Virtual Updates 2020-03-30

VMware Wavefront – Covid-19 Dashboard
The power of VMware Wavefront put to good use in this time.
Check out the 3 x dashboards created in Wavefront monitoring Covid-19 stats.
Just remember, Wavefront can model just about anything you want.

vSphere 7 – vSphere Lifecycle Manager
Been waiting for this feature….
Imagine Update Manager not only applying patches, but also, firmware, drivers, BIOS, and other updates to your hosts?
Well, that’s vSphere Lifecycle Manager.
Desired state, compliance validation, auto-remediation (if you want it).
No more reading the Compatibly Guide (well, during updates and upgrades…still need to use that guide to select hardware.
This VMware Blog post highlights it, though it was written for vSAN….

vSphere 7 – Virtual Disk Mapping
Was excited when I saw this post by Cody Hosterman about mapping VMDK files to drive letters in Windows (& Linux) VMs.
Requires an up to date VMware Tools (not sure which version just yet).

VMware Tanzu Mission Control
Manage (or plan on managing) Kubernetes?
The VMware Blog post goes and explains a few key points: multi-cluster LCM, manage existing Kubernetes clusters (anywhere), centralized policy & governance, centralized performance management, and app centric policies.
Phew!
Yes, there is a lot to it, but this is a pretty good overview in a 5 min read.

VMware DRS – vSAN Awareness in vSphere 7
Duncan Epping has another great write up prior to vSphere 7 being released.
vSphere 7 DRS will be aware of vSAN Stretched Clusters, and understand which side of the stretched cluster the VM and vSAN are “active”.
You can read the post here.

VMware vSAN – Cloud Native & File Services Integration
A VMware Blog post covering the topic.
The short of it…
How using the native File Services of vSAN is a simple enable of the Persistent Volume requirements of Kubernetes workloads.
Also links to a video showing the integration from the Kubernetes point of view, as well as the vSphere Admin / CNS point of view.

Scheduling vSphere Pods on vSphere 7
With vSphere 7 around the corner, Frank Denneman has another post that gets a bit deeper on how kubernetes workloads will be managed and scheduled in vSphere 7.
This post goes into things like placement and scheduling.
Not a light read, but definitely important to spend 10-20 minutes on it.

VMware Horizon 7.12 released
One of the enhancements a lot of folks (some unknowingly) will appreciate…MAC address is preserved on a resync or refresh of a floating instant-clone desktop pool during up front provisioning
Other items in there as well for enhancements or fixes.
Release Notes are here.

VMware DEM (Dynamic Environment Manager) 9.11 released
Focus on updates in the Management Console and FlexAgent.
I’d watch the video, as I didn’t see things in the release notes that were discussed in the video.
Release Notes are here.
A 2.5 minute What’s New video here.

VMware UAG (Unified Access Gateway) 3.9 released
Some new ways to publish apps internally, and of course…but fixes.
Release notes are here.
YouTube Video of What’s new here.

VMware Horizon – presenting physical desktops
This used to be something that I did back around 2009-2010 quite often.
Haven’t revisited this since then….Until last week, as folks moved to work from home options, and physical desktops come back into the discussion….
This linked PDF covers how to do this in Horizon View 7.
Not much has changed, from what I remember (though maybe my memory is not as good as it was 10 years ago).
View 7.7 started handling Win10 1803…
View 7.12 handles Win10 1903
Still, if you need to set it up, good to know its still an available feature.

Nutanix BC & DR
Josh Odgers continues his contributions….
This time, with the focus on BC & DR (which are very different from each other).
Love this post as it highlights concerns and design criteria that are derived when working with a business to determine its goals for a solution.
Matter of fact, had nearly this exact discussion twice this past week!

Upcoming Conferences
Google Cloud Next – Cancelled Now Virtual Only! 4/6-4/8
VMware Empower (partner only) – Cancelled Now Virtual Only! TBD
Red Hat Summit – Cancelled Now Virtual Only! 4/27-4/29
Dell Technologies World 2020 – Cancelled Now Virtual Only! 5/4-5/7
Cisco Live! – Las Vegas, NV 5/31 – 6/4
VeeamOn – Cancelled Now Virtual Only! 6/17-6/18
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