ESXi & SD/USB installations
Continuing on from the post on 2021-05-31….
more info about this potential issue from Christian Mohn, and the justification for migration to internal NVMe drives for the boot drive….
I’m not one to support workarounds for production, but if you DID update to 7.x and need the workaround until your replace your boot drives, this could help.
VMworld 2021 – what content to expect
A revival of customer presentations getting priority?
Registration opens for VMworld, June 15th, 2021.
VMware Blog post is here.
ESXi 7 – Storage Layout for Boot Disks
Niels Hargoot from VMware did a post about the Boot Disk Layout last year, May 2020.
Still super relevant. Given the above issue (SD/USB drives), this is a good read.
vSAN – Shared Witness now has “Extra Large” option
Remember the days of 1 Nested ESXi host per 2-node vSAN ROBO deployments?
vSAN 7.0 Update 1 made it possible to have a “shared” witness ESXi VM.
With vSAN 7.0 Update 2….you now have the option to have 1 of those “shared” witness VMs support up to 64 ROBO clusters….
VMware Blog post is here.
ESXi – pinning a CPU for a VM
I haven’t done this since ESX 3.x (perhaps it was 2.x).
Back then, there were reasons to do so. Nowadays…not so much.
This came to light as a few folks I know on Twitter were discussing it.
Frank Denneman had an awesome short post on why you should avoid it except in the most extreme circumstances…..
SDDC.lab – now at Version 3
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the project, it’s a set of Ansible scripts (Playbooks) that perform automated deployments of nested VMware SDDCs. An hour after you issue the deploy command, a fully-fledged vSphere-NSX-T environment is at your disposal. Pretty cool.
WEI‘s own Karl Newick has been running through this, and gets called out in this post for working/testing this setup.
Read the post here, and get your own SDDC with NSX-T.
VMware TKG Demo Appliance 1.3.1
William Lam noted that this VMware Fling just got updated.
His post is here, with links.
Homelabbers – New Group Buy from William Lam
William Lam (virtuallyGhetto.com which is now WilliamLam.com) has been setting these up.
Check out the current (US based only right now) 2021 HomeLab Group Buy he has put together for SuperMicro servers….
Nutanix – Free Training AND Free Exam Voucher
Want to get trained AND certified?
If you sign up for the free course, and complete the course by July 31, 2021, you get an exam voucher to take the related NCP exam.
What courses are available? the following 4….
Enterprise Cloud Administration (The core of Nutanix)
Nutanix Data Services (Think Files/Objects/Volumes)
Nutanix EUC (End User Computing) (Nutanix Frame, but more VDI/EUC approaches)
Nutanix Database (think Era, the tool for DBAs, like Virtualization is the tool for Server Admins)
Nutanix Files BC/DR – what’s new?
With the release. of the current Prism Central and Files 3.8.1 +…..
Ever want to include replicated file system shares, but hate DFS?
This 14-minute YouTube video shows the config of replicating individual shares with the Nutanix Files solution….
Nutanix – Top 10 things to do after deployment
Artur Krzywdzinski has a great post covering this topic.
a good list, especially if you are new to Nutanix, and making sure you are doing the right things for your infrastructure.
(just remember, X-Ray shouldn’t be run on existing prod clusters)
Nutanix Move with Ansible?
Yup.
Add some consistency to your Move migration plans with Ansible Playbooks.
This post from Nutanix covers the topic, and links to all the called out integrations.
Nutanix Frame – Simplified Image Management
Using/Considering Nutanix Frame for your VDI?
Some examples here for using “Microsoft FSLogix Application Masking” when installing lots of software into the Golden Image, and hiding applications from folks not approved (licensed) to use those apps.
(reminds me of how customers tuned NTFS permissions in days gone by to do the same thing by preventing access to the EXEs….)
Nutanix Blog post is here.
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
VeeamOn 2021 – recordings
VMware vForum – June 24 (Americas)
VMware Customer Connect Learning (old VMware Learning Zone)
VMware Hands On Labs