Virtual Updates 2021-05-31

ESXi 7.0.2 Update 2a – potentially killing SD/USB?
Christian Mohn just posted about a situation where he began having issues with his boot drive (a USB device).
This is a known issue at VMware, KB # 83376.
In short, since 7.0 was released, with the changes in the boot drive partition scheme, I have been rethinking a 12/13 year old habit of using SD cards for the boot drive of an ESXi server…..maybe its time to start doing internal NVMe or SSD only…..

vCenter Patches for 6.5, 6.7, & 7.x
Bob Plankers highlighted this in a post of his on 5/25/2021.
In short…PATCH YOUR vCENTER SERVERS!!!!
This is a critical Patch!!!
Release Notes for vCenter 6.5.0 Update 3p are here.
Release Notes for vCenter 6.7.0 Update 3n are here.
Release Notes for vCenter 7.0.2 Update 2b are here.

VMware vForum 2021 registration open
Europe & India are set for June 22.
Asia Pacific is June 23.
Americas is June 24.
Agenda looks to be identical for each day.
Tracks for Anywhere Workspace, App Modernization, Multi-Cloud, Virtual Cloud Network, and VMware Security are defined.
Get registered here for this free event.

VMware Updates it education portal
Now branded as VMware Customer Connect Learning,
…not EVERYTHING is included in the free tier, but here is still a lot of content for free….
Just login with your MyVMware login (partners, use your partner login).
Under your Name (upper right), if you belong to any special VMware Groups, they will appear there (so for all VCDX holders, there is a special group there for us).

vSphere With Tanzu – Basic, Standard, & Advanced
What’s the difference?
…& why did VMware suddenly introduce a basic layer intead of going Standard, Advanced, Enterprise …. (this one I can’t answer)….
Is it marketing with some technical accuracy? Yes….but it gives you an idea of the different licenses you will want to make sure you consume….
3-minute YouTube video on vSphere Tanzu Basic
5-minute YouTube video on vSphere Tanzu Standard
5-minute YouTube video on vSphere Tanzu Advanced

VMware Tanzu Service Mesh
With all the Tanzu products, it definitely helps when someone can speak plainly about what each of these products do.
Michael Rebmann recently did a post that is a great summary of TSM (Tanzu Service Mesh).
A 5-15 minute read, depending on your background…..

vROPs – working with Dashboards
This conversation has been coming up more and more nowadays….
Viktor van den Berg (VCDX #121) has a set of posts on this very topic

vROPs 8.4 has a HotFix out….
Fixes a handful of issues, but I’m sure there are other bug fixes….
VMware KB 83658 calls out the fix, and download.

Phython3 setup on Windows
Chris Wahl is a great source of information.
He recently posted about Setting up his Windows 10 system…
even if you are seasoned, Never hurts to see if you can learn something new…

HAProxy 2.4 released
Given that this is used by VMware for one of its Tanzu networking options, I’m sure it will be seen as an option to get upgraded to this.
How soon?
Not something I can predict….
HAProxy blog post is here.

Nested ESXi appliances for 7.0 Update 1d & 2a
William Lam has kept this up for quite some time now…
If you already use this content library, you’ll see the new images.
If you haven’t, well…..try it out….very lightweight.
Also….had to have a WilliamLam.com post in here with VirtuallyGhetto.com no longer existing…..

VCF Automated Lab Deployment
William Lam, at it again….
Here, he has an updated VCF 4.2 automated lab deployment script.
Not a bad way to become familiar with the core of VCF.

PuTTY gets updated to 0.75
PuTTY doesn’t get updated too often.
Click here for the PuTTY page, and thank Simon Tatham for keeping PuTTY going.

Nutanix 5.20 LTS released
Finally, a new LTS release.
So many good things have gone into the STS releases since 5.15, I am excited for those of you who only stay on the LTS releases (for prod, I get it….)
Derek Seaman had a post on this first, & nicely summarizes the improvements…
Quite a few things in there, and not all of us care about the same things.
Quick 2-3 minute read….

Nutanix Collector 3.4 released
Noticed this via Derek Seaman’s latest post….
Right from his site, “…Nutanix Collector collects the cluster statistics such as usage data of the allocated resources from AHV, ESXi, and Hyper-V clusters.”
Available in the Nutanix Download section of the portal.

Nutanix Network Port Diagrams
Artur Krzywdzinski has been keeping this going for quite a few years now.
Lots of components from the core functions, to the Era & Calm offerings.
You can see his original post on this topic here.
You can see the latest post on this topic here.

Nutanix – alerts that automatically Open Support Case
So as I was teaching Nutanix Workshop at WEI this past week, one of the questions I got was, “…with Pulse enabled, will support cases be automatically opened for me?”
I know the answer was yes, but not for every alert out there.
One of the students pointed us all to a document he was just looking at the day before, which is Nutanix Article #000001959, Which Alerts Automatically Generate a Support Case with Nutanix Support?
I do learn something overtime I teach a workshop….

Continuing Education – a list of resources that come with references (of people who have used those sites and are happy with the results).
Nutanix .NEXT – September 20-22 (Virtual Event)
VMworld – October 5-7 (Virtual Event)
A Cloud Guru
CodeClouds
HashiCorp Learn
KubeAcademy
Nutanix University
PluralSight
Udemy
vBrownBag
VMware vForum – June 24 (Americas)
VMware Customer Connect Learning (old VMware Learning Zone)
VMware Hands On Labs