, Kubernetes has become the leading container orchestra... - VMware Welcomes Alex Ellis
VMware is happy to welcome Alex Ellis to the VMware Open Source Technology Center (OSTC). Alex, the creator and lead of the OpenFaaS project, joins VMware’s growing team of open source experts to continue his defining work in Functions as a Service (FaaS). Alex’s résumé contains much more than just ... - 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...
- vSphere 5.5 and vSAN 5.5 End of General Support Reminder
We would like to remind you that the End of General Support (EOGS) for vSphere 5.5 and vSAN 5.5 is September 19, 2018. To maintain your full level of Support and Subscription Services, VMware recommends upgrading to vSphere 6.5. Note that by upgrading to vSphere 6.5 you not only get all the lat... - 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...
- What’s Your #TechConfession?
Think back to the first moment you fell in love with technology. Was it love at first deployment? What about developing code to trick your school’s bell system into letting your class out early? If you love all things technology, or you’re a technologist, then you should definitely put #Tech... - Take Application Security to the Next Level – VMware and Carbon Black team up
Perhaps you’ve already begun to secure virtualized applications by rolling out micro-segmentation with NSX, but segmentation of the network is only the beginning to embracing least privilege in your environment. VMware has teamed up with Carbon Black to go beyond network protection an... - Ready for Take-Off with Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, and vSphere
A complex and diverse world Singapore. Etihad. Wow. I always found it impressive when airlines were able to build a business and a brand without a significant domestic customer base to start off from. They instead focus on the global market, which is much more challenging. There is a competitive la...
- vRrealize Network Insight 3.7 – Network Insight Service February 2018 New Releases
The newest release of vRealize Network Insight and the Network Insight Service include a number of great new features. We are supporting several new scenarios for Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers. Another new feature is Infoblox Grid Manager integration (coming soon to the Network Insight Servi... - Monitoring NoSQL RIAK KV Database with Wavefront
Riak KV is distributed key-value NoSQL database that provides a very reliable way to store massive amounts of unstructured data. It enables development of big data applications, so it is very important to monitor your RIAK KV instance performance to avoid problems in your applications. The Wavefr... - Understanding the impact of Spectre and Meltdown patches for end users and consumers
In a recent post we’ve discussed how to leverage vRealize Operations to assess the performance & capacity impact of the Spectre and Meltdown patches. Though the situation around these patches continues to evolve let’s build upon gauging the infrastructure impact and move deeper into the stack. In ...
- Connect with VMware at ContainerWorld
The third-annual ContainerWorld, Feb. 26-28, is all about helping organizations drive business and technical agility with containers. Bringing the promise of cloud-native to the enterprise is the mission statement driving this year’s ContainerWorld. Around 750 software engineers, DevOps professional... - A Look Into the Kubernetes Master Components
By Tom Schwaller, Sr. Technical Product Manager, VMware CNABU This blog post looks at the most important control plane components of a single Kubernetes master node — etcd, the API server, the scheduler and the controller manager — and explains how they work together. Although other components, suc... - 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...
VMware End-User Computing Blog
- VMware Supports New Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+, Continuing Strong Partnership
On Sunday, Feb. 25, Samsung announced the new Galaxy S9 and S9+ devices, the next offerings within the Samsung flagship Galaxy line. For VMware Workspace ONE, powered by VMware AirWatch technology, customers that manage their devices with market-leading unified endpoint management (UEM) capabilities... - Meltdown and Spectre: What You Need to Know to Secure Your End-User Computing Environment
Co-Author: Adi Kunduri, Senior Product Marketing Manager, VMware EUC Although Meltdown and Spectre have been publicly disclosed since January, the two security vulnerabilities remain at the top of daily technology and digital security news fe... - [Deep Dive] User Approved MDM in macOS High Sierra
What Is User Approved MDM? The release of macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 introduces User Approved Mobile Device Management (MDM) enrollment. This enrollment flow requires the end-user to approve device enrollment before an administrator can manage its security-sensitive settings. To qualify as a user-ap...
- Skyline – Proactive Recommendations for Issue Avoidance
VMware Skyline is a proactive support technology that listens for changes, events and patterns within your VMware environment. This information is then analyzed using a robust rules and machine learning engine. Once data analysis has completed, proactive recommendations are provided for each potenti... - New KB articles published for week ending 18th February 2018
VMware Horizon Provision of linked clone virtual machines fails with error: ‘Fail to connect to the UFA service’ Date Published: 2018/2/12 Issue with local IME composition window position for some remote apps Date Published: 2018/2/14 FAQ: Horizon 7, App Volumes, UEM Extended Service Branches (... - New KB articles published for week ending 11th February 2018
VMware vRealize Operations for Published Applications V4PA Broker agent utility controller credentials entries get removed Date Published:2018/2/5 VMware ESXi Windows Server version 1709 crashes or restarts automatically when hot adding vCPU Date Published:2018/2/5 16.04 VM (from .ova file) ha... - 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... - 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 ...
- Introducing VMware Validated Design for Software-Defined Data Center 4.2
On Feb 13th VMware released the VMware Validated Design for Software-Defined Data Center version 4.2. This latest update to our detailed prescriptive path on how to implement, operate, and maintain a VMware based Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) includes a few minor changes, such as updates to t... - 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...
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...
- What is VMware vSphere On-Disk Metadata Analyzer – VOMA
VMware vSphere and ESXi has a very solid storage system. You might be interested in a fact, that there is a tool, similar to Windows chkdsk, which can check and identify incidents on metadata corruption which might affect file systems or underlying logical volumes. During such situations, you might ... - Top 5 Useful VMware ESXi CLI Commands
When working with VMware ESXi and vSphere, there is a time when you have to go into the CLI and fix problems, look for details which you don’t get through the UI or those details would be many clicks away. During those times you might appreciate to know and learn our selection of Top 5 Useful VMware... - 5 Ways to Change Hostname of your ESXi host
This post is a quick recap of different ways to change a hostname of an ESXi host. There are different ways we work and different tools we use. Not every time we have the chance to use the tools we want, or we have an access directly to the server room or to the console. This […] Read the full... - Free Up Disk Space On Windows 10 – The New Way
A quick tip today for users struggling with a free space on their W10 computer. We’ll show you a quick tip for a new way to free disk space. Windows 10 (starting build has introduced a new way to Free Up Disk Space. Previously this was usually possible through the properties of the C: drive […... - Runecast Analyzer 1.7 Adds VMware vSAN Support and More Visibility into Virtual Infrastructures
Runecast just released a new version of their flagship product – Runecast Analyzer 1.7. An interesting new vSAN support and new widget in the dashboard which allows you to see the issues by different layers (Management, VM, Compute, network or storage). The product runs in a lab, where I’m running a...
- Which policy changes can trigger a rebuild on vSAN?
Some time ago, I wrote about which policy changes can trigger a rebuild of an object. This came up again recently, as it was something that Duncan and I covered in our VMworld 2017 session on top 10 vSAN considerations. In the original post (which is over 3 years old now), I highlighted items like i... - A first look at AWS Greengrass on vSphere
Last week, I had the pleasure to attend our CTO Ambassadors conference, hosted by our Global Field CTO Chris Wolf. This was an excellent week, especially for someone like me who works directly for a single business unit at VMware. It gave me great insight into the activities going on in our other bu... - 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, ...
- Technology Short Take 95
Welcome to Technology Short Take 95! This Short Take was a bit more challenging than normal to compile, given that I spent the week leading up to its publication visiting customers in Europe. (My travel schedule in Europe is also why it didn’t get published until Saturday instead of the typica... - 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...
- Is 2018 the year of VVols?
Next month VMware’s new Virtual Volumes (VVols) storage architecture will turn 3 years old as it was released as part of vSphere 6.0 in March of 2015. Since it’s initial release adoption has been very slow, I believe VMware estimates less than 2% of customers are using VVols. So will 201... - VMworld 2018 Call For Papers is open – here’s how to get people to vote for and attend your session
VMware just announced that the Call for Papers for VMworld 2018 is now open until March 13th. Just like last year, this year VMware has opened early compared to the usual March-April period of years past. Remember VMworld US is again back in Vegas this year at the Mandalay Bay from Aug. 26th-30th, V... - Automating Storage Provisioning using VMware vRealize Orchestrator
I finally got my company to get on board with an external webinar platform and I get to kick off the very first webinar on BrightTalk.The topic is on vRealize Orchestrator integration with the 3PAR platform as an example, I promise this will be a technical webinar and not a sales pitch so if you ... - 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...
- Its time for change, and change = renewed invention, renewed vigor, renewed discovery.
I’m going to make this a two-part post. Part 1 = what is in the rear-view window? Part 2 = what’s out the front windshield? Part 1: CPSD and Dell EMC are in my rear-view window. First, while want to close the chapter behind me - it’s a flawed analogy, because it suggests some sort of “finality”. ... - The best athletes (and VxBlock 1000) = faster, higher, stronger!
In watching the Olympics, it’s amazing to see athletes doing amazing things – frankly it’s inspiring. Sometimes it’s a new star rising – something new (amazing Chloe Kim!) . Sometimes it’s a veteran pulling a “Michael Phelps” – producing every 4 years (see Dutch speed skater Sven Kramer). I’m not... - 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...
- RVTools version 3.10 is now available for download
RVTools is a windows .NET 4.6.1 application which uses the VI SDK to display information about your virtual environments. Interacting with VirtualCenter ESX Server 6.5. RVTools is able to list information about VMs, CPU, Memory, Disks, Partitions, Network, Floppy drives, CD drives, Snapshots... - VMware Horizon Cloud Fundamentals
This eLearning course provides information on how VMware Horizon Cloud Service helps IT meet the expectations of today’s mobile workforce. This course explains the architecture, features, benefits, and functionality of the two service offerings of Horizon Cloud: VMware Horizon Cloud Service w... - New Technical White Paper - Containers and Container Networking with NSX
This document is targeted toward virtualization and network architects interested in deploying VMware NSX network virtualization solutions in conjunction with containers and solutions that are part of the container ecosystem (ex. PaaS and CaaS platforms). This whitepaper provides guidance and ... - 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...
- 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 »...
- RVTools version 3.10
RVTools is a Windows .NET application, easy to be install which uses the VI API to collect and display informations about your vSphere virtual environments. RVTools supports ESX Server 3.5, VirtualCenter 2.5, ESX Server 3i, ESX Server 4i, VirtualCenter 4.x, ESX 4.x, VirtualCenter 5.0, VirtualCenter ... - #TFD16 – Tech Field Day 16
I’m very proud and honored to be invited again to the next Tech Field Day in Austin (TX). It will be the 16th edition of Tech Field Day (#TFD16), just one year after the 13th, still in Austin (and where I was also invited). I’m very excited for this event, that remains a must for all techie-people: ... - VMware vCenter 6.5U1f patch for Meltdown and Spectre issues
VMware has released (on Feb, 15th) a new vCSA version: vCenter Server 6.5 U1f, with build number 7801515. This release patches the vCSA operating system (Photon OS) mainly against two vulnerabilities: bounds-check bypass (Spectre-1, CVE-2017-5753) and rogue data cache load issues (Meltdown, CVE-2017... - New Meltdown and Spectre variants
We are still far from a solution for the Meltdown and Spectre, considering the delay of the microcode releases and the complexity of the possible Spectre fixes… And now, some security researchers from NVIDIA and Princeton have discovered new variants of the Meltdown and Spectre flaws that may ... - Runecast Analyzer v1.7 with vSAN analysis
Runecast announces the new release version 1.7 of its proactive issue detection software, Runecast Analyzer. After the Meltdown and Spectre detection added in the previous releases, this latest version brings other interesting news. Runecast Analyzer is powered by the largest database of automated V...
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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