Virtual News – Page 11 – Gabbs' Random Thoughts

Virtual Updates 2021-10-04

VMworld 2021 – Oct 5-7
Remember, this is another Virtual Event….and it starts tomorrow!
Get registered for free at: VMworld

vCenter 6.5, 6.7, and 7.x – Critical Patch
vCenter has just been patched to handle a critical vulnerability.
VMware Advisory VMSA-2021-0020 is here
On vCenter 7, it does take a bit for the patch to be applied, and the vCenter services to be restarted.
vCenter 6.5 u3q Release Notes are here
vCenter 6.7 u3o Release Notes are here
vCenter 7.0 u2d Release Notes are here

TinkerTry – Credit Freeze & Identity Protection
…and stopping unsolicited junk mail.
Paul Braren, who runs TinkerTry, came up with a great summary of these 3 major topics.
Give it a read.

Virtual Updates 2021-09-20

ESXi boot volumes – SD/USB is being deprecated.
With ESXi 7 reworking the boot partition and usage of that capacity, there have been some SD card failures (for those of us booting from SD).
The issue is highlighted in VMware KB 83376.
Followed up by VMware KB 85685, states explicitly that this support will be dropped in the next version of vSphere.
If you plan to have your hardware run the next version of vSphere (whenever that gets released), you will need to be off those boot devices….
Duncan Epping weighing in here.

ESXi boot volumes – migrate from SD to m2
So people are already doing this and validating the process.
VMware has posted the process online, though I couldn’t find it.
Derek Seaman has gone through this, and captured the process in his post.
Given the effort it would take, I’m a bigger fan of remove SD card, install appropriate new boot media, install ESXi, use Update (Lifecycle) Manager and vDS and Host Profiles to configure.

VMUG Boston Event!
Get registered here, at the VMUG site (be sure to login).

Virtual Updates 2021-09-06

ESXi using SD/USB for Boot Volume
In vSphere 7.0, there have been some issues with SD/USB boot drives getting corrupted. Read from certain blogs, that the latest update 2c would resolve this.
Now, hearing that this is deprecated in future releases….
Differing opinions on whether this is good or bad.
Opinions do not matter though, as this VMware KB 85615 states:
(post has been removed)
Another peer, Christian Mohn had a post about this as well.
Well, I guess I’ll keep with the recommendations I’ve been making since 7.0 was released….transition your boot drives to SSD or NVMe is you need your ESXi hosts to run 7.x, or leave them at 6.7 till hardware refresh is possible.

VMworld 2022 – announced
VMworld has been virtual in 2020 and 2021 (for obvious reasons).
On the current main page of VMworld, under the General section….
It shows the dates for VMworld 2022 US in San Francisco.
It shows the dates for VMworld 2022 Europe Fira Gran Via in Barcelona, Spain.

Virtual Updates 2021-08-23

It’s been a bit quite this past week…
With lots of my focus on Nutanix & VMware, and their annual conferences coming up soon….news is s little bit light…
End of September and mid-October posts will be right after the conferences, so I expect that at that time, lots of interesting things to chat about…

vCenter 7.x – Integrating Identity Provider for MFA
Security has taken a more prominent place in our day to day.
Especially when running/managing an infrastructure.
Since vSphere 7.x has a few options (only a few) for MFA, WEI has been helping quite a few of our customers move towards this extra layer of AAA (Authentication, authorization, access) into vSphere environments.
Take a look at the options, and realize it is NOT as hard as it could be to do this.
Understanding 2-Factor Authentication from VMware vSphere Docs.
vCenter Server Identity Provider docs from VMware vSphere Docs.
vSphere Authentication Guide from Aug 2020
Blog post by Vladan Segeton 4sysops.com on the overall process of adding ADFS with to your vCenter Identity Provider.

Virtual Updates 2021-08-09

VMware VMworld Content Catalog is online
Get registered for VMworld 2021, and get your schedules built.
Yes, remote again this year….
Content Catalog is available here.

Nutanix .Next Content Catalog is online
Get registered for .Next 2021, and get your schedules built.
Yes, remote again this year….
Session recommendations from Angelo Luciani

CPU Pinning is NOT a guarantee to a CPU
Man, 20+ years of this conversation….
Frank Denneman has a few credentials that make him one of THE experts on this topic, and if you don’t believe me, well….his post revisiting this topic is here, and is among the simplest explanation of why this is a bad thing.

Virtual Updates 2021-07-26

VDI Design Guide Part II – released!
Currently only in paperback….
Johan van Amersfoort has released Part 2 of his amazing book, the VDI Design Guide. Just released, it’s already on the way to my house for Sumer reading list.
Johan’s page, announcing the release.
Link to the book on Amazon

Containers in the Cloud – what are your options?
came across this post, and thought I would share.
Not everyone is familiar with all the options out there, and this post covers AWS, Azure, and GCP offerings as well as hybrid options.
That being said…. orchestration of all these workloads, security, and access need something to make life easier, regardless of where the workloads run…
That is what VMware Tanzu (specifically Tanzu Mission Control) is about.

Virtual Updates 2021-07-12

iSCSI IQN change during upgrade
So Duncan Epping posted this in his blog.
He specially states that the upgrade from 7.0-update1 to 7.0-update2 is where the issue was found.
Check out his blog post if you use iSCSI!!!!

HPE acquires Zerto
In case you missed this during the days before 4th of July…
I can see this continuing to be a product folks use, even if they are not HPE customers today.
HPE Press Release is here.
Zerto Blog post is here.