FROM THE EDITORS VIRTUAL DESK
Hi everyone, I hope that your past two or so weeks since the last newsletter have been productive. There is a lot to catch up on in the world of VMware, and I hope that some of this is conveyed in the items of news below.
I also want to bring your attention to VMworld 2018 which will be happening in August in Las Vegas. This is of course the premier event of the year and as a TAM customer I am sure that you are looking forward to attending and the many special access areas that you are afforded. As we do every year we will keep everyone up to date in the newsletter as well as on Twitter so please make sure you are following us. I will definitely have a lot of additional news for you on VMworld in the coming weeks and of course chat to your TAM if you haven't already.
There are also a number of new items to consider for new vulnerabilities that now have VMware patches that may be applicable to your environment. I urge you to discuss with your VMware TAM as well as consider all of the advice from our friends over at VMware Support when considering your risk to any of these as well as the best way to patch your environment to ensure your complete safety.
I wish you all a successful week ahead and look forward to bringing more news to you soon.
Virtually Yours
The VMware TAM Team
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TAM Webinar Series
Topic: vRealize Operations 6.7
Thursday, July 12, 2018
11:00am EST/ 10:00am CST / 8:00am PST
Register Here!
Abstract:
In today’s session John Dias will discuss What’s New with vRealize Operations 6.7. The session will also cover upgrade considerations and provide an introduction to how Wavefront can enable monitoring for DevOps use cases.
Guest speakers:
John Dias is a Sr. Technical Marketing Architect with VMware specializing in Cloud Management solutions.
NEWS AND DEVELOPMENTS FROM VMWARE
- A Clear Case for Cloud: Why CIOs Often Start with These Apps
For CIOs just starting a journey to the cloud, here’s where the technology’s impact immediately shines. Anyone who has ever doubted IT’s significant impact on a company’s top line hasn’t considered how much can go wrong during the delivery of digital products, services and experiences to customers.... - How to Help Enable Nonprofits with Technology
Software has the power to unlock new possibilities for people, and for the planet. And yet, not everyone is benefiting equally from automation and operational efficiency. NTEN’s 10th Annual Nonprofit Technology Staffing & Investment report showed that the average technology budget of nonprofits is 5... - Equality in Action: Inclusion in Everything We Do
Alaina Roberts joins colleagues to raise visibility of LGBTQ+ activities and programs at VMware Alaina Robertson was raised in a house with non-traditional gender norms, in what she refers to as “hyper-liberal” Seattle. Having discovered her sexual orientation early on, it was easy for her to come ...
- Summer Reading List: 10 Open Source Must-Reads for the Season
It’s that time of year again—where the days last longer, the sun comes out in full force and everyone flocks to the nearest watering hole to cool down and celebrate the season. That’s right, summertime is officially upon us and whether you’re staying local or jetting off on a tropical vacation, you ... - Women’s Conferences Resonate for an Open Source Change Agent
I recently attended two local conferences for women in technology and walked away with a big dose of inspiration and wisdom. When I go to conferences like these, I’m looking to learn how I can be better at what I do, and both events were packed with women who have overcome major obstacles in their ... - How to Retain Open Source Contributors
By Nisha Kumar, open source engineer, VMware I recently wrote about my experience running a developer sprint at this year’s PyCon, the big annual Python conference. But another important side of conference going is the opportunity it affords for impromptu conversations with fellow developers. Specif...
- Upgrade Considerations for VMware vSphere 6.7
Upgrading to VMware vSphere 6.7 With the recent excitement of vSphere 6.7 being released to the public, it’s only natural that a lot of discussion has revolved around upgrades. How do we upgrade, or even why should we upgrade have been the most popular questions recently. In this post I will cover ... - vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS at Dell Technologies World 2018
Are you planning to attend Dell Technologies World this year? So is the vSphere team! We’re excited to be part of the show, and to talk about all the ways the latest version of vSphere can help you support the demands of your business customers. Do you have questions? We would love to meet with you ... - Introducing VMware vSphere 6.7!
We are excited to share that today VMware is announcing vSphere 6.7, the latest release of the industry-leading virtualization and cloud platform. vSphere 6.7 is the efficient and secure platform for hybrid clouds, fueling digital transformation by delivering simple and efficient management at scale...
- Boston Medical Center Secures Electronic Patient Records with VMware NSX
Boston City Hospital and Boston University Medical Center Hospital merged in 1996 to form Boston Medical Center (BMC). This 497-bed teaching hospital in the South End of Boston provides primary and critical care to a diverse population and houses the largest Level 1 trauma center in New Englan... - Micro-segmentation Starter Kit
Traditional security solutions are designed to protect the perimeter. As applications and data are becoming increasingly distributed, they are often spanning not only multiple sites, but also multiple clouds. This is making it harder to identify where the perimeter actually is in order to secure i... - Two-Factor Authentication with VMware NSX-T
In a previous post, I covered how to integrate NSX-T with VMware Identity Manager (vIDM) to achieve remote user authentication and role-based access control (RBAC) for users registered with a corporate Active Directory (AD). On this post, I’m showing how add two-factor authentication (2FA) for N...
- vRealize Log Insight and VMware Log Intelligence: Better Together
Credit to NICO GUERRERA for blog content (Bio Below)! vRealize Log Insight 1.0 was released for general availability in 2013, and since then it has steadily grown in features, scale, and customer adoption. I have worked with customers who have deployed up to sixty nodes of Log Insight across mul... - May 16th Webinar: More Usability Improvements of vRealize Automation and vRealize Life Cycle Manager
On May 16th, we will be hosting another Getting More Out of VMware webinar. The webinar is designed for Cloud Administrators and VI Administrators who leverage vRealize Suite products, such as vRealize Automation, to run their virtual infrastructure and cloud environment. It will be a great opportu... - Decision Driven Provisioning with Anything as a Service (XaaS)
Decision Driven Provisioning with XaaS To me, the power of vRealize Automation has always been how easy it is to take square pegs and fit them into round holes. Generally this capability comes in the form of leveraging “Anything as a Service”, also known as XaaS. XaaS allows you to take any vRealiz...
- Enable the Easy Button to Bridge the Worlds of Containers and VMs — Watch Pat Gelsinger’s Keynote at Dell Technologies World on VMware Pivotal Container Service
Ning Ge, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Cloud-Native Apps, VMware At last week’s Dell Technologies World, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger delivered a keynote speech on stage where he talked about Pivotal Container Service (PKS), the Kubernetes solution brought to you by VMware with Pivotal, in collaborati... - Red Hat Summit returns to the City by the Bay
By Susan Wu, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Cloud-Native Apps On the heels of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, we’re following up on the cloud-native momentum and heading to the City by the Bay for Red Hat Summit, May 8-10, 2018. We have two theater sessions devoted to the synergies between Kub... - VMware Pivotal Container Service Journeys to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe
By Susan Wu, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Cloud-Native Apps We’re following up our VMware SIG announcement with some exciting plans for our presence at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Copenhagen. On the heels of the last Cloud Foundry Summit in Boston, we’re starting to see the Cloud Foundry an...
VMware End-User Computing Blog
- Half Year Review: Digital Workspace Advancements for Security in 2018
It feels like 2018 just began, yet here we are in the middle of summer! Time is flying by, but there’s been no shortage of activity centered around security, privacy, and compliance for our End-User Computing team. In the first half of 2018, we’ve announced a number of digital workspace advancements... - What’s New in VMware Unified Access Gateway 3.3
VMware Unified Access Gateway (UAG) is the security gateway for VMware Workspace ONE. It provides secure edge services and access to defined resources that reside in the internal network. This access allows authorized external users to access internally located resources in a secure manner. Today’s ... - Secure iOS Devices with VMware Workspace ONE & Cisco Security Connector
With 82% of the work done on mobile taking place on an Apple iOS device, there’s no doubt that iOS plays a major role in the enterprise. Fortunately, VMware’s multi-year partnership with Apple has supported organizations managing and securing Apple iOS devices with VMware Workspace ONE. The Workspac...
- New KB articles published for week ending 24th June 2018
New KB articles published for week ending 17th June 2018
Proactively Identifying Potential Risk with VMware Skyline
New KB articles published for week ending 10th June 2018
Top 20 vSAN articles for May 2018
- Patching Made Easy with VMware Cloud Foundation
A common challenge faced by every IT department is keeping up with the inevitable and never-ending flow of software updates. This becomes even more critical in a modern Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), where compute, network and storage virtualization are interwoven into a unified data center fa... - VMware Cloud Foundation Architecture Poster 2.3
VMware is pleased to release the latest VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) architecture poster. VCF is a fully automated, hyper-converged software stack that includes compute, storage, networking and cloud management. Because VCF has so many tightly integrated products, it is important to understand the ... - HPE Synergy and VMware Cloud Foundation – now certified
Author Bhumik Patel – Technical Alliances, VMware @bhumikp Introduction: As customers leverage VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) to provide integrated Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) & cloud management services for running enterprise applications, it becomes critical to rely on an underlying pl...
EXTERNAL NEWS FROM 3RD PARTY BLOGGERS VMGuru
- Best Practices for Hardening the Veeam Backup Repository (Windows)
A good way of hardening the backup repository is by running it on a standalone Windows Server with storage attached to it. Create/Use a local account with administrative access and make sure only this (newly created) account has access rights to the location where the... The post Best Practices for... - New Lab Stuff
Some time ago, back in December of 2015, I started a three-part story on how to have a supported SMB or lab environment. It consisted of a couple of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Microserver Gen 8’s and a NAS by QNAP. Check out the three part... The post New Lab Stuff appeared first on VMGuru. ... - Running OTNSX in a Docker container
In march of this year we released a whitepaper on automating security using a helpdesk system. For the whitepaper we where using VMware NSX and OTRS. The middleware we created to service it all was given the name OTNSX. More recently I have started playing... The post Running OTNSX in a Docker cont... - What is the VMware Virtual Cloud Network?
A couple of weeks ago, VMware launched the Virtual Cloud Network (VCN). It’s kind of obvious that this is a marketing term and not a specific product or service. However, it’s not all fluff and there is actually some good meat behind this announcement and... The post What is the VMware Virtual Clou... - Upgrade vRealize Suite using vRealize Lifecycle Manager
Recently VMware updated their entire vRealize Suite. It’s always nice to receive a new suite of products with new shiny functionality but it also means a lot of work for you sysadmins, upgrading your entire environment. Well, not any more! With vRealize Lifecycle Manager it... The post Upgrad...
- Auditing detailed operations within VMware Cloud on AWS using the Activity Log API
All operations (UI or API) that occurs within VMware Cloud AWS (VMC), including but not limited to SDDC creation, deletion, updates, network configurations, user authorization/access, etc. is all captured as part of the Activity Log in the VMC Console. Within the Activity Log, customers will be able... - Retrieving detailed per-VM space utilization on VSAN
I was recently helping out my friend Paudie O'Riordan with a request from a customer who was looking for a way to collect detailed space utilization for their VMs (VM Home, VMDK & swap) running on VSAN. Today, this level of granularity is not available in the vSphere UI and the customer was inte... - Using ESXi Kickstart %firstboot with Secure Boot
If you install ESXi via a Kickstart script and make use of the %firstboot option to execute commands on the first boot of the ESXi host after installation, you should be aware of its incompatibility with the Secure Boot feature. If you install ESXi where Secure Boot is enabled, the Kickstart will in... - Use cases for Anti-Affinity VM-Host Rules
I was in a meeting last week with Engineering and a question had come up on whether customers were actively using the Anti-Affinity (AA) VM-Host Rules capability and if so, what are some of the use cases? We know that Anti-Affinity VM-VM Rules are used quite regularly by customers and the use cases... - OVFTool and VMware Cloud on AWS
Recently, I had noticed a number of questions that have come up regarding the use of OVFTool with the VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) service. I had a chance to take a look at this last Friday and I can confirm that customers can indeed use this tool to import/export VMs into VMC whether they […]...
- StarWind Virtual SAN and Stretched Cluster Architecture
Perhaps you did not know, but StarWind Virtual SAN also supports stretched cluster architectures. For an average admin, it might not be an everyday solution as it is used for special use cases with strict networking requirements (latency and bandwidth). To understand what “stretched cluster” is. You... - VMware Workstation 2018 Tech Preview Released
Just a few days ago, VMware has released a VMware Workstation 2018 Tech Preview which allows you to test new features and enhancements fro the upcoming VMware Workstation Pro 2018 release. This tech preview does not need a serial to enter when using it but it’s a time-limited version. It means that ... - Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility – Free Tool
There is a new update on Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility, which is a free tool for VMware vSphere. The tool is free but is not intended to be used in the production system, because it’s only experimental. The same for all the other VMware Flings. Download only when accepting the checkbox…. ... - Runecast Announcing NSX-V support with Runecast Analyzer 1.8
Runecast analyzer continues its rapid development with fast update cycles. Today we’ll report on their latest update of Runecast Analyzer 1.8 which brings VMware NSX-V support allowing to detect misconfiguration and problems within your NSX-V environment. One of the previous releases of Runecast bro... - Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Ravello Service Is a Good Choice for DevOps
Enterprise admins usually value their time which is precious. At the end of the day, the working day has only 24 hours, so every min saved counts. Same for hardware savings, when you need to implement a new application in production, you first need a testing environment. If you don’t have testing en...
- Minio S3 object store deployed as a set of VMs on vSAN
Some time back, I looked at what it would take to run a container based Minio S3 object store on top of vSAN. This involved using our vSphere Docker Volume Server (aka Project Hatchway, and the details can be found here. However, I wanted to evaluate what it would take to scale out the Minio S3 obje... - A deeper-dive into Fault Tolerant VMs running on vSAN
After receiving a number of queries about vSphere Fault Tolerance on vSAN over the past couple of weeks, I decided to take a closer look at how Fault Tolerant VMs behave with different vSAN policies. I wanted to take a look at two different policies. The first is when the “failures to tolerate” (com... - Integrating NSX-T and Pivotal Container Services (PKS)
If you’ve been following along my recent blog posts, you’ll have seen that I have been spending some time ramping up on NSX-T and Pivotal Container Services (PKS). My long term goal was to see how these two products integrate together and to figure out the various moving parts. As I was very unfamil... - Next steps with NSX-T Edge – Routing and BGP
If you’ve been following along on my NSX-T adventures, you’ll be aware that at this point we have our overlay network deployed, and our NSX-T edge has been setup to with DHCP servers attached to my logical switch, which in turn provides IP addresses to my virtual machines. This is all fine and well,... - Performance Checklist now available for vSAN benchmarking
Hot on the heels of the vSAN 6.7 release, a new performance checklist for vSAN benchmarking has now been published on our StorageHub site. This is the result of a project that I started a few months back with my colleague, Paudie O’Riordan. It builds upon a huge amount of groundwork that was already...
- More Handy CLI Tools for JSON
In late 2015 I wrote a post about a command-line tool named jq, which is used for parsing JSON data. Since that time I’ve referenced jq in a number of different blog posts (like this one). However, jq is not the only game in town for parsing JSON data at the command line. In this post, I&rsquo... - A Quick Intro to the AWS CLI
This post provides a (very) basic introduction to the AWS CLI (command-line interface) tool. It’s not intended to be a deep dive, nor is it intended to serve as a comprehensive reference guide (the AWS CLI docs nicely fill that need). I also assume that you already have a basic understanding o... - Examining X.509 Certificates Embedded in Kubeconfig Files
While exploring some of the intricacies around the use of X.509v3 certificates in Kubernetes, I found myself wanting to be able to view the details of a certificate embedded in a kubeconfig file. (See this page if you’re unfamiliar with what a kubeconfig file is.) In this post, I’ll shar... - Using Variables in AWS Tags with Terraform
I’ve been working to deepen my Terraform skills recently, and one avenue I’ve been using to help in this area is expanding my use of Terraform modules. If you’re unfamiliar with the idea of Terraform modules, you can liken them to Ansible roles: a re-usable abstraction/function tha... - A Quadruple-Provider Vagrant Environment
In October 2016 I wrote about a triple-provider Vagrant environment I’d created that worked with VirtualBox, AWS, and the VMware provider (tested with VMware Fusion). Since that time, I’ve incorporated Linux (Fedora, specifically) into my computing landscape, and I started using the Libv...
- Top vBlog 2018 starting soon, make sure your site is included
I’ll be kicking off Top vBlog 2018 very soon and my vLaunchPad website is the source for the blogs included in the Top vBlog voting each year so please take a moment and make sure your blog is listed. Every year I get emails from bloggers after the voting starts wanting to be added but … Con... - Configuration maximum changes in vSphere 6.7
A comparison using the Configuration Maximum tool for vSphere shows the following changes between vSphere 6.5 & 6.7. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]... - Important information to know before upgrading to vSphere 6.7
vSphere 6.7 is here and with support for vSphere 5.5 ending soon (Sept.) many people will be considering upgrading to it. Before you rush in though there is some important information about this release that you should be aware of. First let’s talk upgrade paths, you can’t just upgrade f... - vSphere 6.7 Link-O-Rama
Your complete guide to all the essential vSphere 6.7 links from all over the VMware universe. Bookmark this page and keep checking back as it will continue to grow as new links are added everyday. Also be sure and check out the Planet vSphere-land feed for all the latest blog posts from the Top 100 ... - Summary of What’s New in vSphere 6.7
Today VMware announced vSphere 6.7 coming almost a year and a half after the release of vSphere 6.5. Doesn’t look like the download is quite available yet but it should be shortly. Below is the What’s New document from the Release Candidate that summarizes most of the big things new in t...
- 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...
- Free e-book - Cloud Management For Dummies
Companies in all industries are responding to new opportunities to leverage big data and mobility to improve service and increase productivity. For IT teams, the switch to digitally driven business has big implications. Download this book to learn how to meet these cloud-driven challenges, inc... - vCenter Embedded Linked Mode
vCenter Server embedded linked mode enables you to connect multiple vCenter Servers together seamlessly without the need for external Platform Services Controllers.vCenter Server embedded ... - VMware Horizon v7.5 Help Desk Tool Feature Walkthrough
Complete overview and demonstration of the Horizon Help Desk Tool along with the enhancements included with the new VMware Horizon 7.5 release. ... - Free ebook - Accelerating Digital Transformation with Containers and Kubernetes
Container technology can help transform a company into a digital enterprise focused on delivering innovations at the speed of business. Containers package applications and their dependencies into a distributable image that can run almost anywhere, streamlining the development and deployment of ... - HPE Scalable Persistent Memory Virtualized with VMware vSphere 6.7
What is persistent memory and what are its benefits? This video provides an overview and briefly walks through some of the technical components. ...
- 7th Gen NUC Remote Management with KVM using vPro AMT
Intel's latest 7th Gen Dawson Canyon NUCs are equipped with AMT vPro Technology. Intel AMT (Active Management Technology) allows remote management including a KVM Console. vPro is available in NUCs with i7 and i5 CPUs. NUCs with i3 CPUs do …Read more »... - ESXi on 7th Gen Intel NUC (Kaby Lake - Dawson Canyon)
Intel launched a commercial version of their 7th Gen NUCs. The new Dawson Canyon named NUCs are available with vPro technology which allows you to manage NUCs remotely. NUCs are not officially supported by VMware but they are very widespread in many …Read more »... - vCenter Service Appliance 6.7 Tips and Tricks
VMware is moving their vCenter Server from Windows to the Linux based Photon OS. The following tips and tricks might come handy when working with the vCenter Service Appliance 6.7: Enable SSH File Transfer with SCP/SFTP Public Key Authentication Disable …Read more »... - Free ESXi 6.7 - How to Download and get License Keys
vSphere 6.7 has been released and as known from previous versions, VMware provides a free version of their Hypervisor ESXi for everyone again. The license key can be created for free at VMware's website. It has no expiration date. The …Read more »... - VMware ESXi 6.7 - IO Devices not certified for upgrade
Beside Server Hardware, also double check if your IO Devices (eg. NIC, HBA,..) are supported when updating ESXi hosts from VMware vSphere 6.5 to 6.7. The following devices were supported in vSphere 6.5 but are according to VMware's HCL not (yet) …Read more »...
- Update the VCSA to latest 6.1U1g and not to 6.5U2
VMware vSphere 6.5 it’s quite popolar now, considering the deadline for the version 5.5 in this year and the direct upgrade path from v5.5 to v6.5. But maybe not everybody want to update vSphere 6.5 to Update 2, considering that there will be no upgrade path (yet) to version 6.7 and maybe othe... - VMworld is still valuable?
During the last years I hear from several people that the huge VMworld event is becoming less attractive. Several people just say (for different reasons) that they probably will not attent VMworld event… unless finally going anyway… But it’s VMworld still a valuable event? An unmis... - Runecast for NSX environments
Runecast is a powerful tool to monitoring and check a vSphere environment and recently also for a VSAN environment. But it’s not over, actually there is a beta for the new version (Runecast version: 1.7.6 probably) that can analyze also NSX-V environments and this could be quite cool, consider... - VMware Workstation and Windows 10 Security
The new build of Windows 10 have a lot of new security settings and some of them can make cause issues with VMware Workstation (or potentially also other host hypervisors). One common issue when you try to power on a VM in Workstation and instead you get this error message: VMware Workstation and De... - #SFD16 – Storage Field Day 16
I’m very proud and honored to be invited to the next Storage Field Day in Boston. It will be the 16th edition of Storage Field Day (#SFD16), and seems to be very interestning both for the presenters and the delegates lists. I’m very excited for this event, that remains a must for all techie-people: ...
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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