After VMworld, this is a bit longer than normally expected, but hey….after VMworld, it SHOULD be a bit longer than normal….
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 referenceback to a February post, with links and FAQs around the topic.If your customers are still running vSphere 5.5….let’s reach out to them, and make sure they understand their options, and the implications.
VMware Certification Updates
No longer are VMware certifications tied to versions of vSphere (or their other products).
Now, you will be earning VCP-DCV 2018
This goes for VCP, & VCAP (not sure about VCDX yet)
More importantly….PLANNED UPDATES ON NEW EXAMS.
January 1 – all VCP examx/certs get updated
March 1 – All VCAP Design exams/certs get updated
May 1 – All VCAP Deploy exams/certs get updated.Only a few are available currently with the new branding.
Official VMware Education blog post from Karl Childs here.
VMworld Highlights
Want to watch the General Session, or any of the Breakout Sessions?
This link has ‘em.Prefer a list of breakouts?
William Lam of Virtually Ghetto put this together (current ~570 of the 800 breakouts)
Want the Top 10 list day-by-day, try this link.
Big push on VMware Cloud Foundations (vSphere + vSAN + NSX)vSphere Platinum (vSphere Enterprise Plus with VMware AppDefense)
ESXi on ARM
PKS on vSphere – Kubernetes seems to be where VMware is headed (what happened to Docker?)
The Virtual Cloud Network – enabled with vRNI 3.9 for planning, deploying, & managing, AND for NSX-T
VMware on AWS – 3 nodes for the price of 2 promotion going on
AWS RDS (relational database) on VMware for on-premises use (theCUBE interview)
Project Dimension – think about an AWS region, and now create that “region” in your datacenterCloud Motion – bulk move of on-premises VMs to cloud (uses vSphere Replication, then vMotion).Automating in the Cloud – Cloud Assembly, Service Broker & Code Stream
Workspace ONE was huge.
Dell ships all new business laptops with Workspace ONE
Pulse IoT Center 2.0 – got quite a bit of attention, coupled with ESXi on ARM.
VMware ESXi on ARM
We knew this was coming, and it was officially announced.
Shows VMware ESXi 6.8.2. Built for “the edge” computing
VMware on AWS with EBS backed Volumes
Currently, there are a few hardware offerings for VMware on AWS.There is a new R node that is very memory dense, and has no hard drives.You add Amazon EBS volumes as HDD for the VMware on AWS nodes.This allows huge scalability in the solution.Currently only available in 1 offering, but that will change and be generally available to allow huge storage scaling in this offering.
VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 1 (and vSAN 6.7 U1)
A summarization posted here on the VMware blogs.Short version…
HTML 5 client is 100% (we’ll see…)
PSC can be brought back into the vCenter Appliance (collapsing). Tools on vCenter ISO, with template answer files!
vSAN has a Quickstart dialogue that helps simplify (was it really that hard) configuration of a vSAN cluster.
vSAN I/O controller firmware updates via VUM.
vSAN nodes entering maintenance mode now have additional safeguards to avoid unnecessary data movement.
vSAN has better Capacity Utilization reporting (in the monitor tab of the cluster)
vSAN TRIM/INMAP support now enabled.
Content Libray now deploys VM templates (VMTXs) directly
VMware vSphere Platinum
A short VMware Blog post I scraped this from.
This is a vSphere Enterprise Plus with VMware AppDefense license.
Focusing on security is a good thing….adaptive micro segmentation is really what it delivers
Mixing on-premises licensing with VMware Cloud SaaS is different, but not out of the question….but that’s vSphere Platinum
If you buy this, you get $10,000 worth of VMware on AWS credits.
OK cool, but that’s 1 node for 2 months….
You can’t get it yet, but it is coming soon.
Here is a summaryof the offering.
VMware Purchases CloudHealth
Simplify The Cloud…..So this was purchased by VMware recently, and it is headquartered in Boston, MA.
Looks like VMware’s offerings of vRB, couple with Multi-cloud, governance, vROPs, and containers all built into 1 offering.
More coming in the near future, but this has the potential to be a SaaS offering, and be a great conversation topic.
VMware ESXi Persistent Memory
So new hardware has the capability, and ESXi can exploit this.
So can VMs.
A good writeup is available here.
If you’d like to simulate it in a nested environment, VirtuallyGhettohas you covered.
VMware Visio Stencils
FINALLY! VMware has created Visio stencils. You can get them here.
These are stencils the SDDC team created, and uses for the VVD (VMware Validated Designs) documentation.
While not the world’s best, these are VMware’s 1st Visio Stencils in 20 years…..
VMware PowerCLI 10.2.0
…has been released.Some bug fixes, and such, but now has support for NSX-T 2.2
To update, simply run the command:
Update-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI
VMware vRealize Operations 7.0
Coming soon, and this is the time that vRealize Business (as a separate appliance) will no longer be needed.
Lots of tweaks to the product, and lots of new management packs (such as AWS).
Give a quick overview here.
VMware vRealize Automation 7.5T
his was announce last week, (not sure if its available yet).
Lots of improvements, and integrations with Ansible Tower, PKS, NSX-T, vRO, AWS, GCP, and Azure.
A post summarizes this, but doesn’t exactly state when it will be GA.
For deeper automation, check out this post on VMware Cloud Assembly, Service Broker, and Code Stream.
VMware Wavefront
This was a big hit at VMware Code / VMTN sessions this past week.
Bill Roth, the product manager I’ve been working with, ran quite a few session at VMware Code/VMTN
Sending metrics to Wavefront from a Raspberry Pi.
People had fun with this session, and ended up sending even attaching temperature gauges and such and getting data mapped in Wavefront.
VMware Flings of Note
Code Capture (if you remember Onyx, same thing).
In the HTML5 GUI, click record, and it will spit out PowerCLI commands for the actions you just performed.
Could be useful.
If you want to try it out, its under the latest vSphere HTML5 WEb Client fling
Horizon Helpdesk Utility For our Horizon View implementations, the Fling would install locally at your desktop.Install it, launch it, and connect to Connection Server.It may be a more intuitive tool for people to pick upGranted, this requires Horizon Enterprise 7.0.2 or greater to function, but most of our clients meet that requirement.
ESXi Compatibility CheckerThe ESXi Compatibility Checker is a python script that can validate VMware hardware compatibility and upgrade issues of ESXi.
The python script runs locally from your windows PC, (after you get a few prerequisites installed).
Not sure if this would replace RVtools, as that give us so much more information….
VMware NSX 6.4.2
New update, with Context-Aware Micro-Segmentation, Multicast Routing support, and simpler deployment/management of the Controller VMs.
Small improvements, but I see them as important.
Not sure it will create new deals for us, but I believe any of our NSX customers could get a call from us on this new update.
Still, at VMworld, NSX-T is getting huge amounts of attention.
Here is a pretty good overview (with corresponding VMworld sessions) posted by Humair Ahmed
Azure & VMware NSX Cloud
Lior Kamrat has been a longtime VMware employee who recently moved over to Microsoft.
With his VCDX in Datacenter and in Cloud, it may seem wierd that he is now an Azure Cloud Architect.
Regardles…he recently hosted a webinar on this topic, and it is available for replay here.
This one is about an hour, so plan accordingly.
Cloudera Validated Hadoop Design on VMware vSAN
This is new.Found this out after the event from Cormac Hogan’s posting.…and the Validated Design in on VMware’s StorageHubdocumentation site.
Kubernetes on VMware vSphere
This VirtuallySpeakingPodcast Episode covers Kubernetes on VMware vSphere.
WEI’s Twitter was advertising this, and it has good guests:
Cormac Hogan & Frank Denneman.
Good 35 minute podcast.
Base NVMe – 4 part blog
So far, only 1 post exists, but I like the article.
Short, to the point, technical.I know we all know what NVMe is/does, but his was worth the 5-10 minute read.
Runecast
Why Do I find this software offering to be interesting?
It will, essentially, tell you what conifguration issues you havein your vSphere Infrastructure (like an ongoing health-check).It also has Log collection (Syslog) capabilities from ESXi Hosts and VMs….
I’ll be working to get through setting up a Partner Agreement with these folks, as I find this to be SUPER cost effective.
I was told that a 10 x CPU licenses of this costs about $3,000/year.
No brainer if that is true.