Virtual Updates 2023-01-23

ESXi TPM Encryption Recovery Keys – Backup via PowerCLI
Deploying ESXi 7.x or 8.x hosts that have TPM 2.0 devices?
MIGHT want to take a look at this PowerCLI script to backup those keys…
Grab that script, and give it a go (be sure to add an Export-CSV command to the end of it).
Post by Steven Bright is here.

ESXi Server Hardening
Security is coming to the forefront of most designs nowadays.
The official Securing ESXi Hosts (vSphere 8.0 Docs) is a short 462 page read, as of the December 2022 update.
While many things are called out in the vSphere Hardening Guide, never hurts to view the documentation along with it (and grab a PDF copy for a point in time reference) to document your decisions.

vSphere Replication Calculator
Discussing use of vSphere Replication recently, I got a chance to use the vSphere Replication Calculator again.
There are many tools we forget even exist, so if using vSphere Replication (included with your vCenter Standard license), just give this a go to plan your bandwidth requirements, RPO, or even the # of VMs you can replicate….

Replication & DR on VMC on AWS using SRM
That’s a mouthful, but yea…its correct.
Hence the reason I was using the vSphere Replication Calculator.
This VMware Tech Zone post covers the whole process (in case you are not familiar with VMware SRM).
If you’ve ever done SRM before, this covers it, on AWS or between two of your locations.

vSAN ESA Ready Nodes – what can you change?
Of course Duncan Epping would be the first to post this….
Check out Duncan’s post here.
He also links to VMware KB 90343 what you can and can’t change.

Nutanix AOS 6.6 released
Just remember, 6.6 is on the STS train…>
(all LTS releases are multiples of 5 … 5.5, 5.10, 6.5)
Magnus’ post gives a short summary.

NC2 on AWS – Hibernate / Resume your cluster
Another conversation I had recently…
Available on AWS and Azure, a great way to extend your environment for whatever use case you might have.
And don’t forget that Nutanix offers BYOL for its AOS software.
While this post is just over 2 years old, it still highlights a cool capability of using NC2 (Nutanix Cloud Clusters) on AWS….
You can hibernate them when not needed!

Nutanix Files – WORM Compliance!
For those of us that need WORM (Write Once Read Many) support, its here!
This comes with Nutanix Files 4.2.1, so get your LCM kicked off!
Nutanix Post is here.

Nutanix NKE 2.7 released
NKE (Nutanix Kubernetes Engine), formerly known as Karbon, has gotten an update.
Magnus’ post gives a short recap.

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