VTUG Winter Warmer 2019
I am sure people are looking forward to this event!
Thursday, January 24 2019
Gillette Stadium, 1 Patriot Place, Foxboro, MA
Register Here!
Boston VMUG
A meeting in December! Cool (hahahaha).
OK, so get registered here.
Dec 13, 2018 from 1:00 PM to 6:00 PM, and is the final 2018 event for the Boston VMUG.
AWS reInvent & Nutanix .NEXT London
Both conferences were kicked off two weeks ago.
I was expecting cool things in both, but some of the Nutanix announcements really got me excited. More on that below….
Marriott Hack
Lots of business folk travel, and this is just another incident that (most likely) could have been avoided. Given that this happened 4 years ago, and that hackers lived in their datacenter for too long, I sit back and wonder how an organization of that size does not have the security tools in place to see this kind of infection in their datacenter (granted, 4 years ago, the tools may not have been as readily available as they are now).
Regardless….
What is Marriott recommending? The usual…change password, get a new Passport (and Passport #)……but how do you get a new Mother’s Maiden name?
One day, these organizations might be held accountable and have to pay for all Identity Theft costs for each person …not just the “WebWatcher” subscription and a fine……
Nutanix .NEXT London
This just seemed exciting, even if I was not actually there in London with everyone. Announcements included:
ERA – DBaaS (Database as a Service). Oracle, Oracle RAC, SQL, MariaDB and SAP HANA, all with Intent clone, app consistency, and little to no storage overhead.
Prism X-Play – an IFTTT engine driven by Prism Pro Machine Learning
Files – as it sounds, with all Nutanix customers getting 1-TB for free once they upgrade to AOS 5.10
Karbon – an HA Kubernetes solution covering the storage, networking, and lifecycle management.
Just a sampling there, but with all the other topics to touch on in the Nutanix stack, it might be a bit much in this.
AWS reInvent 2018 – All Novemeber Announcments
This is a list of all announcements from November 2018 from AWS.
All reInvent announcements are listed here as well.A
AWS reInvent 2018 – S3 Glacier Deep Archive
People use Glacier for archive storage (stuff that would be online, but take 4-12 hours to get access to if you needed it), and it was super cheap.
Now, with S3 Glacier Deep dive, they are cutting costs of this archival storage even further (~$1/TB/month), with the caveat that it may take 12+ hours to get access to your data if you needed it.
Coming soon in 2019!
AWS reInvent 2018 – AWS Well-Architected Tool
Ever want a review of your AWS infrastructure, like a health check?
Thats what AWS Well-Architected Tool is all about. It focuses on Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and of course, Cost Optimization.
Right now, this runs in US East (Ohio & N. Virginia), US West (Oregan), and Europe (Ireland), and there is no charge right now for it.
Jeff Barr has a great writeup of it, and walks though how to use this from the AWS Console.
AWS reInvent 2018 – VMware on AWS
Can’t expect to be at AWS and not hear about VMware announcements.
VMware on AWS has expanded to more regions and AZs, has a GovCloud US offering, and with vRNI 4.0 (vRealize Network Insight), you get to troubleshoot network connectivity from on-premises to VMware Cloud, or even an EC2 instance in AWS..
You can read the VMware Cloud blog here.
AWS reInvent 2018 – AWS Outpost
Azure Stack equivalent from AWS – their hardware, ordered from he AWS console, configured, managed, and running in your datacenter.
This drew a lot of excitement for obvious reasons.
What I find interesting here is that there will be two flavors of AWS Outpost offered….
1) VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost – this is the same SDDC stack as VMware on AWS, bur in your datacenter.
2). VMware Cloud Foundation for EC2 – this allows you to run EC2 instances, EBS volumes, and continue to use the same APIs you do today to manage your AWS workloads.
…and wouldn’t you know it that William Lam wrote up a great summary of this on the VMware Cloud pages. or you can pop over to the AWS Outposts main page on AWS here.
AWS reInvent 2018 – Machine Learning University
Now available to all developers. The announcement is here, and for those developers looking to grow that Machine Learning skill set, its a way to get over 50 hours of course, videos and labs.
AWS reInvent 2018 – VMware NSX Cloud
Since NSX Cloud supports Azure and AWS, this got highlighted quite often. I was reminded of it from this blog post (which has links that get you the NSX YouTube Channel and NSX Blog pages). Plenty of HCX discussion complemented many different use cases as well at reInvent, so as the videos of sessions go live, a huge amount of info will be available to all of us.
vSphere 6.7 Update 1 Security Configuration Guide
Mike Foley strikes again!
His latest VMware blog post from last month notes the improvements in the core ESXi release, deprecated settings, and links to his 6.5 Security Guide and 6.7 Update 1 Security Guide.
These don’t take long to read, especially since Mike Foley spent a lot of time getting recommended settings into the build of ESXi.
VMware vSphere Platinum (AppDefense)
A great 1 hour Video from Matt Vandenbeld and Paige Clapper
AppDefense is the big add on here from what we have traditionally had from Enterprise+. So…the big benefit, is when you update your vCenter to 6.7 Update 1. You’ll have choices of “Offline Mode” (for those who choose to not to use the cloud manager), or SaaS.
VMware Unified Access Gateway 3.4
This was released last week, and there are a number of updates.
The best update, in my opinion, is the inclusion of the VIP function (meaning no more load balancers in the DMZ are required).
Here is a youtube video explaining and showing the features.
Here are the release notes for this updated.
VMware NSX Books – Free Downloads
This has been out for a while now, and keeps getting updated.
Check it out, and grab yourself a copy of anything from intro to NSX, to Day 1 operations, up through day 2 operations….
Matching VMDKs to Windows Drive Letters
Ever try to do this? not so hard when you only have 2 x VMDK on your VM, but what if you have 20 VMDKs? How do you figure out which VMDK is which Drive letter in the Windows OS (easily)?
Joshua Stenhouse wrote up a great use case for this on some 10,000 VMs, and solved it with PowerCLI.
Great read that I can see helping other people, as this is NOT the first time I heard this request.
VMware Flings of Note
I/O Analyzer
Pretty straightforward…deoploy on OVA, and use I/O Meter to generate I/O Loads, or even capture real application workloads with a replay tool.
Nutanix A Copycat?
I read this article when it was posted, and loved it (thanks Steve Kaplan!)
Some back and forth between VMware & Nutanix, a bit of history on VMware & Nutanix, and with good comparisons between the two.
Kubernetes in 5 minutes
Found this over the weekend.
New to the concepts of Kubernetes? Want to get an idea of what it does?
This short 5 minute video provides a high level overview for you.
No, it is not deep, but for an overview in 5 minutes….that works.
IBM sell Lotus Notes/Domino
Never thought this would happen.
Sold to HCL for $1.8 billion.
TechCrunch article linked here….
Upcoming Conferences
VMware Empower (for Partners only) – Atlanta, GA 4/15-4/19
Nutanix .NEXT – Anaheim, CA 5/7-5/9
Red Hat Summit – Boston, MA 5/7-5/9
VMworld 2019 US – San Francisco, CA 8/26-8/29
VMworld 2019 EMEA –