FROM THE EDITORS VIRTUAL DESK
Hi everyone, firstly I want to apologize for some of the duplicates that crept into the last newsletter. This does happen from time to time as news feeds that we use change their feeds or even stop publishing regularly making the feed go stale. We do try and keep on top of this on a regular basis to ensure that we are bringing you the newest and freshest news for each newsletter.
This week we have many updates including VMworld 2018, new security advisories as well as education resources from our friends at VMware Education.
Please subscribe to our Facebook or Twitter to ensure that you are receiving the latest and greatest updates from the VMware TAM Program especially with the lead up to VMworld 2018.
Have a great week everyone.
Virtually Yours
VMware TAM Team
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VMWARE SECURITY ADVISORIES
VMSA-2018-0017
Severity: Important
Synopsis: VMware Tools update addresses an out-of-bounds read vulnerability
Issue date: 2018-07-12
CVE numbers: CVE-2018-6969
TAM CUSTOMER WEBINARS
PowerCLI, RESTful APIs, and more
Date: Thursday, August 9th
Time: 11:00am EST/ 10:00am CST/ 8:00am PST
Duration: 1.5 Hour
Synopsis:
This session comes packed with automation goodness! We’ll take a look at all the latest and greatest features and updates for PowerCLI. (Hint: there’s already been 2 releases this year and we’re not slowing down anytime soon!) We’ll also take a look at how VMware is making the APIs easier to consume with a new set of RESTful APIs
Guest speakers:
Kyle Ruddy is a Senior Technical Marketing Engineer at VMware in the Cloud Platform Business Unit. Kyle currently focuses on vSphere with Operations Management as well as all things API, SDK, and CLI.
Registration Link:
https://vmware.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_EeoxTJ0gRnOn4gsSmuG_hg
VMWARE EDUCATION
Did you know that VMware offers industry-leading training?
VMware software connects, manages, and automates the world’s digital infrastructure. Is your business maximizing the value of its VMware investment? VMware Education Services is the training and certification division that is dedicated to expanding VMware knowledge and expertise. Our offerings span installation, configuration, management, troubleshooting, advanced design and certification programs. Our training programs offer expansive choice for your IT Team to access sessions either in classroom, live online, hands-on labs or through courses on demand. Discover how our customized training solutions can accelerate VMware software proficiency, improve business outcomes and accelerate value.
NEWS AND DEVELOPMENTS FROM VMWARE
- 5 Questions About VMware’s Stake in the Native Public Cloud
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Networking is undergoing a fundamental transformation. The network of the past—inflexible, brittle, and time-consuming—cannot help companies meet the demands of the digital present, much less the future. How is modern networking technology meeting the demand for pervasive connectivity and integrated...
- Install, Update and Contribute to open-vm-tools Easier Than Ever Before
By Rohit Agarwal, Yogendra Bhasin and Nisha Rai VMware Tools is part of VMware’s vSphere suite, which brings a set of services and capabilities to end-users that enable operating systems to work within the VMware environment. About four years ago, we started developing a version optimized to work wi... - A Consistent Approach to GPLv2 Compliance
Over the past nine months, we have seen a growing consensus in the industry regarding one specific aspect of GPL compliance. Since the October 2017 announcement of the Linux kernel Technical Advisory Board’s Linux Kernel Enforcement Statement, which stated that the Linux kernel project was ado... - KernelShark — The Future of Trace Data Visualization
KernelShark, the open source graphical user interface or tracing data that gives users a view of the events happening within the Linux kernel, has proven useful for many kernel developers—but it’s not without its limitations. That’s why we’re now in the process of completely rewriting KernelShark, r...
- Key Manager Concepts and Topology Basics for VM and vSAN Encryption
At VMworld 2017 VM and vSAN Encryption and security of vSphere in general became VERY popular topics. And in those discussions the topic of Key Managers came up and specifically “How many key managers should I have?” was a recurring question. This blog article will give you two examples of key ... - Three Key Reasons for Joining Modernize Data Centers Track at vForum Online
As digital transformation increases across the business world, the era of costly, complex legacy infrastructures is coming to an end. But what will it take to modernize infrastructures in such a way that IT gets the agility and flexibility it needs to operate, innovate, and scale to meet the demands... - Understanding the Impacts of Mixed-Version vCenter Server Deployments
There are a few questions that come up quite often regarding vCenter Server upgrades and mixed-versions that we would like to address. In this blog post we will discuss and attempt to clarify the guidance in the vSphere Documentation for Upgrade or Migration Order and Mixed-Version Transitional Beha...
- VMware Closes Acquisition of VeloCloud Networks
As applications and data continue to be distributed more broadly from the data center to the edge, customers are increasingly relying on software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WANs) versus traditional networking for flexible, secure connectivity. It’s for this reason that I am pleased to share tha... - Terminology Tuesday Presents: ZTP
ZTP stands for Zero Touch Provisioning. And, as a quick google search will quickly reveal, many other things as well. Back to our ZTP. ZTP is the process by which new network switches can be configured without much human involvement. Notice that I said “much” and no... - Introducing NSX-T 2.1 with Pivotal Integration
Application architectures are evolving. That shouldn’t be news to anyone. Today, emerging app architectures that leverage container-based workloads and microservices are becoming mainstream, moving from science projects in development labs to enterprise production deployments at scale. The benefits ...
- vRealize Network Insight 3.5 – Feel the vRNI
vRealize Network Insight 3.5 (vRNI) introduces a number of great features, which improve our visibility and ability to ensure a secure and compliant configuration. Also Network Insight is now available as a service. This means you can rely on VMware to handle management and updates of Network Insi... - IT As Developer Of Infrastructure As Code
IT As Developer: One Of The Keys To Relevance This blog is the third installment in a series focused on the question of what IT teams need to do to retain or regain relevance (depending on their circumstance) with line-of-business. For the full list check out my first blog on this subject. In a... - vRA and NSX – Intro to App-Centric Networking and Security
Introduction In a software-defined world, infrastructure is defined by policies based on a set of requirements — prescribed by the business, applications, security or IT itself. Those policies are tied to a set of logic that integrates and automates a given service as needed, when needed. For its p...
- How Cloud Foundry Container Runtime Tackles Both Day 1 & Day 2 Operations for Production Kubernetes
by Merlin Glynn, Technical Product Manager, VMware Cloud Foundry Container Runtime (CFCR), formerly known as Project KUBO, is an open source project that delivers the functionality of both Day 1 (deployment) and Day 2 (operations) tasks for Kubernetes clusters. The initial genesis behind CFCR was t... - Connect with VMware Around Containers at DockerCon EU
Copenhagen is one of Europe’s leading cities around information technology, making it the perfect locale for this year’s DockerCon EU, taking place October 16-19 at the Bella Centre in Denmark’s capital city. DockerCon is the leading container conference for practitioners to learn from other contain... - Join VMware at China Kubernetes End User Conference
On October 15, the China Kubernetes End User Conference, a joint venture put on by Caicloud, Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the “K8sMeetup China Community,” will celebrate the tremendous technological impact of Kubernetes, unveil the latest updates and enhancements around it and provide top-l...
VMware End-User Computing Blog
- [New Webcast] Brian Madden and Shikha Mittal Discuss Industry Trends and More!
As you may have heard by now EUC industry expert Brian Madden from BrianMadden.com and BriForum fame joined VMware End-User Computing in April of this year. We are thrilled to get his insights and wisdom on end-user computing and on technology in general, and Brian definitely has a lot to say on the... - Build Your Schedule: VMworld 2018 US Content Catalog is Now Live!
We’re excited to announce that the content catalog for VMworld 2018 US is now live. With 600+ breakout sessions, panels, labs, and talks to consider across the event, and 50+ breakout sessions and 70+ Hands-on Labs for End User Computing solutions, we’re giving you the perfect tool to make VMworld 2... - Webinar: Modernize Your Legacy Rugged Deployments with Android Enterprise
Over the past 10 years, Microsoft’s Windows CE and Windows Embedded Handheld (WEH) have been the most popular operating systems (OSs) for rugged devices, due to Windows’ large selection of devices and development tools. However, from 2018 through 2020, Microsoft will phase out support for Windows Em...
- New KB articles published for week ending 15th July 2018
Top 20 vSAN Articles June 2018
Top 20 NSX Articles June 2018
Top 20 vSphere Articles June 2018
New KB articles published for week ending 8th July 2018
- IBM Cloud Secure Virtualization built on VMware Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud addresses new GDPR requirements
The following post is contributed to the Cloud Foundation Blog by Andrew Guerra, Offering Manager, VMware on IBM Cloud On 25 May, 2018, the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect in the European Union (EU), with sharper teeth than any other compliance regulation to date. W... - CONTEST: Retweet VMware Cloud Foundation for a chance to win VCF giveaways!
Starting July 26th, we’re asking you, to be a part of the Cloud Foundation community! As you might have noticed, Cloud Foundation has moved to a new Twitter handle. In order to help keep our community up-to-date on all the Cloud Foundation, hybrid cloud, and unified SDDC news and announcements, we ... - VMware Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud addresses today’s hybrid cloud needs
The following post is contributed to the Cloud Foundation Blog by Steven M. Huntington, Program Director Offering Management, VMware on IBM Cloud IBM and VMware announced an integral partnership to extend the sale of VMware solution offerings on the IBM Cloud in February 2016. This cloud partne...
EXTERNAL NEWS FROM 3RD PARTY BLOGGERS VMGuru
- Nieuwe deepdive community events in Networking & Security en Management & Automatisering
[this is a Dutch post because it’s about two new Dutch spoken community events] Op 25 en 26 September 2018 worden er twee nieuwe gratis technische deepdive evenementen georganiseerd door een aantal VMware Partners voor de community. Daarvan is de 25ste volledig gefocust op Networking... The p... - Application monitoring with VMware Wavefront
IT Control meets Developer Agility If you are a VMware fan or working with VMware products I’ll bet you heard of vRealize Operations with Endpoint Operations for application monitoring. But did you know that VMware also has an application monitoring & analytics tool running in... The post... - Using VMware and Veeam? Update VBR 9.5 to Update 3a now
Veeam just released their latest update for Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3a with lots of support for new VMware platform versions! Are you already running or planning to update to VMware vSphere 6.5 Update 2 or vSphere version 6.7? Make sure you update... The post Using VMware and Veea... - 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. ...
- Resource Pools, Folders & VMC now supported with Cross vCenter vMotion Utility Fling
Many of you are already familiar with the Cross vCenter vMotion Utility, which was released as a Fling last year. In fact, a number of you have even shared your VM migration numbers, many of which are quite impressive (e.g. 5-10K VMs). Not only are the number of production VMs significant, but I als... - Automating VM Template management using Content Library in VMC
Today, the vSphere Content Library only supports a single deployable VM type using the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard. Although customers are familiar with both OVF and OVA (archive of OVF and VMDKs), support for vCenter VM Template is still one of the most highly requested feature for Co... - New SDDC Certificate Replacement Fling
Certificate lifecycle management is not something anyone looks forward to, it is time consuming and usually not automated. However, it is a necessity for many of our customers. The process gets even more challenging when needing replace certificates across multiple VMware products, not only careful ... - My list of Microsoft Visual Code Studio Extensions
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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...
- Remote Desktop Web Client for Windows Server 2016 and 2019 Preview is Generally Available
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This is a short post which will demonstrate the upgrade process of Veeam Backup and Replication 9.5 U3 to U3a. The U3a was released a week ago and also directly integrated to the Full 9.5 U3a ISO, but for the upgrade, you’ll only need the “veeam_backup_9.5.0.1922.update3a_setup.exe” which is a separ...
- A closer look at VVol snapshot policies on Pure Storage with vSphere 6.7
I am in the very fortunate position of having access to a Pure Storage array, and this has been recently updated to support Virtual Volumes. With my new 6.7 vSphere cluster, I finally found some time to take a closer look at Virtual Volume (VVol) snapshots on the Pure array, something that I have be... - Workflow issues when vCenter instance not correctly added to vRO
As part of my preparation work for VMworld 2018, I was looking into how one might be able to automate the deployment of VMs from vRealize Automation with an appropriate policy for consuming the under-lying storage. In my case, this underlying storage was vSAN, so I wanted to be able to select a vSAN... - Setting up Nginx reverse-proxy for distributed Minio S3 deployment
I wanted to follow-up on my recent Minio S3 post with steps on how to implement a reverse-proxy using Nginx. The purpose of this is to allow an end-user to connect to a single Minio server, and have that connection be redirected in a round-robin fashion to all of my other 16 Minio servers in my Mini... - 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...
- Additive Loops with Ansible and Jinja2
I don’t know if “additive” is the right word, but it was the best word I could come up with to describe the sort of configuration I recently needed to address in Ansible. In retrospect, the solution seems pretty straightforward, but I’ll include it here just in case it proves... - Technology Short Take 102
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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...
- Join two great technical conferences in September - The vMA and the vNS TechCon
VMware and their partners are organizing two free technical conferences at the end of September in the Netherlands. Some great speakers like Joe Baguley and Jad El-Zein will present the keynotes. These conferences can be compared to the old TSX event back in 2007, no sales only technical stuff.... - Latest Fling from VMware Labs - ESXi Compatibility Checker
The ESXi Compatibility Checker is a python script that can validate VMware hardware compatibility and upgrade issues of ESXi. ... - 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. ...
- Veeam Backup & Replication support for vSphere 6.7
VMware vSphere 6.7 wasn’t officially supported by Veeam Backup & Replication, as also the new vSphere 6.5 Update 2 (due to the backporting from 6.7). But now Veeam has released the Backup Replication 9.5 Update 3a version that fully supports latest vSphere versions, including vCloud Direct... - VMware Workstation Pro 14 issues with old CPU
VMware Workstation 14 it’s a great product and adds several features from ESXi 6.5 and 6.7 (like NVMe support). But drops too many CPU from its compatibility list and this means less support for old PCs or laptop. With an unsupported processor, you can create, configure, move the VMs, but when... - 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...
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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