Virtual Updates 2020-04-13

This week is a bit light.
I spent so much time these past 2 weeks reading the vSphere 7 documentation, rebuilding the classroom to run vSphere 7 (and doing all the patching of the Windows OS), and updating process documentation, that I missed keeping up on this post.

vSphere 7 – Released
OK, so there are a lot of things on this one note.
I’ll have a collection once you click “read more” on this post.
I’ll link the release notes here, but the collective of posts and informative notes will be linked as a collection below.
I’ve read through the 3500 pages of documentation already.
Lots of good information in there.
I have prepped a vSphere 7 What’s New that I plan on delivering to folks who would like to hear it.

Remote Access, VPN, VDI, or EUC
Lot of conversations about this these past few weeks.
I am doing a session on this today.
Thought I’d share some really good posts around that.
Brian Madden post on VMware’s Blog Site on VDI or VPN, what that means, and the considerations you should take, depending on your partners.
VMware has a Steps to Enable a Remote Workforce with Workspace ONE
This post gives the 10,000 foot view of the process of standing up Workspace ONE.

vSphere 7 & Tanzu Collection of Posts – week of release
Essentially….posts I still need to read over the next two weeks….
Mike Foley’s post Intro to vSphere Pod Service
Deploying Tanzu Kuberenets Grid Management Clusters
4-part Cormac Hogan Building TKG Cluster in vSphere with Kubernetes
David Stamen’s Deploying vSphere with Kubernetes
Managing Kubernetes at scale – Tanzu Mission Control

vSphere 7 – The Good & The Bad
A shot collection of things I’ve taken note of
Backups -Image-based (whole VM) backup of vCenter no longer supported. To backup vCenter, you MUST use the built-in file-level backup (in the VAMI).
vSAN File Services – requires vSAN Enterprise Licensing. This kinda sucks.
vSphere Lifecycle Manager – next gen of Update Manager. Use LCM (same way you used VUM) to upgrade to 7.0. Then change to Image Management to get the benefits of LCM.
Content Library from vGhettoupdated with ESXi 7.0 Tempaltes

PowerCLI 12 released
No longer supports vSphere 6 (& a few other things), but adds vSphere 7 support.
Run Update-Module VMware.PowerCLI
Kyle Ruddy’s VMware Blog post here.

vSphere 7 with Kubernetes
Cormac Hogan has a series of posts (recent) that cover standing this up with VCF and vSphere 7.
This latest post covers how this looks at GA.
Developer and vSphere Admin perspectives provided.

SRM & vSphere Replication 8.3 Released
Obviously for vSphere 7 support.
SRM release notes are here.
vSphere Replication release notes are here.

New ESXCLI commands in vSphere 7
Found this post highlighting some of the new commands.
Need to find time to test / validate some of these.
That will probably happen this week.

NSX-T 3.0 released
To complement the vSphere 7 release.
Also required for VCF 4.0 coming out this month.
Release Notes are here…a ton of updates.

vRealize Network Insight 5.2 announced
Has support for vSphere 7 and NSX-T 3.0
Integrations into vROPs 8.1 (when released)
huge improvement in visualizations…
VMware Blog post here.

Nutanix AOS 5.15
The current LTS release of the AOS software.
Login to the Nutanix Portal and check out the release notes.

Nutanix Prism Central 5.16.2
Required if you plan on moving to AOS 5.15 LTS
Starting to see more of the LCM components getting centralized.

Nutanix Usable Capacity
Continuing his series of posts, Josh Odgers goes into more detail about the usable capacity of Nutanix vs vSAN on the same hardware.
Good read.

Upcoming Conferences
VMware Empower (partner only) – Cancelled Now Virtual Only! 5/27
Red Hat Summit – Cancelled Now Virtual Only! TBD
Dell Technologies World 2020 – Cancelled Now Virtual Only! TBD
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 – Cancelled Now Virtual Only! 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