Virtual Updates 2022-05-30

vSphere 6.5 & 6.7 – End of General Support
Don’t forget that vSphere 6 is phasing out, and that most people should be moving to vSphere 7.
So far, vSphere 7.0.3 Update 3c seems to be very stable.
vSphere 6.5 & 6.7 End Of General Support ends October 15, 2022
This only leaves just under 7 months to get to vSphere 7.
VMware End of Support pages are here.
Don’t forget that SD cards are no longer recommended by VMware!
That means you need SSD or NVMe for boot drives now!

VMware acquired by Broadcom
This completed just last week.
All sorts of people have differing opinions on how this will impact VMware moving forward.
An interesting perspective causing controversy (whether you agree with him or not), is Brian Madden’s take on this topic.
I have linked to his post on LinkedIn here
VMware’s Post about this is here.

VMware Tools for Windows – CVE – Time to Upgrade
Time to upgrade to 12.0.5, as all versions of 10, 11, & 12 are affected.
VMware CVE post is here.

How did vSphere get its name?
Bob Plankers posted this back in December 2019….
How vSphere Came To Be Named
Kinda cool to just remember some history….

Conferences Remembered
A good friend of mine, Doug Baer, recently posted about conferences, specifically VMworld, and reminisced about the many VMworld events he has been to.
While cool to flashback & remember many of the things he recalls, it can also be an import guide to those who are off to their first conferences, while for those of us who are going to our first conference in 2+ years, a great way to remember what to focus on….

Need a Flash based browser?
Well, Flash is dead right?
<sarcasm>
No one has anything running that still needs the Adobe Flash
</sarcasm>
Found a tweet by Bob Plankers calling out this portable browser, Basilisk in the Internet Archive.
I grabbed myself a copy in case it ever gets pulled and someone needs it.

CISA warning – don’t patch domain controllers this month
CISA (or…the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) recently announced, Microsoft May 2022 update can potentially break domain controllers.
They have a quick (unsupported) fix for now if you have already applied it.
I DID apply it in class I’m teaching this past week, and I did notice a couple of quirks in integrating AD with some software, but not catastrophic…but its a lab.
I can imagine if users can’t log on in production, that could be an issue.
You can read their post here.

Windows OS talks to ~291 & ~2,900 IPs …by default
Just thought this was interesting….
Bob Plankers posted a link to this article.

Windows Server 2012 & SQL Server 2012 – End of Support options
Came across this post on the Microsoft site.
You have until:
July 12, 2022 for SQL Server 2012
October 10, 2023 for Windows 2012 (and 2012 R2)

Nutanix AOS 5.20.4 released
Some security updates & feature enhancements.
Magnus Andersson, thanks for the summary!

Nutanix AOS 6.1.1 released
Given that 6.1 is still an STS release, I don’t expect production usage of it just yet….that being said….
Some really cool things are going to get wrapped up into the next LTS release.
Magnus Andersson recently summarized the new features in his post.
Hmmm…data in transit encryption?….

Nutanix Global Tech Summit 2022
I was lucky enough to get an invite to this event, which is specifically for Nutanix SE. Had a lot of fun there, and look forward to the things coming out!!!

Continuing Education – a list of resources that come with references
(of people who have used those sites & are happy with the results).
VMware Explore 2022 – August 28 – Sept 1 (San Francisco, CA)
VMware Explore 2022 Europe – November 7 – November 11
HashiCorp Learn
HPE Discover 2022 – June 28-30 (Las Vegas, NV)
Kode Kloud
KubeAcademy
Nutanix University
PluralSight / A Cloud Guru (PluralSight purchased A Cloud Guru)
Udemy
vBrownBag
VMware Customer Connect Learning (old VMware Learning Zone)
VMware Hands On Labs
VMworld Sessions (2021, 2020, 2019)