Cisco Live!
Is this week in San Diego CA. Looking forward to hearing what my team learned out there….
HPE Discover
Is next week in Las Vegas NV. I know the WEI team has some insights into some of the announcements….can’t wait to talk with folks about what is currently under NDA…..
VMware Visio Stencils – Updated
At the end of May, updates were made to the Visio Stencils used in the VVD.
Funny…18 years without any stencils, and now…updates every 2 weeks?
VTUG (Virtualization Technologies User Group) – The Last Event
I have been a member of this group for many years now, and it is sad to see this group having its last event.
I am biased, of course, as I have been involved for years….
Those of us in New England are lucky…between VTUG, VMUG, and other Virtualization User Groups in the area, we have had the opportunity to have at least 12-24 events a year where we can network with peers, and continue our learning while contributing to the community.
If you have the time, the final VTUG Summer Slam is July 18, 2019.
It would be great to see this event have the sendoff it deserves…..
VMware Skyline – is it worth it?
Given that the cost is free, that gives it a great starting point (well, its not free, buy you are entitled to it with Production VMware Support).
Its feedback is all about proactively alerting you to issues.
WEI feels pretty strongly that this is a good recommendation for our customers to utilize….matter of fact, it is the subject of our VTUG Summer Slam breakout this year.!
This was updated on June 4th, so update your Skyline appliances if you have not yet done so….post here with new features.
If you have multiple vCenter servers with different groups responsible for them, there is a post regarding that configuration here.
Certificates, vSphere, & You
This is a great post to review, or begin, your understanding of certificates, and the role they play in a VMware vSphere solution.
The post is compiled by quite a few people, and while my note here is short regarding this topic, the post itself is REALLY worth reading…..
HPE ProLiant ESXi issue?
Found this post from Davoud Teimouri, about HPE ProLiant servers getting an error about “Ramdisk tmp is full…”
The issues is from a bad AMS driver found in HPE ESXi media.
…of course, it was patched, but not until the May 2019 VIBs depot.
Time to get your HPE ESXi hosts patched….Make sure to add the latest VIBs Depot repository to Update Manager, and remediating this should be easy.
VMware Workspace ONE – Mobile Flows
The Digital Transformation of EUC (End User Computing) has been going on for quite a while now. In the VMware space, it started with VDM (Virtual Desktop Manager), which became Horizon View …. and that delivers desktops or applications to end users.
Over the past few years, Workspace ONE has been taking VDI solutions and turning them into EUC solutions,….combining VDI, Device Management, Conditional Access, application delivery, along with anytime any device access to be productive.
Workspace ONE has been adding “Mobile Flows” to the mix.
Rather than users having to jump into different apps to do an approval or request, it is just an actionable message to the user that they can deny/approve quickly easily.
Check out the Mobile Flow post here.
If you want to revisit what EUC is about, this video by 2 x UEC rockstars is the de facto (my opinion) explanation. While it takes an hour, it covers it all!
NVIDIA – is it worth it in VDI?
For our VDI solutions, WEI has kept its stance for the past few years that NVIDIA GRID is a requirement for maintaining a great user experience.
NVIDIA has this post on YouTube, and it shows the differences.
3.5 minutes to show WHY WEI believes this is required.
Cool that they use the same baseline I do…. YouTube playing on VDI.
Windows 10 and VDI – its performance impact
One of the choices we go through today, when architecting a VDI solution, is the version of Windows 10 that is used to provide the base image of desktops.
Why is this a big deal?
Each edition of Windows 10 supports different VDI brokers, tools, versions of Office, performance impacts, and usability concerns.
This post I found over the weekend did some performance measurements on different versions of Windows 10, and the impact it had on performance….hence the different density of users per server that can be achieved. While your gut instinct may know this already, it is great when there are metrics to back up your instincts.
The short….
Each version of Windows 10 has, and probably will continue to, require more hardware to run.
VMware Log Intelligence – Webhooks to Slack
OK so the post is for Slack, but you can send notifications wherever….
….and William Lam makes another worthy post (I don’t think there’s been a week he hasn’t put something of value on his site).
This post, he covers how to use the VMware Log Intelligence (log collector/analyzer) and how to send messages to Slack channels
Nutanix LCM (LifeCycle Manager) 2.2 released
Anyone who has ever manually updated BIOS or firware appreciates the automation tools that can do this for you.
Nutanix has been doing LCM for their hardware for a while, and now, as they move to being a software company, that means their software runs on a variety of hardware vendors.
Those additional vendors have been (or are being) added to the LCM software.
Check out this post from Nutanix about it.
VMware Flings of Note…
vRealize Build Tools – for those who use vRO or vRA and want to manage their code/workflows
Home Lab – Synology DSM at home
Derek Seaman, a good friend of mine, recently got a Synology unit to update his homelab, AND decided to post about things along the way.
I’ve always liked the way he presents information.
If you give his posts a few minutes, I’m sure you’ll like his straightforward postings….
Selecting & Configuring DSM Model
Picking Packages
Home Lab – A rack shelf for NUCs
So quite a few people discussed this over the past couple of weeks, which brought it to my attention in the first place.
Pretty cool, minimalist shelf to stuff 8 x NUCs into 3 rack units….and a shared power supply, and an ethernet switch….
Upcoming Conferences
CiscoLive! – Sand Diego, CA 6/9-6/13
HPE Discover – Las Vegas, NV 6/18-6/20
AWS re:Inforce – Boston, MA – 6/25-28
VMworld 2019 US – San Francisco, CA 8/26-8/29
Microsoft Ignite – Orlando, FL 10/4-10/8
VMworld 2019 EMEA – Barcelona, Spain 11/4-11/7
AWS re:Invent – Las Vegas, NV 11/25-11/28
VeeamOn – Las Vegas, NV 5/4 – 5/6 (2020)