Virtual Updates 2023-01-09

VMware End of Support – this year’s countdown
While the official Product Lifecycle Matrix (vmware.com) is still here,
I love when others post it with a countdown on it.
vCenter 7 has 814 days left of support (April 2 2025).
Horizon 7 in April this year
SRM 8.5 in April this year.
vRA 8.8.1 in June this year.
Lots of other software listed here….
Time to plan your updates for this year, team!

VMware Explore 2023 US
Las Vegas, NV
Venetian Hotel
Aug 21-24
Here’s the link.

vSphere Key Providers – a comparison
This 11-minute YouTube video reviews the 3 supported key providers.
The Native Key Provider (caution, when used in production).
Standard Key Provider (pointing to a KMS).
Trusted Key Provider (pointing to a KMS).

Find out which VM this vSphere VM was cloned from?
Ever need to do this?
William Lam wrote about this recently, as Luc Dekens wrote this up nicely.
Here is William Lam’s post.

1Password hs MFA support?
This is great. Not sure when they added this capability!
Why does it matter?
Well, I’ve used 1Password for many years now as my Password Manager.
Nice integration with macOS, iOS, Windows, Android, Linux…and more importantly, the major browsers.
cutting over your MFA to this is super easy, and no longer need authenticator apps….
Check out the instructions page from 1Password.

1Password’s take on LastPass
Given the hack of LastPass, there has been grumblings from those who used LastPass, and felt it was time to move.
In this 1Password post, they offer their opinion on their approach to security versus LastPass’ approach.
Not to say either is better (OK, I use 1Password, so…).
Just a nice take on mitigating risk.

Southwest’s Technical Debt & Its holiday problems
Not here to pick on Southwest, but they recently had their travel problems.
This is more a Technical Debt article, reviewing how relying on older software that “just works”, and not modernizing your infrastructure components or workflows for the modern age can lead to catastrophic results.
If only someone mentioned it to leadership (they did, its in the article).

Proxmox – an Open Source Virtualized Environment?
Came across Proxmox over the holiday week.
Gave it a download to try it out.
Runs on top of Debian (the way ESX used to run on Red Hat).
While not going to rip out any existing environments, cool to see this type of solution

Nutanix Move 4.7 released
Sweet!
AHV to AHV, EC2, Azure
AWS EC2 to AHV, ESXi (on Nutanix), NC2 on AWS
Azure to AHV, ESXi (on Nutanix), NC2 on Azure
ESXi to AHV, ESXi (on Nutanix, NC2 on AWS, NC2 on Azure
Hyper-V to AHV, ESXi (on Nutanix), NC2 on AWS

Continuing Education – a list of resources that come with references
(of people who have used those sites & are happy with the results).
VMware Explore 2023 -Aug 21-Aug 24 (Las Vegas, NV)
HashiCorp Learn
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
VMware Explore 2022 (sessions)
VMware Explore VMTN Sessions (vBrownBag)
VCDX Mentoring Series