Virtual Updates 2019-12-09

HPE SAS SSD Drive Failure Imminent!
This sounds bad.
Taken right from the linked document….
Bulletin: HPE SAS Solid State Drives – Critical Firmware Upgrade Required for Certain HPE SAS Solid State Drive Models to Prevent Drive Failure at 32,768 Hours

VMware Project Pacific
I keep posting on this, but I’m just trying to stay on top of it…
Cormac Hogan did a great writeup that takes 5-10 minutes to read & comprehend the solution.
Of course, William Lam tweeted about a few VMworld sessions (2 of which were new to me) that are worth watching. You will need a VMworld account to get access to these.
HBI1452BE – Supervisor Cluster
HBI4500BE – Guest Cluster
HBI4501BE – Native Pods

AWS re:Invent 2019
What a tough event to keep track of.
So many announcements, its hard to focus on what to summarize.
A few things stood out in the Infrastructure space that I am accustomed to…
AWS Outpost is GA (VMware on AWS Outpost coming in 2020)
Couple of things I like focusing on securing the core of AWS offering
IAM Access Analyzer (focus on understanding public & private access permissions on your AWS accounts)
Access Analyzer for S3 (focus on showing you S3 access policies on your buckets so you can restrict permissions if needed).
….so many things….like new Nitro chips by AWS (displacing Intel chips).
Want to see Tuesday’s 2.5 hour Keynote?
I’ve put a link here to the AWS announcements & keynotes from re:Invent.

VMware vSphere 6.7 u3b released
Some bug fixes, some security fixes.
Veeam is checking the CBT issues are resolved, and should give a thumbs up in a week or so.
Release Notes are here.

VMware vSphere CNS (Cloud Native Storage)
We have heard about this feature, and can see it our current vCenter Client…
Given that all the announcements for CNS have focused on the storage being vSAN, leave it to one of the champions (Cormac Hogan) for showing how to use CNS with VMFS & NFS (so ….not just vSAN).
Short of it….CNS uses storage policies in vSphere, to provide a StorageClass constructs in Kubernetes for use in manifests (YAML files).
You won’t be a master of this day 1, but you’ll see how to support your Kubernetes PV (Persistent Volumes) easily with this.

VMware Tanzu Mission Control
I keep hearing/seeing this since VMworld late August this year.
Another post from Cormac Hogan, really simplifies what the Mission Control part of Tanzu is looking to achieve.
This is going to be an important part of the Manage function….
Deploy (and attach existing) Kubernetes clusters from Mission Control.
Create policies and attach to groups (of Kubernetes Clusters).
Manage apps living in multiple namespaces.
Great 5-10 minute read.

VMware vSAN Operations Guidance
Now you have vSAN….what do you need to know to keep it running day 2?
VMware Blog post covers it nicely.
The VMware vSAN Operations Guidance section of StorageHub is what VMware came up with.
Complementing VMware Docs, KB articles, & StorageHub details.

VMware Cloud Assembly with Ansible
Short post on how to determine if Tower is even needed (it probably is).
Has links pointing to examples of consuming Ansible via Cloud Assembly.
VMware Blog post here.

Simulate PMem in Physical or Nested ESXi hosts
William Lam has another (not-supported) hack for those of us learning new things in the lab.
How to simulate PMem (so you can play with a new feature requiring the newest of hardware.
Once you apply the hack, reboot your ESXi host, and you have PMem to learn and play with!
As this technology becomes cheaper, I believe adoption will increase dramatically (think of SSDs 9 years ago vs. today).

VMware Flings of Note
Kubewise – updated to 1.1
USB Network Native Driver for ESXi – updated to 1.3
OS Optimization Tool – updated to b1120

Veeam Backup for AWS
Just saw this from Gostev’s weekly email.
Now you can backup EC2 instances, just like you can VMs on-prem.
In the past, you loaded an agent into the EC2 image.
Works with EBS snapshots, can tier down to S3, and can copy to same or different cloud, including on-prem.
First 10 instances are totally free.
Product page is here.

Blockchain – Applying to Applications
By this point in time, you MUST have at least heard of blockchain.
I’m by no means an expert in it, but I understand what it can do for data integrity.
This VMware Blog post is a nice example of how it could be applied to applications, improve throughput in the application, and keep data integrity in a large system.

Jenkins – What is it
I came across this post when reading around Project Pacific.
I think it is a great read for those who don’t know what Jenkins does.
Even if you don’t plan to use it, at least you’ll understand what the DevOps team are using….
About a 5 minute read.

Git – Getting Started
This Microsoft post takes about 20 minutes to go through if you are a first timer with Git.
I know , Microsoft documentation….
But….this is actually pretty good walkthrough.

Kubernetes – getting started with Manifests
Given all the Project Pacific hype going around, never hurts the vSphere Admins out there to get an understanding of Kubernetes.
This post is pretty much spot on for HOW to build the manifests and understand what they do for you/the application you need to deploy.
Not that everyone will start building apps, but if you have team members that will be consuming Kubernetes, I believe it will help you to understand what they need, and how they do it.
You do the same thing now with VMs, right?
You don’t know all the apps running in the VMs, but you understand how to provide an OS to the App team…

Windows 7 Support – ends 1/14/2020
Anyone still running this?
Here is Microsoft’s End of Support statement for Windows 7.
Guess it’s REALLY time for me to update the lab VDI sessions…..

Upcoming Conferences
Aruba Atmosphere – Las Vegas, NV 3/22-3/27
VMware Empower (partner only) – Dallas, TX 4/20-4/23
Red Hat Summit – San Francisco, CA 4/27-4/29
VeeamOn – Las Vegas, NV 5/4 – 5/6
Cisco Live! – Las Vegas, NV 5/31 – 6/4
HPE Discover – Las Vegas, NV 6/23-6/25
Nutanix .NEXT – Chicago, IL 6/29 – 7/2
Microsoft Inspire – Las Vegas, NV 7/19-7/23
VMworld 2020 – San Francisco, CA 8/30-9/3
VMworld 2020 – Barcelona 11/9-11/2