Technology – Page 13 – Gabbs' Random Thoughts

Virtual Updates 2021-06-14

ESXi & SD/USB installations
Continuing on from the post on 2021-05-31….
more info about this potential issue from Christian Mohn, and the justification for migration to internal NVMe drives for the boot drive….
I’m not one to support workarounds for production, but if you DID update to 7.x and need the workaround until your replace your boot drives, this could help.

VMworld 2021 – what content to expect
A revival of customer presentations getting priority?
Registration opens for VMworld, June 15th, 2021.
VMware Blog post is here.

Virtual Updates 2021-05-31

ESXi 7.0.2 Update 2a – potentially killing SD/USB?
Christian Mohn just posted about a situation where he began having issues with his boot drive (a USB device).
This is a known issue at VMware, KB # 83376.
In short, since 7.0 was released, with the changes in the boot drive partition scheme, I have been rethinking a 12/13 year old habit of using SD cards for the boot drive of an ESXi server…..maybe its time to start doing internal NVMe or SSD only…..

vCenter Patches for 6.5, 6.7, & 7.x
Bob Plankers highlighted this in a post of his on 5/25/2021.
In short…PATCH YOUR vCENTER SERVERS!!!!
This is a critical Patch!!!
Release Notes for vCenter 6.5.0 Update 3p are here.
Release Notes for vCenter 6.7.0 Update 3n are here.
Release Notes for vCenter 7.0.2 Update 2b are here.

Virtual Updates 2021-05-17

Short Update this week….
Spent a lot of time playing with new software releases, teaching a class, and preparing for another….plus got knocked out of commission for a few days (Long story…)

VirtuallyGhetto is now williamlam.com
I can only speculate that VMware mad him change it…
virtuallyghetto.com was a go to for so many people.
WilliamLam.com has the same content…..but it just doesn’t feel right.

Virtual Updates 2021-05-03

Tanzu – what are all these different offerings?
Tanzu….there are 9 offerings under Tanzu.
Just like vRealize, which has 10+ offerings….
So, how to break down all the terminology, the software and the what works with what?
Check out the post here.
One of the best breakdowns of the Tanzu portfolio I’ve seen…
(definitely helps with all the renaming of Tanzu over the past year)

Virtual Updates 2021-04-19

VMware to be spun off from Dell
VMware News Release is here.

vROPS – day 2 operations guide
Now in its 3rd Edition, this FREE guide is worth checking out.
Iwan ‘e1’ Rahabok of VMware has been keeping this up to date.
If you use vROPs….you should download this AND read it.
It is in my to do list for this week.
It is available here on Dropbox for download.

Virtual Updates 2021-04-05

VMware Cloud Universal – introdction
VMware now has this thing call “VMware Cloud Universal” (…VCU?).
Essentially, buying VCF (VMware Cloud Foundation) and having the ability to deploy the software in any cloud….
I can see this being an enabler for those who want to run vSphere with Tanzu, but I’m pretty sure that can be done in the cloud pretty easily as the main components are already there….
I’m interested to see how this plays out…..
VMware Blog post is here.

Northeast Regional VMUG Virtual UserCon
“In just one day, you can virtually explore the newest VMware content and get connected with hundreds of IT professionals in the Northeast region.”
Looks like a full day of content!
Check it out and learn a bit more about what used to be called VDI, and in now referred to as EUC (End User Computing).

Virtual Updates 2021-03-22

VMware has quite a few new releases
I go into them below….
DO NO UPGRADE JUST YET>>>>>

The Cloud is Just Someone Else’s Computer / Datacenter
March 9th, OVH (a cloud provider), had a fire in one of its Datacenter locations, affecting a few of the AZs (Availability Zones) in that region.
their message to their users was quick….
“….time to activate your business continuity / Disaster Recover Plans….”
I’ve just heard too many stories of people moving to cloud, and not building in a BC/DR plan as part of that, thinking that the cloud is always on.
This just gets back to good architecture of you environment, expecting things to fail, and making sure the design accounts and deals with those situations.
I found the story here, but by the time you read this, I’m sure many more updates will exist.
Here is the Twitter Thread, from OVH.
….add to that an Azure outage in mid-March….too bad there is no way I am aware of to have an on-prem version of Office 365 running in case Azure goes offline….