Virtual News – Page 18 – Gabbs' Random Thoughts

Virtual Updates 2019-11-11

Conferences…..
VMworld 2019 Europe has wrapped up this past week.
So has MS Ignite 2019.
Lots of good announcements, some of the ones I found most exciting are below…..
AWS re:Invent 2019 is coming up in a few weeks!
A Veeam online event is next week….

VMworld -Security, Project Pacific & Project Tanzu
Was able to find some pretty good summaries of these from VMworld.
(sorry that they are embedded in Twitter, but these are all short & sweet)
Tanzu Mission Control in 82 seconds
Project Pacific in 97 seconds
NSX Intelligence in 72 seconds
NSX + AppDefense + Carbon Black in 102 seconds
Workspace ONE + Carbon Black in 132 seconds
…and of course, William Lam has already posted his VMworld 2019 EU direct playback & download URLs for all VMworld sessions

vCenter / Skyline – Upgrade Checker & Validation
Skyline had a VMware Blog post on this.
VMworld Europe sessions highlighted this within vCenter.
Software Interoperability checks to be performed in vCenter /Skyline.
Upgrades processes (when you have multiple products) & sequence provided.
To me, this means less time spent int he VMware Interoperability Matrix, and less risk in performing updates / upgrades.
Can’t wait to see that feature become reality.
Even still…..we’ll have to upgrade the old way to get to a point where these checks and validations are done for us….THEN the NEXT upgrade will be easier.

vROPs – Expiring Certificates
Saw this in my inbox this week. First I’ve heard about it….
Replace expired internal certificate in vROPs 6.3 & later
Sounds like anyone who’s deployed vROPs should check this out….
Apparently, the certificates expire on 11/19/19?
Simple check and fix in the linked VMware KB article.
This could be for things deployed as late as 8.0 (possibly)?

Virtual Updates 2019-10-28

VMworld 2019 – Barcelona
Can’t wait to hear all the news from this next week!
With all the vRealize Suite 8 components released this past week…
I expect we can hear more about vSphere’s next release…

VMware Snapshot problems – Again!
I first came across this from a post on The Register.
Windows 2019 on vSphere 6.5 & 6.7 has quiesce issues….
This reminds me of the CBT bug from vSphere 6.0.
This VMware KB does not inspire me with confidence (recommends turning off App Quiesce OR to convert from GPT disks to MBR disks)…
I hope I’m just reading old news….

Sudo Flaw! – patch your distributions!
Found an article calling this out on thehackernews.com.
It summarizes how to use sudo without proper authorization or passwords.
It shows how to exploit it.
It states that all sudo versions prior to 1.8.28 are affected
(1.8.28 was released 10/14/2019)

Virtual Updates 2019-10-14

PuTTY Gets updated
PuTTY is now version 0.73
Still funny that it is not even 1.0 yet….
Here is the change log.

Repointing vCenter to another SSO Domain
There were quite a few situations in vSphere 5.5 to 6.x migrations where this would have been handy. Now in 6.7 the domain-repoint command is available for performing this move.
VMware Blog post covering the steps.

Virtual Updates 2019-09-30

VMware Tools 11.0 is out!
So VMware Tools has been released separately from ESXi hosts for a while now. Still, a lot of people miss out on this information.
Well, Tools 11.0 is out, & I’m getting ready to run it in the lab this first weekend.
You can find the download here.
Release Notes are here.
Grab the offline VIB add it to Update Manager, and use Update Manager to distribute to your ESXi hosts (so VMs can be updated).

VMware vROPs – The community Reference Guide
Came across this great collection for vROPs on GitHub.
Kudos to the community putting this together.
VMworld sessions, documentation, books, training, HOLs sessions, Twitter Handles……

Virtual Updates 2019-09-16

VMworld – more follow up
The last update was the Monday following VMworld.
Having had some time to watch some sessions, and do some research, you’ll see that some of the below topics I’ve mentioned before, but am now able to elaborate on, or provide better details / links to follow up with.

VMUG – Boston
The Boston VMUG is 9/25 (Wednesday)
It is at the Boston Westin Hotel 425 Summer St Boston, MA 02210
(this is next to the South Boston Convention Center…same as last year)
Registration is here.
Hope to see you there!

VMUG – Virtual Event
This is about Professional Development.
This is online 9/19 (sorry for the short notice).
I did not see a single technical topic (except may “How to talk to Developers”) as this is all about you & your personal growth.
Registration is here.

vBrownBag – VMworld Tech Talks
There are now posted & live on YouTube.
Here is a link to this playlist covering 67 different topics.
Sessions range from 7-30 minutes in length.

Virtual Updates 2019-09-02

VMworld 2019 US
This was a great event….the most energy of many recent VMworld.
So many announcements (below) drove this.
Project Pacific, Tanzu, Kubernetes (everywhere), & security were huge.
I am so happy to have attended my 13th VMworld, and shared that experience with the WEI team, our customers, and my peers from around the world….
You’ll be hearing the: Build, Run, Manage, Connect, Protect
mantra over and over this year…..
Day 1 Recap (VMware Blog Post)
Day 2 Recap (VMware Blog Post)
Day 3 Recap (VMware Blog Post)
Day 4 Recap (VMware Blog Post)
Chris Wolf’s (VP & CTO) take on VMworld.

Tech Field Day was presenting at VMworld, and they too have uploaded a lot of their presentations.
Intro to Pacific, how Pacific was created, Pacific Architecture, Bitfusion & ML/AI, Bitfusion demo, Bitfusion & vSphere.

An amazing job, in that all the presentations are up and available for viewing. Kudos to the VMworld staff for that.
More importantly, William Lam has made it easy to find them all.
Or you can use VMware’s VMworld On-Demand Video Library to find them.

For those of us in New England, I’ll see you at the Boston VMUG 9/25.
There are 11 events scheduled right now, maybe in your town.

VMware Project Pacific
This is all about ESXi getting an architecture update for native Kubernetes support (and being able to manage via vCenter).
Kubernetes adds Harbor Registry to vSphere.
Kubernetes at an 8% speed increase over bare metal.
Looks like full SDDC support too (vSphere, vSAN, NSX) for K8s namespaces.
VMware Blog post here (which also has great links about it).
Frank Denneman chimes in here.
Cormac Hogan chimes in here.

VMware Tanzu
Above and beyond Project Pacific, Tanzu is another major announcement this year from VMworld.
Tanzu Mission Control is for managing ALL your Kubernetes (whatever cloud they happen to be running on).
VMware Blog post here.
Another VMware Blog post here.
A 1.5 minute YouTube video of Ray’s take on Tanzu and what it does.

Virtual Updates 2019-08-19

VMworld 2019 US starts next week
VMworld is back in San Francisco.
My first of many VMworld events (this year makes my 13th showing) was in San Francisco.
Looking forward to catching up with my peers, validating that WEI is doing right by our customers, and getting a glimpse of whatever else I can find to make our day to day lives in IT easier….and with the Update 3 announcements this past week, I’m really looking forward to seeing what’s next.
OneRepublic is the band for the Wednesday VMworld Party.
Don’t forget to download the VMworld 2019 app on your mobile!

vSphere 6.0 End of Support
This is coming on March 12, 2020.
That is only 7 months away folks!
Here is a link to the latest (Aug 1 2019) Product Lifecycle Matrix.