VMworld 2021 – Oct 5-7
Remember, this is another Virtual Event….and it starts tomorrow!
Get registered for free at: VMworld
vCenter 6.5, 6.7, and 7.x – Critical Patch
vCenter has just been patched to handle a critical vulnerability.
VMware Advisory VMSA-2021-0020 is here
On vCenter 7, it does take a bit for the patch to be applied, and the vCenter services to be restarted.
vCenter 6.5 u3q Release Notes are here
vCenter 6.7 u3o Release Notes are here
vCenter 7.0 u2d Release Notes are here
TinkerTry – Credit Freeze & Identity Protection
…and stopping unsolicited junk mail.
Paul Braren, who runs TinkerTry, came up with a great summary of these 3 major topics.
Give it a read.
vSphere 7.0 Update 3 announced
Blog post is more of an announcement, while the video, long as it is, covers quite a bit of detail.
With VMworld this week, should be a lot more info on this upcoming release.
VMware Blog post is here.
42-minute YouTube video is here.
Duncan Epping covers vCLS enhancements.
vSAN 7.0 Update 3 Announced
Quite a few new features….
Read the post or watch the video (depending on your preference).
VMware Blog post is here.
15-minute YouTube video is here.
Duncan Epping goes over a few of vSANs new features.
Duncan Epping talks about the IO Trip Analyzer.
vSphere Replication – a Technical Overview
I’ve used vSphere Replication since it was introduced in SRM 4.0 (before it got decoupled from SRM & made available via a vCenter License).
It has always worked, though like every other software, had some minor issues in its early days.
Today, people are still surprised that they even are licensed for vSphere Replication (available in the vSphere product download section).
This VMware Tech Zone post reviews vSphere Replication (its ~20 minute read).
Updating VM Hardware – do you, or don’t you?
I have always tried to keep VM Hardware (or VMX version, or VM Compatibility) up to date in some form or other.
When building a new VM Template, I use the current VMX version.
If I’m deploying a new vCenter, I update its hardware as part of the workflow.
….I found out that I should NOT be upgrading the vCenter VM Hardware versions….Per VMware KB 1010675
…Modification of the virtual hardware version on the vCenter Server Appliance is not supported. Personally, I think that is nonsense, but hey….have to be supported!
Time to verify the checklists have this nuance accounted for.
Veeam Backup & Replication 11a released
Adding support for a lot of items, but vSphere 7.0 Update 3, Windows Server 2022, and NSX-T 3.0 using vDS are highlights for me.
Check out the KB article.
For right now, you can only get 11a by applying the hot fix from the KB article.
Nutanix AOS 6 Performance & Resilience
Some cool updates.
RF1, or Redundancy Factor 1, means only 1 copy of data exists.
While not for normal VMs, VMs such as Hadoop, Splunk, or NoSQL have data resiliency but into them, where an RF1 would be appropriate to save on storage consumption. Now Data Locality (writing locally) is a huge performance improvement!
Predictive Storage Capacity for rebuilds after host failure.
Predictive Time-To-Rebuild after a host failure.
Check out the Nutanix Post here.
VMworld recommendations
From folks I follow…
Getting Started with vSphere with Tanzu [MCL1648]
The Fast Path to Kubernetes with VMware Tanzu [APP1630]
Deep Dive on vSphere with Tanzu Updates [APP2063]
The Future of VM Provisioning – Enabling VM Lifecycle through Kubernetes [APP1564]
Johan van Amersfoot
Graham Barker
Duncan Epping
Tony Foster
Cormac Hogan
Phoebe Kim
Sam McGeown
Continuing Education – a list of resources that come with references (of people who have used those sites and are happy with the results).
VMworld 2021 – October 5-7 (Virtual Event)
VMworld 2022 – August 28 – Sept 1 (San Francisco, CA)
HashiCorp Learn
Kode Kloud
KubeAcademy
Nutanix University
PluralSight / A Cloud Guru (PluralSight purchased A Cloud Guru)
Udemy
vBrownBag
VeeamOn 2021 – recordings
VMware Customer Connect Learning (old VMware Learning Zone)
VMware Hands On Labs