VMware Tools Recall & Resolution
VMware Tools 10.3.0 recalled, as it can PSOD your ESXi hosts.
Someone didn’t test this out …. At all….
This has to do with VMXNET3 drivers, which should be used for all your VMware VMs Updated on 9/12/18 is VMware Tools 10.3.2
VMware Boston VMUG UserCon
This is October 17 in Boston from 8-5Lots of great sessions.
Let your friends know.
Hands-on training, NSX introduction.
See full agenda here
VMware Hands On Labs Updated
Hands On Labs from VMworld 2018 have been released.
Here is a page of the most popular HOLsfrom 2018
VMware Testdrive
Want to demo Workspace ONE, Workspace ONE Unified Endpoint Management, Horizon, Horizon Cloud, App Volumes, User Environment Manager, or vSAN.
Plus, sample integrations of simple things such as Dropbox, Office 365, and SalesForce.
This is a great end user demo environment.
Used it this past week to get a customer starting to explore Workspace ONE for Unified Endpoint Management.
VMware ESXTOP
We all know it, and my main reference, Duncan Eppings’ old post, has been updated.
Great reference material when you’re on the spot.
VMware vSAN Data ProtectionNo better source than Duncan Epping….
Imagine vSAN taking a snapshot automatically based on the VM storage pocliy.
That same policy can replicate the snapshot to NFS, S3, or to a DR site.
Some pretty good futures coming in vSAN.
VMware vSphere 6.7 DRS Enhancements
VMware has made some DRS enhancements in 6.7
A PDF of the changes can be downloaded here.
Some changes in how resource pools handle reservations, but a short 10 page read.
VMware Round Robin PSP changes in 6.7 U1
We’ve all configured multipathing in vSphere for efficient use of the paths to disk.
I only discovered this AFTER VMworld this year.
Didn’t even find it on VMware’s site, but a blog post.
Short version of it is, that you can enable (as it will be disabled by default) Active Monitoring.
PSP will determine latency on each path, outstanding I/Os on each path, and use this for more efficient RR path selection.
VMware SRM sneak peak
SRM is one of the last Windows Applications (View is the other) that WEI frequestntly run into.
At VMworld, one session in particular gave out notice that SRM is soon to be available as an appliance.(See video at the 31:02)
Future SRA (Storage Replication Adapters) from the vendors will be run as Docker Containers.
A thank you to Eric Siebert for pointing this out in his post
VMware Horizon View 7.6 is out
Release notes here.
RDS CAL licensing changes with the newest VMware View Client 4.9Composer now needs .NET Framework 4.6.1, or the installation fails.
WIndows 10 versions supported has been updated in the VMware KB
VMware Horizon Client 4.9 Release notes here
VMware UEM (User Environment Manager) 9.5 marketplace
With all VDI projects, one area that can seem overly complex is managing the User ProfileVMware UEM provides the capability to manage the user profile and applications.
VMware UEM 9.5 includes a “Marketplace” to download applications profiles that you can use to get you started Find “Download Config Template” in the toolbar, login with your MyVMware credentials, (or you can browse them here anytime)
VMware View – GSLB (Global Server Load Balancing)_ using AWS Route 53
As Route 53 is AWS’ answer to DNS, and the service is available globally, its always been an option to use this for our external load balancers for any solution, including directing users to the VMware View solution providing them their desktops.
A nicely written article provides an overview, and the configuration required to configure Route 53 for this purpose.
VMware Flings of Note
Workspace ONE Configuration Tool for Provisioning
The Workspace ONE Configuration Tool helps you build special-purpose unattend.xml configuration files to be applied in the Dell factory as part of Factory Provisioning. This helps to domain join (domain, workgroup, AAD, AAD Premium) and enroll devices automatically on first-boot. This simplifies the creation of the unattend.xml configuration file for Windows 10
Horizon Session Recording
VMware Identity Manager Architecture
Already sent this off to Karl & Josh, but never hurts to capture it in one place.
Jan Hosselaer did a great writeup of it here.
It covers a highly available deployment, and I believe it is much simpler to read than VMware’s documentation.
VMware Project Concord
This is an open source project by VMware focused on efficient blockchain execution.
Here is an overview post, while this is the project page itself.
Amazon RDS on VMware
Jeff Barris a staple in the AWS world as the Chief Evangelist.
Check out his post on the upcoming Amazon RDS on VMware
You will be able to provision new on-premises database instances in minutes with a couple of clicks, make backups to on-premises or cloud-based storage, and to establish read replicas running on-premises or in the AWS cloud. Amazon RDS on vSphere will take care of OS and database patching, and will let you migrate your on-premises databases to AWS with a single click.
This includes MS SQL, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB.
VMware plans to add more AWS services on vSphere
As noted just above, AWS RDS can run on vSphere (soon).
Additional AWS services are also planned, though no details have been given….
Nutanix Certified Professional exam is out
Per this post, the NCP exam has been released.
You can take it, free of charge, until November 27.
This will retire the existing NPP exam, which some of us have.
I am SURE that the new partner requirement will be NCPs on staff, not NPPs.
Getting registered, it will take 2 days to get registered….per Proctol
VMware Cloud Assembly
the concept of the cloud agnostic machine, an component in a Cloud Assembly blueprint that allows you to deploy exactly the same blueprint to different clouds: currently supported are vSphere, AWS and Azure.
A good overview is here
Project Dimension
Intro to Project Dimension
So we started to think: what if we could deliver the same radical simplicity as VMware Cloud but do it for customers’ on-premises datacenter and edge locations? This was the genesis of Project Dimension.
Project Dimension will extend VMware Cloud to deliver SDDC infrastructure and hardware as-a-service to on-premises locations. Because this is will be a service, it means that VMware can take care of managing the infrastructure, troubleshooting issues, and performing patching and maintenance.
This in turn means customers can focus on differentiating their business building innovative applications rather than spending time on day-to-day infrastructure management.
Integrated Workflows
A key part of Project Dimension is working with our hardware partners to provide seamless top-to-bottom integration. Let’s walk through each of the different aspects of this integration:* Initial Deployment: we will provide a true zero-touch provisioning experience by working with our hardware partners to customize the hardware at the factory. After that, we will provide a consumer-like plug-and-play experience: once the Project Dimension servers are plugged in, they will automatically connect to VMware Cloud and self-configure.* Patching and Upgrading: VMware takes care of all patching and upgrades, relieving customers from this tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone task. We will leverage our expertise with VMware Cloud on AWS to seamlessly push updates to Project Dimension infrastructure just like we do in the cloud. Of course firmware updates are included too!* Monitoring and Troubleshooting: Again, customers will no longer need to worry about infrastructure availability. Instead VMware engineers and SREs, working closely with our hardware partners, will monitor customers’ SDDCs and hardware and take proactive actions if any issues are detected (even dispatching a hardware service technician to your location when needed).We’re excited to be partnering with DellEMC and Lenovo on Project Dimension as we prepare to deliver on a seamless customer experience. There’s a lot of innovation to be done to realize the full power of this model and we’re delighted that both DellEMC and Lenovo are bringing their differentiated technologies to bear on this important area.
Imagine this at Edge locations (non-datacenter locations)