VMworld 2018
Las Vegas, Mandalay Bay, August 26-29
Its coming quickly. If you are going, PLEASE…let me know. Want to make sure that we include ALL our customers in anything WEI does in Las Vegas.
VMware vSphere 5.5 End of General Support
September 19, 2018 is coming, and many of our customers are engaged in projects getting their infrastructures up to date.
It was a good five (5) year run on this version of vSphere, but all good things must come to an end.
VMware has been repeatedly stating this over the past 7 months, and here is another reference back to a February post, with links and FAQs around the topic.
If you are still running vSphere 5.5….let’s me know, and make sure you understand your options, and the implications.
VMware Tools
The latest version of VMware Tools is out.
As you may know, VMware is now releasing VMware Tools outside of ESXi (ESXi may be close, but its never the newest version). I’ll be adding this to the workshops, so people are aware of it, but I know many of our customers wait for ESXi upgrades before updating VMware Tools.
I am sure, though have not yet found it, that there MUST be a minimum version of ESXi that you should be running…..
Side note on VMware Tools….
Windows Update will soon provide updated PVSCSI device drivers for Windows running in a VM!
VMware Log Insight
Saw this post today, and customers are getting emails about it (started on Monday 7/16).
No longer will Log Insight be included with vCenter (even though it was only for 25-OSI instances).
Granted, this doesn’t effect anyone till 8/23/2019
So how do you get back what used to be included?
Well, if you are running a vRealize / vCloud Suite, you are covered, so no concern there.
You could always buy a 25-OSI back to get back the functionality you had (I believe its ~$5,000)
Or … you could try VMware SaaS Log Intelligence.
In the process now of ramping up quite a few of the VMware Cloud services, and we should have a good set of offerings in a month or so (as we return from VMworld).
Let me know if you have questions, please.
VMware on AWS Elastic DRS
This is cool.
When running VMC on AWS, and you allow for this policy to work, it will add & remove ESXi hosts from your cluster as needed.
Frank Denneman’s post is where I first saw this last week, and it is pretty cool.
Imagine your VMware clusters adding and removing hosts automatically as needed / on demand.
Cisco UCS Firmware Bug
Karl was working with NHP and found a bug that is known to Cisco.
In NHPs environment, there are 2 separate UCS chassis…one was affected, the other was not.
After upgrading to 3.2(2b), you get call home redundancy power alarms.
The fix is to go from 3.2(2b) to 3.2(3D)
A Journey from EC2 (or VMs) to Serverless
WE keep hearing about moving to AWS, or Azure.
Well, if a customer is just moving VMs, we all have an understanding that it is more expensive to run in the cloud.
Static Workloads = Private Cloud
Elastic Workloads = Public Cloud
Even with that understanding, Fender Guitars went a bit further, and went Serverless.
I am not including this here because serverless is cool.
I am including this, because it shows how a development team is key to consumption of Public Cloud resources. They are the ones that must capable of developing and using those tools.
Plus…Fender makes guitars…
vCenter Resource Pools
Frank Denneman just posted a good read on Resource Pools.
Given that he has written the 5 books that we all seem to reference, I’d say he’s a great source of information.
Every time I read something like this, I shudder at the complexity that incorrectly used Resource Pools can create.
If you’ve ever heard me speak about them, you know I like to aovid them if possible.
But that may be changing…..I really need to formulate this thought, and it needs to complement vSphere Clusters, Enhanced vMotion Compatibility, and DRS policies.
VMFS-5 & VMFS-6
Well, VMFS-6 is out, and requires ESXi 6.5 or higher to utilize this file system.
Why go through the pain of upgrading the file system….
Nisar Ahmad put this table together on his site.
Following table shows the comparison of features and supports between VMFS5 and VMFS6.