FROM THE EDITORS VIRTUAL DESK
Hi everyone, after a very busy week, with lots of VMware updates, product and service related we are pleased to bring you all a wrap up of this past weeks VMware news. As regular readers will be aware, we try and provide a balanced digest of news from around the VMware world from the past week or so. The best way to keep updates is to check our weekly newsletter, and chat tp your TAM, who is always there to help you.

Have a fantastic week in virtualization.

Virtually Yours
VMware TAM Team
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NEWS AND DEVELOPMENTS FROM VMWARE

VMware Radius

• VMware’s Cloud Strategy: Connecting People to Any App and Service
  Cloud is fundamentally reshaping the enterprise, leaving both disruption and opportunity in its wake. “Everywhere you look,” says VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, “tech innovation is reshaping our expectations as new tech-driven models transform every aspect of business. Cloud lies at the heart of this tra...
• VMware Global Impact Report: Annual Progress Update
  By Nicola Acutt, VP, Sustainability Strategy, VMware Nicola Acutt, Vice President of Sustainability Strategy, VMware VMware has a reputation for tackling big challenges boldly. Nowhere is this more evident than in our journey to leave ahead a better future, particularly when it comes to the enviro...
• Ensuring Application Security With VMware AppDefense
  “Cybersecurity today is very similar to the way parents approach child development,” declared VMware’s Senior Vice President, Security Products Group, Tom Corn, as he kicked off his spotlight session at VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas. The session was designed to highlight VMware’s new security solution, ...

Open Source @VMware

• 4 Vital Steps to Open Source Success in Your Company
  Open source software is gaining serious traction throughout many industries. A 2016 survey conducted by Black Duck Software found virtually all companies rely on open source software in their product development. This indicates that open source is widely adopted and is becoming a strategic part of e...
• Watch On-Demand: Tiejun Chen Talks “Unikernels and Explorations” at Open Source Summit North America
  Earlier this month, The Linux Foundation hosted Open Source Summit North America in Los Angeles. The technical conference hosted more than 2,000 technologists and open source community members who collaborated and shared insights across a wide variety of topics. Tiejun Chen, an open source expert a...
• A Maintainer’s Perspective: What Is Software Made Of?
  What is a software project made of? What are the components? Ask software engineers of various disciplines and language expertise, and you’ll likely receive a fairly predictable set of responses: Software is comprised of source files, a build system and, if you’re lucky, documentation. Digging a ...

VMware vSphere Blog

• Key Manager Concepts and Topology Basics for VM and vSAN Encryption
  At VMworld 2017 VM and vSAN Encryption and security of vSphere in general became VERY popular topics. And in those discussions the topic of Key Managers came up and specifically “How many key managers should I have?” was a recurring question. This blog article will give you two examples of key ...
• Three Key Reasons for Joining Modernize Data Centers Track at vForum Online
  As digital transformation increases across the business world, the era of costly, complex legacy infrastructures is coming to an end. But what will it take to modernize infrastructures in such a way that IT gets the agility and flexibility it needs to operate, innovate, and scale to meet the demands...
• Understanding the Impacts of Mixed-Version vCenter Server Deployments
  There are a few questions that come up quite often regarding vCenter Server upgrades and mixed-versions that we would like to address. In this blog post we will discuss and attempt to clarify the guidance in the vSphere Documentation for Upgrade or Migration Order and Mixed-Version Transitional Beha...

Network Virtualization

• Kubernetes in the enterprise with VMware NSX-T and vRealize Automation
  This post is written by Hany Michaels, Senior Staff Architect at VMware – Personal blog: www.hanymichaels.com We’ve all seen the VMware PKS announcement at VMworld 2017, and we are all excited about it. The idea of provisioning Kubernetes clusters in an easy way, with day-2 operations, inside your ...
• Recapping the Incredible Presentations at future:net 2017
  For those of you unable to attend future:net 2017 in Las Vegas, NV last month, fear not—what happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay in Vegas! That’s right, thanks to the wonder that is YouTube, there are video recordings available of the amazing keynote speakers and presentations that took place at t...
• Demo: Multi-site Active-Active with NSX, F5 Networks GSLB, and Palo Alto Networks Security
  I wrote this post prior on my personal blog at HumairAhmed.com. You can also see many of my prior blogs on multisite and Cross-vCenter NSX here on the VMware Network Virtualization blog site. This post expands on my prior post, Multi-site Active-Active Solutions with NSX-V and F5 BIG-IP DNS. Specifi...

Virtual Blocks

• 3 Key Reasons Why You Must Attend the Modernize Data Centers Track At vForum Online
  As digital transformation increases across the business world, the era of costly, complex legacy infrastructures is coming to an end. But what will it take to modernize infrastructures in such a way that IT gets the agility and flexibility it needs to operate, innovate, and scale to meet the demands...
• Oakland University Accelerates Technology Growth with vSAN
  At first glance, Oakland University (OU) looks like a relaxed midwestern university with rolling lawns and students lounging under spreading oaks. And while that is indeed part of the university’s charm, a closer look reveals a campus culture that is anything but sleepy. Serving more than 20,500 stu...
• vSAN Announcements and Highlights from VMworld 2017
  Las Vegas wasn’t the only destination on VMworld’s itinerary this year. The annual conference traveled overseas and made waves in Spain. The record breaking number of attendeeds at each event heard how vSAN surprassed the noteworthy milestone of 10,000 customers. Many of these customers were out in ...

VMware Cloud Management

• vRealize Network Insight 3.5 – Feel the vRNI
  vRealize Network Insight 3.5 (vRNI) introduces a number of great features, which improve our visibility and ability to ensure a secure and compliant configuration.  Also Network Insight is now available as a service.  This means you can rely on VMware to handle management and updates of Network Insi...
• IT As Developer Of Infrastructure As Code
  IT As Developer:  One Of The Keys To Relevance This blog is the third installment in a series focused on the question of what IT teams need to do to retain or regain relevance (depending on their circumstance) with line-of-business.  For the full list check out my first blog  on this subject.  In a...
• vRA and NSX – Intro to App-Centric Networking and Security
  Introduction In a software-defined world, infrastructure is defined by policies based on a set of requirements — prescribed by the business, applications, security or IT itself. Those policies are tied to a set of logic that integrates and automates a given service as needed, when needed. For its p...

Cloud Foundation

• IBM Cloud Secure Virtualization built on VMware Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud addresses new GDPR requirements
  The following post is contributed to the Cloud Foundation Blog by Andrew Guerra, Offering Manager, VMware on IBM Cloud On 25 May, 2018, the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect in the European Union (EU), with sharper teeth than any other compliance regulation to date. W...
• CONTEST: Retweet VMware Cloud Foundation for a chance to win VCF giveaways!
  Starting July 26th, we’re asking you, to be a part of the Cloud Foundation community! As you might have noticed, Cloud Foundation has moved to a new Twitter handle. In order to help keep our community up-to-date on all the Cloud Foundation, hybrid cloud, and unified SDDC news and announcements, we ...
• VMware Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud addresses today’s hybrid cloud needs
  The following post is contributed to the Cloud Foundation Blog by Steven M. Huntington, Program Director Offering Management, VMware on IBM Cloud IBM and VMware announced an integral partnership to extend the sale of VMware solution offerings on the IBM Cloud in February 2016.   This cloud partne...

Cloud-Native Apps

• Harbor Private Registry: Image Vulnerability Scanning Demo
  By Henry Zhang, Chief Architect of R&D, VMware China The popular open source Harbor registry recently released its latest version, 1.2, which introduces a new feature called Vulnerability Scanning. This feature allows users to scan through the images stored in Harbor and report any vulnerability fo...
• Developer Sandboxes with VIC 1.2
  By Patrick Daigle, Sr. Technical Marketing Architect, Cloud-Native Apps Introduction In version 1.2, vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) introduced the concept of the native Docker Container Host (DCH). This is a built-in Docker image containing a full-fledged Docker engine that runs using VIC. DC...
• Join VMware at Cloud Foundry Summit Europe
  When it comes to picking a host city for an event like Cloud Foundry Summit Europe—the premier event for enterprise app developers—Basel, Switzerland probably isn’t the obvious choice that comes to mind. However, Basel has a reputation for being a historical, international place, making it a perfect...

VMware End-User Computing Blog

• Creating a Shared Vision of the Digital Workspace: Are We There, Yet?
  Exploring Part 2 of the *New* Digital Workspace Story Map IT organizations might have something quite remarkable in mind for the digital workspace, but if they can’t share it with colleagues, build excitement and align goals and objectives, they’re just left tinkering by themselves. I began this ser...
• vForum Online Sneak Peek: 5 Empower Digital Workspace Event Spotlights
  Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications and mobile workflows are hallmarks of the modern workforce. Employees expect flexibility, ease of use and the ability to work from anywhere on any device. To meet these demands, IT must shift from traditional models for application and device management to s...
• What’s New in VMware Horizon 7.3.1 & Horizon Client 4.6
  VMware has released VMware Horizon 7.3.1 and Horizon Client 4.6! With this new release, Horizon 7.3 enhances key platform features, including Horizon Virtualization Pack for Skype for Business, VMware Instant Clone Technology and the Horizon Help Desk Tool. Many new items have been introduced, such ...

AirWatch Blog

• Unlock the Power of APIs with VMware AirWatch
  As the volume and variety of mobile devices in the enterprise expands, the use of application programming interfaces (APIs) to connect devices to the internet has increased tenfold. APIs, which enable third-party software systems to interact with applications, have revolutionized how companies acros...
• Deliver Magical Onboarding Experiences with VMware Workspace ONE & Windows AutoPilot
  Of all the day-to-day tasks of IT administrators, the process of imaging and configuring PCs has been one of the most time intensive and mundane. Historically, companies either dedicated internal resources or paid third-party companies to handle this process, which resulted in long delays for the av...
• 6 New PCLM Capabilities for Windows 10 + Unified Endpoint Management
  As part of the VMware End-User Computing (EUC) mobile team, I am completely humbled seeing the level of enthusiasm from customers, media and analysts for our innovations in workspace and unified endpoint management (UEM). At VMworld 2017, top customers, spanning industries and locations, talked abou...

The Support Insider

• Top 20 Horizon View articles for September 2017
  Unable to save pool settings or create new pools in VMware View Changing the name of a VMware Horizon View Connection Server Connecting to VMware Horizon View desktops fails with the error: Tunnel server presented a certificate that didn’t match the expected certificate Audio issues with the VMware...
• Top 20 vRealize Operations Manager articles for September 2017
  Removing the vRealize Operations Manager Plugin from vSphere after upgrading to vRealize Operations Manager 6.6 Update sequence for vSphere 6.5 and its compatible VMware products How to configure Data Retention in vRealize Operations Manager 6.x Ensuring adequate free disk space is available on VMw...
• Top vRealize Log Insight articles for September 2017
  FAQ: Log Insight for vCenter Server Update sequence for vSphere 6.5 and its compatible VMware product Collecting diagnostic information for VMware vRealize Log Insight Converting from Active Directory to VMware Identity Manager in vRealize Log Insight Upgrade to vRealize Log Insight 4.0.0 fails wit...
• Top vRealize Automation articles for September 2017
  Removing a virtual machine from vRealize Automation 7.x using Cloud Client  Update sequence for vSphere 6.0 and its compatible VMware products  Requests get stuck at ‘In Progress’ or ‘Pending Approval’ status in vRA  Logging in to a tenant with verified administrator credentials or user credentials...
• Top 20 VSAN articles for September 2017
  Component metadata health check fails with invalid state error vCenter Server 6.0 Update 2 displays on non-vSAN enabled ESXi hosts displays the message: Retrieve a ticket to register the vSAN VASA Provider vSphere Web Client displays alerts for network partitions of a vSAN cluster vSAN 6.2 hybrid d...

EXTERNAL NEWS FROM 3RD PARTY BLOGGERS virtuallyGhetto

• VMware Fusion Powershell community module
  During the VMware Fusion 2017 Tech Preview, I was experimenting around with the new Fusion REST API and I had built a small prototype PowerShell Module as a way for me to learn how the API works. This allowed me to provide valuable feedback back to the Fusion Engineering team on improving the REST A...
• VMworld Hackathon Hardware/Software BOM
  I know many of you have been asking about the hardware setup that we had used in this years VMworld Hackathon. I finally got a chance to document the details and you can find the complete hardware and software BOM below. For VMworld US, we had two different HW configurations, one for the primary Hac...
• How to enable remote REST API access for VMware Fusion 10
  In case you did not hear the good news, VMware Fusion 10 along with its older brother VMware Workstation 14 just GA'ed a few days ago and there are a TON of cool new features (like new Network Simulator) for both product lines. I am personally excited about the Automation capabilities that have been...
• Automating VM keystrokes using the vSphere API & PowerCLI
  I am constantly amazed at the number of new use cases that can now be enabled with some of the new and updated capabilities of our vSphere Platform. I recently discovered a new vSphere API that was introduced in vSphere 6.5 called PutUsbScanCodes() which may sound a little strange but it enables som...
• VMworld Hackathon vSphere Client Login UI Theme
  For those of you who attended this years VMworld Hackathon (US/Europe), you may have noticed something different when logging into the vSphere Web/H5 Client? In case you missed it or could not attend, here is a GIF demonstrating what you would have saw: via GIPHY No, the VMworld Hackathon environmen...

ESX Virtualization

• LPAR2RRD – Free Monitoring Software Review
  Today we write about another Czech company called Xorux and their Free performance monitoring software for VMware and IBM Power Systems. Their product’s name is LPAR2RRD. The same virtual appliance for VMware has a second product built-in called STOR2RRD which does performance monitoring for enterpr...
• VMware Horizon View 7.3.1 Released
  A few days back VMware has released their flagship product for VDI – VMware Horizon View 7.3. The latest release brought some improvements and new features such as dedicated instant-clone desktop pools (previously only non-persistent desktop pools could be created via instant-clones). Also, instant-...
• Veeam Backup for Office 365 Released
  Finally, Veeam has released Veeam Backup for Office 365 yesterday. After a long time being in beta (and 1.0), we can see this product going GA, in it’s version 1.5. While many users are still running Exchange On-Premises, organizations with hybrid deployments and full cloud deployments are able to u...
• VMware Virtual Hardware Performance Optimization Tips
  This post will try to outline some performance optimization tips for virtual hardware within VMware infrastructure. Performance is one of the topics which is crucial. How far can you go to optimize each and every VM within your infrastructure? There are few guidelines from VMware, we’ll focus on opt...
• Microsoft Windows Server Management Challenges – Project Honolulu
  It seems that Microsoft hasn’t said their last word concerning GUI management for Microsoft Server systems. In this post we will discuss the new Project Honolulu but get back to Nano Server which seems to be dying fast. In fact, after trying to develop Nano server for some time, a very lightweight s...

CormacHogan.com

• 2-node vSAN – witness network design considerations
  It seems that 2-node vSAN for ROBO (remote office/branch office) deployments are becoming more and more popular. The fact that one can now connect the 2 vSAN hosts at the remote office directly back-to-back without needing a 10Gb switch has reduced the cost extensively. And with the introduction of ...
• Upcoming speaker session at the Poland/Polska VMUG (Warsaw)
  I’m delighted to announce that I have been invited back to present at the next Poland/Polska VMUG, which will take place in Warsaw on Wednesday, October 25th, 2017. I have been asked to deliver the keynote at this VMware User Group meeting, and I will be using the opportunity to present on Storage P...
• Supporting Fault Tolerance VMs on vSAN Stretched Cluster
  During one of our many discussions at VMworld 2017, I was asked about supporting Fault Tolerance on vSAN Stretched Clusters, more specifically SMP-FT. Now to be clear, we can support SMP-FT on vSAN since version 6.1. The difficulty with supporting SMP-FT on vSAN stretched cluster has always been the...
• How many hosts are needed to implement SFTT in vSAN Stretched Cluster?
  Many of you who are well versed in vSAN will realize that we released a Secondary Failures To Tolerate (SFTT) feature with vSAN 6.6. This meant that not only could we tolerate failures across sites, but that we could also add another layer of redundancy to each copy of the data maintained at each of...
• Slides from my VMworld 2017 sessions are now available
  All three of my sessions from VMworld 2017 are now available on slide share. Lots of folks have been asking me for the content, so this is the easiest way of making them accessible. I just want to say thanks once more to my great co-speakers/co-presenters. I’m grateful to Cody Hosterman of Pure Stor...

Scott's Weblog

• Upcoming Spousetivities Events
  Long-time readers/followers know that my wife, Crystal, runs a program called Spousetivities. This program organizes events for spouses/partners/significant others at IT industry conferences. This fall is a particularly busy season for Crystal and Spousetivities, as she’ll be organizing events...
• Technology Short Take #87
  Welcome to Technology Short Take #87! I have a mix of newer and older items for you this time around. While I’m a bit short on links in some areas, hopefully this is outweighed by some good content in other areas. Here’s hoping you find something useful! Networking Vincent Bernat has ...
• Some Static Site Resources
  Over the last few days—prompted perhaps by my article with some additional information on my site migration—a few folks in the community have reached out to me to share some resources they thought I might find useful. In turn, I’d like to share them with you, my readers, in the eve...
• HashiConf 2017 Wrap Up
  HashiConf 2017 is a wrap for me, and as I’m sitting here at the airport lounge in Austin I’d thought I’d post links back to the liveblogs I published as well as a few thoughts on the conference overall. Liveblogs First, here are links to the liveblogs published during the event: ...
• Liveblog: Cloud Native Infrastructure
  This is a liveblog of the HashiConf 2017 session titled “Cloud Native Infrastructure.” The speaker is Kris Nova, a Senior Developer Advocate at Microsoft. Kris, along with Justin Garrison, authored the O’Reilly Cloud Native Infrastructure book (more information here). As one of the...

Welcome to vSphere-land!

• With attendance down does this mean VMworld has jumped the shark?
  As I reported in my annual post on my experiences at VMworld, attendance was down this year and in a fairly big way. VMware reported attendance at 20,000 this year which is about a 15% decline from the 23,000 who attended in 2015 & 2016. Is this a sign that less people care about what … C...
• New report from IDC highlights the many benefits of VMware VVols
  I find one of the biggest barriers to VVols adoption is lack of customer understanding of what VVols is and what it will do for them. Many customers are happy with VMFS and the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mind-sight is prevalent which keeps them using what they are comf...
• VVols enhancements coming in the next vSphere release
  I’ve known the VVols roadmap for quite a while but haven’t been able to share that publicly but VMware recently just shared it in a VMworld VVols session that is publicly available on YouTube so I though I would comment on that. If you watch the STO2446BU – VMware Virtual Volumes T...
• My thoughts and observations on VMworld 2017
  Another year, another VMworld in the books, this is number 10 for me (there have been 14 VMworld events total) and how fast the event flies by never changes. I’m posting this a little late this year as the old adage “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” didn’t hold true for...
• Get your Top vBlog 2017 virtual logos
  Hot off the presses are new logos for your blog/website to show off how you did in Top vBlog 2017. I was going for a new look this year and hence had to find a new designer which was no easy task. I use Fiverr which is a huge community of freelance designers for hire … Continue reading »...

Virtual Geek

• VMworld 2017: XtremIO X2the best clean-sheet AFA gets better.
  This week marks the launch of the next generation of an incredible successful product – Dell EMC XtremIO. The best way to think of X2 as the 2nd generation of XtremIO – it takes the great foundation of the strengths of XtremIO and builds on them. The core architecture of keeping all the metadata ...
• VMworld 2017: re-inventing Data Protection for VMware
  This is cool. Every customer needs Data Protection for their VMware environment – local backup and recovery, and protection from disaster recovery. I’ve seen every chapter of this – from the birth of Site Recovery Manager in 2008 (to Jay Judkowitz – shout out to you buddy!, the birth of CBT in 2009...
• VMworld 2017: Continued Advances in Hybrid Cloud DIY Choices
  If you’re coming here first – I strongly recommend reading the “Lessons Learnt” post in this series, here.  It will help with context, and understanding your options and choices.   Also – I strongly recommend reading this “DIY” and “Consume” blog post here – it’s very useful. Ok, with that context ...
• VMworld 2017: Pivotal Container Services (PKS)
  IMO – this is one of the biggest announcements at VMworld this week.   It is a major shift to the Dell Technologies strategic perspective, and important for our customers. It’s something we’ve been spending a lot of time on internally for a while – I’ve spent hours at end with Scott Yara and James...
• VMworld 2017: Continued Advances in Hybrid Cloud - NHC
  If you’re coming here first – I strongly recommend reading the “Lessons Learnt” post in this series, here.  It will help with context, and understanding your options and choices. Ok, with that context – lets talk about the Native Hybrid Cloud (NHC) 1.4  NHC is designed to be a full cloud stack – bu...

Eric Sloof - NTPRO.NL

• New Free eLearning Course: VMware Network Virtualization Fundamentals 2017
  The VMware Network Virtualization Fundamentals 2017 course introduces the concept of Software Defined Data Center (SDDC).  The course is designed to introduce basic and fundamental concepts associated with SDDC, Network Virtualization, Security, and the types of business challenges the solution...
• Performance Characterization of Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere 6.5
  In this paper, an online transaction processing (OLTP) benchmark, DVD Store 3, is used to characterize performance and power across five generations of 4-socket Intel servers hosting monster-sized Microsoft SQL Server 2016 database VMs. The results show vSphere is capable of fully utilizing cu...
• New Free eLearning Course: vSphere Integrated Container Fundamentals
  This course covers a series of topics on cloud native basics such as container technology, Kubernetes, and container related infrastructure technologies.   What is a Container? In this lightboard talk, Ben Corrie explains what a container is for beginners.    The Benefits of Containers  I...
• Configuring SSL Certificates for View Servers
  VMware strongly recommends that you configure SSL certificates for authentication of View Connection Server instances, security servers, and View Composer service instances. A default SSL server certificate is generated when you install View Connection Server instances, security servers, or ...
• Performance of Enterprise Web Applications in Docker Containers on VMware vSphere 6.5
  In this paper, VMware explores the performance characteristics of a large enterprise web application running in Docker containers deployed in VMware vSphere 6.5 virtual machines. The paper includes: Performance metrics of the web application running in the Docker virtual and physical environm...

Virten.net

• Critical Patch for All-Flash vSAN with Deduplication (6.0 and 6.5)
  VMware has released a critical patch for vSAN 6.0 and 6.5. This patch contains a fix for a highly critical vSAN issue that might cause IO read errors and in some cases severe symptoms such as inaccessible VMs, host failures, or stuck resyncs. The issue …Read more »...
• Get-VMHostVersion and Get-VMHostLatestVersion PowerShell Function
  The Get-VMHostVersion and Get-VMHostLatestVersion PowerShell functions are aimed at helping you to identify the version at which your ESXi is currently running, and whether updates are available. Both are using a JSON based ESXi Build database which is also the backend …Read more »...
• Convert-ScsiCode PowerShell Function
  The Convert-ScsiCode PowerShell function decodes SCSI sense codes found in the vmkernel.log from ESXi hosts. It uses a JSON based SCSI Code database provided by virten.net. The function works just like my web-based SCSI Sense Code Decoder but allows you to integrate …Read more »...
• JSON Repository Format Update and now with SCSI Codes
  Whenever I create databases with information like ESXi Versions, vCenter Versions or VMware's HCL I try make these available to be used for automation or in scripts. JSON is my data-type of choice but I figured that another structure might be …Read more »...
• SCSI Sense Code Decoder OP Code Update
  I've added a new feature to my online SCSI Sense Code Decoder. It is now possible to enter the Command that has been reported to be failed into the form. The command is displayed in the error message and can …Read more »...

vInfrastructure Blog

• VeeamON Tour Virtual 2017
  VeeamON is the big event from Veeam (actually only in the US) and VeeamON Tour is usually a smallest (one day) event around the world. But, like happened in the past year, on December 5 there will be also a VeeamON Tour Virtual event: coming right to your desktop, an event on the future of Availabil...
• Issue during PSC 6.5 deployment
  If you choose to install the vCSA 6.5 in two different components, you may have an error during the PSC custominization (happens also on latest 6.5U1): An error occurred while starting service ‘pschealth’ This it’s related to a failure of identity management service error on first ...
• October 2017 IT events
  Interesting European IT events: GOTO 2017 – Copenhagen (Oct, 1-3) IoT Solutions World Congress – Barcelona (Oct, 3-5) IP Expo Europe – London (Oct, 4-5) SDN NFV World Congress 2017 – Den Haag (Oct, 9-13) O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference – London (Oct, 16–18) Do...
• VMware Workstation 14 and VMware Fusion 10
  After a technical preview period and the official announce, now both VMware Workstation 14 and VMware Fusion 10 are available for the download. This is a good news, considering that one year ago there were some rumors and doubts about the future of Workstation and Fusion product, due to the laying o...
• Nested virtualization on Google Compute Engine
  Seems that nested virtualization is becoming popular on public cloud: first with Ravello, this year also on Azure, and now Google Compute Engine supports nested virtualization in beta. This feature allows you to run one or more virtual machines inside a Compute Engine Linux virtual machine by levera...

DISCLAIMER
While I do my best to publish unbiased information specifically related to VMware solutions there is always the possibility of blog posts that are unrelated, competitive or potentially conflicting that may creep into the newsletter. I apologize for this in advance if I offend anyone and do my best to ensure this does not happen. Please get in touch if you feel any inappropriate material has been published. All information in this newsletter is copyright of the original author. If you are an author and wish to no longer be used in this newsletter please get in touch.

Getting Caught Up, What Happened In September?

Seems like just yesterday it was the end of August with the start of VMworld in Las Vegas, now its the end of September and Microsoft Ignite in Orlando is wrapping up. Microsoft has made several announcements this week at Ignite including Azure cloud related, AI, IoT, Windows platforms, O365 among others. More about Microsoft Azure, Azure Stack, Windows Server, Hyper-V and related data infrastructure topics in future posts.

Like many of you, September is a busy time of the year, so here is a recap of some of what I have been doing for the past month (among other things).

VMworld Las Vegas

During VMworld US VMware announced enhanced workspace, security and endpoint solutions,  Pivotal Container Service (PKS) with Google for Kubernetes serverless container management, DXC partnership for hybrid cloud management, security enablement via its AppDefense solutions, data infrastructure platform enhancements including integrated OpenStack, vRealize management tools, vSAN among others. VMware also made announcements including expanded multi-cloud and hybrid cloud support along with VMware on AWS as well as Dell EMC data protection for VMware and AWS environments.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press) at VMworld bookstore

In other VMworld activity, my new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press) made its public debut in the VMware book store where I did a book signing event. You can get your copy of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials which includes Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) along with hybrid, multi-cloud, serverless, converged and related topics at Amazon among other venues. Learn more here.

Software Defined Everything

In early September I was invited to present at the Wipro Software Defined Everything event in New York City. This event follows Wipro invited me to present at in London England this past January at the inaugural SDx Summit event. At the New York City event my presentation was Planning and Enabling Your Journey to SDx which bridged the higher level big picture industry trends to the applied feet on the ground topics. Attendees of the event included customers, prospects, partners, various analyst firms along with Wipro personal.

At the Wipro event during a panel discussion a question was asked about definition of software defined. After the usual vendor and industry responses, mine was a simple, put the emphasis on Define as opposed to software, with a focus on what is the resulting outcome. In other words how and what are you defining (e.g. x) which could be storage, server, data center, data infrastructure, network among others to make a particular result, outcome, service or capability. While the emphasis is around defined, that also can mean curate, compose, craft, program or whatever you prefer to create an outcome.

Role of Storage in a Software Defined Data Infrastructure

At the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) Storage  Developers Conference (SDC) in Santa Clara I did a talk about the role of  Storage in Software Defined Data Infrastructures. The theme was that not only  is there a role, storage is fundamental and essential for any software defined  data infrastructure (as well as legacy) from cloud to container, serverless to  virtual servers, converged and hybrid among others. Other themes included the changing role of storage along  with how hardware needs software, software needs hardware, and serverless has  hardware and software somewhere in the stack. Tradecraft along with other related data infrastructure topics were also discussed.

Various IT and Cloud Infrastructure Layers including Data Infrastructures

While promoted as an event for  storage developers by storage developers, based on a lot of the content  presented, SNIA could easily increase attendance to a broader audience with  some slight tweaks as well as messaging. If SNIA is looking to focus the event only for vendor  storage developers, surprise surprise, there were developers there, however I  also talked with IT customers who were there among other non developers.  SDC IMHO is not a replacement for SNW, however with some simple  adjustments in messaging from who shouldn't attend to who should or could attend, more  attendees and sponsors might just happen appear.

Check out the SNIA SDC presentations here, along with my presentation from the 2017 event here (among others).

Tape in a Software Defined and Hybrid Cloud World

I was invited by Fujifilm to present at their recent  9th annual executive summit in Seattle. The Fujifilm event was attended by various partners, customers and industry folks covering a diverse set of topics. Focus areas spanned from legacy IT to hyper-scale to public cloud and High-Performance  Compute (HPC) among others. Magnetic Tape (e.g. tape) may be going away from your data center,  however, chances are if you are doing or storing things in the cloud, your data may end up on tape. In other words, not only does tape continue to evolve, its place and how used (as well as accessed) is also changing. Check out the  Fujifilm site here where you can scroll down and check out mine and other  presentations from the event.

Focus on Data Protection (and recovery)

September also saw  hurricanes, tropical storms, flooding, earthquakes, and acts of natural events, to man-made accidental as well as intentional including software-defined threats such as ransomware, malware, virus, Equifax data information breaches, leaks, loss among other security concerns. A reminder that there are the headline-making news events, as well as those that may be more common yet not widely talked about. What this means is that big or small, full or partial damage, destruction, loss or loss of access, data protection should be proactive to enable recovery instead of an afterthought.

Think of data protection as an investment instead of cost overhead, however that also means finding ways to spread costs out while gaining more benefit. Also remember that if something can occur, fail or happen, it probably will. In other words, the question should not be if, rather when, with what impact. This also means evolving from backup/restore, disaster recovery to business resiliency that enables your applications and data to stay available as well as accessible. In other words, how well are you prepared?

Additional data protection related topics and content include:

• Free Webinar (registration required) with tips for disaster recovery (DR) and business resiliency (BR)
• Preventing Unexpected Disasters article tip via Iron Mountain
• Server StorageIO data infrastructure data protection diaries (various tips and content)
• Free webinar (registration required) planning for GDPR
• Time to recover, do you know where backup data is (article from Computerweekly)
• Ensuring your data infrastructure remains available (article from Networkworld)
• Tips on preparing for Hurricane and storm season (via IronMountain)

Expanding Your Data Infrastructure Tradecraft

At the September Minneapolis St. Paul (MSP) Computer  Measurement Group (CMG) event, I gave a presentation discussing industry trends  perspectives, buzzword bingo updates including software defined, NVM (the media) vs. NVMe (the interface) benchmarking, tools, cloud,  serverless and tradecraft. Tradecraft as a refresher are those skills and  fundamental experiences you acquire over time including what tools, techniques  to use for different scenarios.

As part of the CMG presentation, the discussion  looked at expanding your data infrastructure tradecraft into adjacent areas around  your current focus. Also discussed were the importance of context as different  words have two or more meanings. For example SAS can mean Scandinavian Air  System, Statistics Analysis Software the original unstructured and big data  tool, as well as for storage Serial Attached SCSI. However there is another  meaning for SAS which spans server, storage, networking, cloud, security and  other focus areas which is Shared Access Signature.

Downloads the CMG and other  presentations from the Server StorageIO website here.

Where To Learn More

Learn more about related technology, trends, tools, techniques, and tips with the following links.

• What's a data infrastructure? (Via NetworkWorld)
• Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure and related presentations downloads
• Server StorageIO workload generator and benchmark scripts
• Server StorageIO performance tools and benchmark resources
• Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press) book companion page
• www.thessdplace.com - NVM, flash, SSD, SCM and related topics
• www.thenvmeplace.com - NVM Express (NVMe) related topics

What This All Means

The above are some of the things I was involved with during September with themes of data infrastructure, data protection, software defined cloud, virtual, serverless containers, servers, storage, I/O networking, SSD including NVMe, performance and capacity planning, metrics that matter, management among other topics. It was great meeting many new people at the various venues this past month, likewise seeing old acquaintances and friends. Also thanks to all who have ordered copies of my new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials along with your comments. Check out the Server StorageIO data infrastructure update newsletter for other related activity, industry trends among other topics. Now lets see how fast October and the rest of 2017 goes.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Hot Popular New Trending Data Infrastructure Vendors To Watch

A common question I get asked is who are the hot popular new or trending data infrastructure vendors to watch.

Keep in mind that there is a difference between industry adoption and customer deployment, the former being what the industry (e.g.  Vendors, resellers, integrators, investors, consultants, analyst, press, media, analysts, bloggers or other influences) like, want and need to talk about. Then there is customer adoption and deployment which is what is being bought, installed and used.

Some Popular Trending Vendors To Watch

The following is far from an exhaustive list however here are some that come to mind that I'm watching.

Apcera– Enterprise class containers and management tools
    AWS– Rolls our new services like a startup with size momentum of a legacy player
    Blue Medora– Data Infrastructure insight, software defined management
    Broadcom– Avago/LSI, legacy Broadcom, Emulex, Brocade acquisition interesting portfolio
    Chelsio– Server, storage and data Infrastructure I/O technologies
    Commvault - Data protection and backup solutions
    Compuverde– Software defined storage
    Data Direct Networks (DDN)– Scale out and high performance storage
    Datadog– Software defined management, data infrastructure insight, analytics, reporting
    Datrium– Converged software defined data infrastructure solutions
    Dell EMC Code–  Rexray container persistent storage management
    Docker– Container and management tools
    E8 Storage– NVMe based storage solutions
    Elastifile– Scale out software defined storage and file system
    Enmotus - MicroTiering that works with Windows, Linux and various cloud platforms
    Everspin - storage class memories and NVDIMM
    Excelero– NVMe based storage
    Hedvig– Scale out software defined storage
    Huawei– While not common in the US, in Europe and elsewhere they are gaining momentum
    Intel– Watch what they do with Optane and storage class memories
    Kubernetes– Container software defined management
    Liqid– Stealth Colorado startup focusing on PCIe fabrics and composable infrastructure
    Maxta– Hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) and software defined data infrastructure vendor
    Mellanox– While not a startup, keep an eye on what they are doing with their adapters
    Micron– Watch what they do with 3D XPoint storage class memory and SSD
    Microsoft– Not a  startup, however keep an eye on Azure, Azure Stack, Window Server with S2D,  ReFS, tiering, CI/HCI as well as Linux services on Windows.
    Minio– Software defined storage solutions
    NetApp– While FAS/Ontap and Solidfire get the headlines, E series generates revenue, keep an eye on StorageGrid and AltaVault
    Neuvector– Container management and security
    Noobaa– Software defined storage and more
  NVIDA– No longer just another graphics process unit based company
    Pivot3– An original HCI software defined players, granted, some of their competitors might not think so
    Pluribus Networks– Software Defined Networks for Software Defined Data Infrastructures
    Portwork– Container management and persistent storage
    Rozo Systems– Scale out software defined storage and file system
    Rubrik– Data Protection software, reminds me of a startup called Commvault 20 years ago.
    ScaleMP– Composable scale out software defined servers
    Storpool– Scale out software defined storage
    Stratoscale– Software defined data infrastructure and hybrid solutions
    SUSE– Linux distribution looking to expand their offerings, gain more insight
    Tidalscale– Composable software defined data infrastructures
    Turbonomic– Software Defined Management, insight, analytics and automation
    Ubuntu– Known for their Linux distribution, check out their Metal as a Service (MaaS) technology
    Veeam– Data protection and backup solutions
technology
    Virtuozzo– Software defined storage and data infrastructure technologies
    VMware - AWS, vSAN, NSX, Integrated Containers and much more
    WekaIO– Scale out software defined storage and file system

Some Popular Trending Technology Trends

• ARM, ASIC, FPGA, GPU servers among others
• Converged Infrastructure (CI), Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI), Composable Infrastructure
• Analytics, reporting, insight, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), automation
• Software Defined including Cloud, Virtual, Containers, Docker, kubernetes, mesos, serverless, micro services
• Data protection, backup/restore, archive, security, business resiliency (BR), business continuance (BC), disaster recovery (DR)
• Non-volatile memory (NMV), NVM Express (NVMe), storage class memories (SCM), persistent memory, nand flash, SSD

Where To Learn More

Learn more about related technology, trends, tools, techniques, and tips with the following links.

• Server StorageIO IT Data Infrastructure Industry Links A to E
• Server Storage I/O Benchmarking Performance Resource Tools
• What's a data infrastructure? (Via NetworkWorld)
• Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press) book companion page (includes various images, sample figures and added content)
• Object and Cloud Storage Center (www.objectstoragecenter.com)
• www.thessdplace.com - NVM, flash, SSD, SCM and related topics
• www.thenvmeplace.com - NVM Express (NVMe) related topics

  Various IT and Cloud Infrastructure Layers including Data Infrastructures

What This All Means

There are always more hot popular new or trending data infrastructure vendors to watch, which ones are you keeping an eye on?

Ok, nuff said, for now.
Gs

Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers
Gs

Although vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) is a great tool for a variety of reasons, one of the more useful abilities it brings to a datacenter is the ability to look inside the guest OS and tell you about its state. Back in 6.2 or maybe 6.3, VMware added the ability to look at guest OS metrics. One of the things they added was guest file system stats on a per-drive basis. The available options as of vROps 6.6.1 look like this.

There is one that displays the usage in percentage, and two that show total capacity and usage in units of GB. What’s absent from this list is a metric that shows remaining disk space in terms of capacity (GB). Curiously, though, this metric was present back in 6.3 but has since been, for whatever odd reason, removed from later releases.

            Now, as far as alerting goes, there is already a preexisting alert in vROps that uses the Guest File System Usage (%) metric to inform you on a per-drive or file system basis when capacity is running low. This alert definition is called “One or more virtual machine guest file systems are running out of disk space” and is based on symptoms of a percentage starting at 85% and going to 95%. And this works perfectly well as you can see from the triggered alert below.

Looks good, right? What’s the problem with that? It’s not a problem per-se, but a limitation on the flexibility of the alerting. Consider this scenario for a moment: You have a number of file server VMs with drives in the multi-terabyte range. Space isn’t consumed on a terribly rapid basis, but you still want to know when you’re running low. If you have a, say, 5 TB drive, using the default alert I showed above at the critical level of 95% capacity still leaves you with over 250 GB free. Probably not deathly critical if you’re not consuming space in a rapid manner. What would be better in these cases is to craft an alert based on arbitrary remaining capacity figures rather than remaining percentage. Unfortunately, vROps no longer has the metric necessary for us to make this happen. Happily, though, we can get this ability back through the use of super metrics. Read on to learn how restore this ability.

            The goal here is to use the super metrics ability in vROps to create a new metric that tells us on a per-drive basis the remaining capacity in GB. Using that new metric, we can create new symptoms, and using those symptoms we can create a new alert. Although this is a mildly-involved process, you fortunately only need to endure it once and never again regardless of how many different drives you might eventually have on systems. In order to carry out these steps, we need a few prerequisites to move forward.

1. A disposable Windows VM. Can be almost any OS. Best not to use an existing VM that you care about, although these steps should be perfectly safe if you can’t create a new VM from template.
2. Latest VMware Tools installed on test VM.
3. vRealize Operations Manager 6.6 or better.
4. A Windows-based workstation with PowerCLI 6.5.2 installed. Earlier versions should work but have not been tested.

In this tutorial, I have a disposable VM called “space-test” which I’ll use to set this up.

I am providing you with a few resources in this blog to make the process easier including a pre-constructed super metric that needs to be imported, and two Powershell scripts which can be used to add some test drives to your VM and format them inside Windows. Here’s the overall process we’ll follow.

1. Deploy test Windows VM. Use PowerCLI script to add drives, and use Powershell script inside the guest to format them (both scripts provided).
2. Import super metric provided here.
3. Duplicate super metric enough times to cover all possible drive letters.
4. Activate super metrics in your policy.
5. Create a symptom definition using these super metrics.
6. Create an alert using the new symptom definition.

  I’ve already deployed the test Windows VM, so now we need to add drives. The idea with this is to add a drive for every letter in the alphabet that covers all possibilities you might encounter. Since A, B, and C are reserved, and you’ll likely have D as a virtual optical disk drive, we just need the rest of the letters. A simple PowerCLI script I’m providing you does all this in just a couple of lines.

Connect-VIServervcenter.domain.com-Usermyuser@domain.com-Password'VMware1!'

$vm=Get-VM-Namemyvmname

ForEach ($HardDiskin (1..22))

{

New-HardDisk-VM$vm-CapacityGB1-StorageFormatThin|New-ScsiController

      }

Be sure to edit the script accordingly to connect to your vCenter and provide your VM name. Also, ignore any errors you might warning that the VM must be in a powered off state as they’re false. If this is run successfully, you should have a bunch of 1 GB drives created on your test VM. After that, run the provided PS script inside the guest to bring them online and format them.

Update-HostStorageCache

$disknum= (Get-Disk|Wherepartitionstyle-eq'raw').Number

Foreach ($stuffin$disknum){

Initialize-Disk-Number$stuff-PartitionStyleMBR-PassThru|

New-Partition-AssignDriveLetter-UseMaximumSize|

Format-Volume-FileSystemNTFS-Confirm:$false

  }

Once complete, you should see this madness.

Go into vROps under Administration -> Configuration -> Super Metrics and import the JSON file provided for you.

The result should be this.

Next, duplicate that super metric for as many drive letters as you have (not counting D: if that’s your CD-ROM drive) and change the metric slightly so it references the drive letter. (Unfortunately, I don’t have a script that does this part for you.)

After creating the metrics, add the Virtual Machine as the object type.

Go into your policy and activate these new super metrics. Save the policy.

After a couple collection cycles, you should see these new super metrics working and displaying data on your test VM. You can create a dummy file on a drive that occupies space to see if the super metric is reporting correctly. Something like fsutil file createnew E:\200mb 209715200 will get the job done.

The high value seen above is before the 200 MB file was created, and the low value is after, proving the super metric is collecting accurately.

            Next, we have to create a new symptom definition with these super metrics. Navigate to Alerts -> Alert Settings -> Symptom Definitions. In the metric explorer, change the object type to Virtual Machine. Click the strange button to the right of the “Metrics” drop-down menu and search for then select your test VM. The reason for this (and the whole reason why a test VM was necessary in the first place) is due to a rather unfortunate limitation in vROps to date, and that is you can’t select metrics from which to create a symptom definition just by virtue of them existing in the system. They have to be “active” on an object. If you were to expand the super metrics list there prior to selecting your test VM, you wouldn’t find them. Now that you’ve selected it, however, they appear. Drag-and-drop each of your super metrics into the symptom definition window. Change the definition to suit your needs.

If you expand the Advanced section, you’ll see by default the wait and cancel cycles are set to 3. When complete, save your symptom definition. Once saved, you’ll notice there are individual symptom definitions created for each one. This is intended and rather nice since we don’t have to create them individually ourselves.

We’re almost done. At this point, we have to create a new alert definition that will make use of these symptoms. Walk through the new alert creation wizard giving it a name, description, selecting the base object type of Virtual Machine, setting an alert impact, and then adding symptom definitions. Drag each of them onto the definition so they’re stacked together and not separately. Change the evaluator to be “any” as shown in my example.

This will ensure that you only need a single alert definition to catch any of those symptoms that become true. Once saved, it’s time to test it out. Since I created my symptom definition with the condition that those super metrics need to be less than 5 GB space remaining, I have to increase the size of a drive. After that, fill it up with some test stuff.

Wait a few collection cycles and check to see if the alert fires.

And there we go, we have an active alert on our test system. Since it’s a regular alert, we can do anything we want with it including sending to a CMDB, dispatching an email, generating a web hook, whatever.

            Although this process is, shall we say, uncouth (due to VMware’s redaction efforts), we only have to endure the pain once and all future Windows systems will be covered. But there you have it, we have a good use case for super metrics and have plumbed them all the way through from simple metric to functional alert. Now it’ll be easier for you to integrate this into your process and hopefully keep a closer eye on those drives in the future.

P.S. - The two scripts and JSON for the super metric definition are all available on my GitHub repo here.

I recently received my VCP6-DCV Certification from VMware by Passing the 2V0-621 Proctored Exam with Pearson VUE.

The Journey

For many years I have used VMware products. I distinctly recall getting my hands on VMware Workstation back in 2001, and it was truly an amazing tool. I could emulate Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, QNX, and even a few BSD environments, which I used to learn and troubleshoot issues.

Over the years I continued to use VMware line of products from: Workstation, ESX, GSX, and lastly the introduction of VirtualCenter.

Fast forward to now: The latest products have changed the landscape of running the data center, desktop provisioning, and the rapid deployment of test/development systems.

It was a no-brainer that I should obtain a certificate, but I never felt the need to. This changed when I was made a vExpert in 2017 this year, and that initiated my drive to do more with my knowledge and experience with the product. I now wanted to “prove” to myself, and perhaps others that I had what it takes to pass the exam and have an official recognition backing my previous and current experience levels.

VCP6-DCV Prerequisite

Obtaining the VCP6-DCV Certification requires a set of prerequisites. You need to meet all 3 requirements:

• Attend an authorized training course
• Pass the vSphere Foundations exam (2V0-620)
• Pass the VCP6-DCV exam (2V0-621)

Training

The most difficult part of my path to being a vCP was finding a reputable company to train with in addition to scheduling the time to attend training. The following may sound like a plug and do I assure you that I am not being compensated for writing about them.

I choose to train with a company by the name of StormWind as they offer exceptional VMware Certified professional training which is not only budget friendly, but doesn’t require travel as training is instructor lead; Live in real time and can be done from the comfort of your home or office.

The course I enrolled in was: VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage [V6], with instructor: Vince Rightley.

This was a very engaging class which allowed for attendees to not only be instructed but to participate in supplemental discussions which I personally found to be beneficial. Labs were particularly useful as they allowed for students to get hands on.

Study

vSphere Foundations exam (2V0-620)

After completion of my course I was now qualified to take the vSphere Foundations exam (2V0-620). Admittedly I rushed in to take this exam and FAILD my first attempt.

This was an eye opener that I was not fully prepared to take the test. What I discovered was that many of the resources can be found on VMware’s My Learn site. I would highly recommend following their guidance.

VCP6-DCV exam (2V0-621)

After successful passing the vSphere Foundations exam (2V0-620) it was time to start preparing myself for the VCP6-DCV exam (2V0-621)

VCP6-DCV exam Preparation

I have a few suggestions to make regarding preparation for the VCP6-DCV exam which I believe was beneficial to my success in passing.

Study the materials you obtained in your training course. Continue to leverage the study notes you made for yourself from the Foundations exam (2V0-620). Yes! You should have been keeping notes.

Seek out resources from VMware’s My Learn site. They are beneficial to your success.

Search ‘Google’ for VCP-DCV Study Guides. You will find many results many of great value

Practice Labs

I highly recommend that you gain access to a lab such as VMware’s Hands-On Labs (HOL) to get hands on to all the subject areas covered under the VCP6-DCA as you will need them. I built my own lab so I could have the full experience of building from scratch, to give me a full understanding of the environment.

Test many scenarios including areas of troubleshooting things which are broken (I had to break them, so I could fix).

Familiarizing yourself with acronyms and terms is also very helpful. Example: http://jermsmit.com/vmware-vcenter-terms-acronyms-glossary-tag-your-it/

Find yourself a practice test, and take it once a week to get yourself in accustom to taking tests; In my case it’s been a long time, and practice pays off.

Certification URL

Originally Posted on my LinkedIn

And, that’s it all folks.

–         Jermal

I recently retired my OpenVPN Turnkey appliance and needed to get my VPN solution up and running again. I decided to go with installing OpenVPN Access Server on a clean install of Ubuntu Server to create a stable and light weight Virtual Private Network (VPN) to access my network.

I chose to go with OpenVPN AS because its using the OpenVPN I know and trust, but it also has the value added feature of an administrative server used for user and access management.

Setup is straight forward after a few small prerequisites are established.

Requirements:

Ubuntu Server – Running the latest version and updates. I am using 16.04.2-as my base

Root or possibly sudo access

Software:

Download the latest release of the OpenVPN AS Server

https://openvpn.net/index.php/access-server/download-openvpn-as-sw.html

The direct Ubuntu installs here

The following steps can be used to download and install:

Download the install package: wget http://swupdate.openvpn.org/as/openvpn-as-2.1.9-Ubuntu16.amd_64.deb

Install the downloaded package: dpkg -i openvpn-as-2.1.9-Ubuntu16.amd_64.deb

Change the password for the openvpn user: passwd openvpn

When the installation has completed, the Access Server web UIs will be available here:

Admin UI: https://<yourip>:943/admin

Client UI: https://<yourip>:943/

And just like that you now can take better control over your privacy, security.

Note: I did not go over the configuration of OpenVPN AS, I may do this in another post. I just wanted to run though the steps of getting this software installed.

Original Post Here: http://jermsmit.com/openvpn-access-server-on-ubuntu/

NSX Last Mile Overview

VMware Partners are key to drive exponential growth of NSX and SDDC. Customer Success Last Mile Program focuses on partner enablement by providing live mentoring from experienced NSX Solutions Architects on real customer deployments.

Last Mile Program Details

The program focuses on developing partner competency on NSX deployments and day 2 operations. Moreover, this program also emphasis on rewarding and recognizing partners who are driving results in terms of revenue and number of production deployments. The program also focuses on driving NSX mindset within the partner community who are seeing NSX as their career transformation track rather than just a technology solution.

Program is directly endorsed by VMware leadership and being recognized as one of the most creative and impactful initiatives among vendors in the entire industry. Currently the last mile team is working with about 100 global partners and have directly influenced about 60 partners with their initial NSX deployments. Team has been focusing not only on bigger more established markets such as US, EMEA but also in maturing regions such as LATAM, MENA, SEAK and GCH. This momentum will result in exponential growth and scale which is a win/win for both VMware and Partner community.

Blog Objective

This series of blogs will highlight key partner achievements around NSX deployments specially focusing on

• Regional coverage
• Use-case competency
• Vertical specialization
• 3rd party integration
• Individual consultant accomplishments
• Technology coverage area

This post describes how to perform the basic task of creating a host profile.
Description of Hos Profiles:

VMware Host Profiles are available through VMware vCenter Server and enable you to establish standard configurations for VMware ESXi hosts and to automate compliance to these configurations, simplifying operational management of large-scale environments and reducing errors caused by mis-configurations.

Prerequisites:

1. You need to have a vSphere installation
2. You need to have admin rights
3. You need a configured ESXi host that acts as the reference model

Steps:

1. In vCenter Navigate to the Host profiles view
2. Click the Extract profile from a host icon
3. Select the host that will act as the reference model host and click Next
4. Enter the name and  a description for the new profile and click Next
5. Review the summary information for the new profile and click Finish
6. The new profile will appear in the profile list

Original Post: http://jermsmit.com/vmware-vcenter-66-5-creating-host-profiles/

Video:

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Microsoft has created an Azure and Amazon Web Service (AWS)Service Map  (corresponding services from both providers).
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/cloud-service-map-for-aws-and-azure-available-now/

Image via Azure.Microsoft.com

Note that this is an evolving work in progress from  Microsoft and use it as a tool to help position the different services from  Azure and AWS.

Also note that not all features or services may not be available in different regions, visit Azure and AWS sites to see current availability.

As with any comparison they are often dated the day they are  posted hence this is a work in progress. If you are looking for another Microsoft  created why Azure vs. AWS then check out this here. If you  are looking for an AWS vs. Azure, do a simple Google (or Bing) search and watch  all the various items appear, some sponsored, some not so sponsored among  others.

Whats In the Service Map

The following AWS and Azure services are mapped:

• Marketplace (e.g. where you select service offerings)
• Compute (Virtual Machines instances, Containers, Virtual Private Servers, Serverless Microservices and Management)
• Storage (Primary, Secondary, Archive, Premium SSD and HDD, Block, File, Object/Blobs, Tables, Queues,  Import/Export, Bulk transfer, Backup, Data Protection, Disaster Recovery, Gateways)
• Network & Content Delivery (Virtual networking, virtual private networks and virtual private cloud, domain name services (DNS), content delivery network (CDN), load balancing, direct connect, edge, alerts)
• Database (Relational, SQL and NoSQL document and key value, caching, database migration)
• Analytics and Big Data (data warehouse, data lake, data processing, real-time and batch, data orchestration, data platforms, analytics)
• Intelligence and IoT (IoT hub and gateways, speech recognition, visualization, search, machine learning, AI)
• Management and Monitoring (management, monitoring, advisor, DevOps)
• Mobile Services (management, monitoring, administration)
• Security, Identity and Access (Security, directory services, compliance, authorization, authentication, encryption, firewall
• Developer Tools (workflow, messaging, email, API management, media trans coding, development tools, testing, DevOps)
• Enterprise Integration (application integration, content management)

Down load a PDF version of the service map from Microsoft  here.

Where To Learn More

Learn more about related technology, trends, tools, techniques, and tips with the following links.

• What's a data infrastructure? (Via NetworkWorld)
• Introduction to Azure Files (Microsoft Docs)  
• Public preview of Virtual Network service endpoints for Azure storage and SQL database
• Azure debuts Availability Zones for high availability and resiliency (Azure)
• Azure and AWS       comparison (Docs Microsoft)
• Cloud Storage Considerations (via WServerNews)
• Microsoft Windows Server, Azure, Nano Life cycle Updates
• Overview Review of Microsoft ReFS (Reliable File System) and resource links
• Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press) book companion page
• Amazon Web Service AWS September 2017  Updates
• AWS S3 Storage Gateway Revisited (Part I)
• Cloud conversations: AWS EBS, Glacier and S3 overview (Part II S3)
• Microsoft September 2017 Updates

What this means

On one hand this can and will likely be used as a comparison however use caution as both Azure and AWS services are rapidly evolving, adding new features, extending others. Likewise the service regions and site of data centers also continue to evolve thus use the above as a general guide or tool to help map what service offerings are similar between AWS and Azure.

By the way, if you have not heard, its Blogtober, check out some of the other blogs and posts occurring during October here.

Ok, nuff said, for now.
Gs

Amazon Web Service AWS September 2017 Software Defined Data Infrasture Updates

September was a busy month pertaining to   software defined data infrastructure including cloud and related AWS announcements. One of the announcements included VMware partnering to deliver vSphere, vSAN and NSX data infrastructure components for creating software defined data centers (SDDC) also known as multi cloud, and hybrid cloud leveraging AWS elastic bare metal servers (read more here in a companion post). Unlike traditional partner software defined solutions that relied on AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances, VMware is being deployed using private bare metal AWS elastic servers.

What this means is that VMware vSphere (e.g. ESXi) hypervisor, vCenter, software defined storage (vSAN), storage defined network (NSX) and associated vRealize tools are deployed on AWS data infrastructure that can be used for deploying hybrid software defined data centers (e.g. connecting to your existing VMware environment). Learn more about VMware on AWS here or click on the following image.

Additional AWS Updates

Amazon Web Services (AWS) updates include, coinciding with VMworld, the initial availability of VMware on AWS (using virtual private servers e.g. think along the lines of Lightsail, not EC2 instances) was announced. Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues its expansion into database and table services with Relational Data Services (RDS) including various engines (Amazon Auora,MariaDB, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL,and SQL Server along with Database Migration Service (DMS). Note that these RDS are in addition to what you can install and run your self on Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) virtual machine instances, Lambda serverless containers, or Lightsail Virtual Private Servers (VPS).

AWS has published a guide to database testing on Amazon RDS for Oracle plotting latency and IOPs for OLTP workloads here using SLOB. If you are not familiar with SLOB (Silly Little Oracle Benchmark) here is a podcast with its creator Kevin Closson discussing database performance and related topics. Learn more about SLOB and step by step installation for AWS RDS Oracle here, and for those who are concerned or think that you can not run workloads to evaluate Oracle platforms, have a look at this here.

EC2 enhancements include charging by the second (previous by the hour) for some EC2 instances (see details here including what is or is not currently available) which is a growing trend by private cloud vendors aligning with how serverless containers have been billed. New large memory EC2 instances that for example support up to 3,904GB of DDR4 RAM have been added by AWS. Other EC2 enhancements include updated network performance for some instances, OpenCL development environment to leverage AWS F1 FPGA enabled instances, along with new Elastic GPU enabled instances. Other server and network enhancements include Network Load Balancer for Elastic Load Balancer announced, as well as application load balancer now supports load balancing to IP address as targets for AWS and on premises (e.g. hybrid) resources.

Other updates and announces include data protection backups to AWS via Commvault and AWS Storage Gateway VTL announced. IBM has announced their Spectrum Scale  (e.g. formerly known as SONAS aka GPFS) Scale Out Storage solution for high performance compute (HPC) quick start on AWS. Additional AWS enhancements include new edge location in Boston and a third Seattle site, while Direct Connect sites have been added in Boston and Houston along with Canberra Australia. View more AWS announcements and enhancements here.

Where To Learn More

Learn more about related technology, trends, tools, techniques, and tips with the following links.

• What's a data infrastructure? (Via NetworkWorld)
• Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press) book companion page
• Amazon Web Service AWS September 2017  Updates
• Microsoft September 2017 Updates
• Dell EMC VMware September 2017  Updates
• AWS S3 Storage Gateway Revisited (Part I)
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the NetFlix Fix?
• Cloud Conversations: AWS EFS Elastic File System (Cloud NAS) First Preview Look
• Cloud conversations: AWS EBS Optimized Instances
• Cloud conversations: AWS EBS, Glacier and S3 overview (Part I)
• S3motion Buckets Containers Objects AWS S3 Cloud and EMCcode
• Part II: Revisiting re:Invent 2014, Lambda and other AWS updates
• Cloud Conversations: AWS S3 Cross Region Replication storage enhancements
• Welcome to the Cloud, Bulk, Big Data, Software Defined and Object Storage page
• Getting Caught Up What Happened In September 2017

What This All Means

AWS continues to grow and expand, both in terms of number of services, also the extensiveness of them. Likewise AWS continues to add more regions and data center availability zones, enhanced connectivity, along with earlier mentioned service features. The partnership with VMware should enable enterprise organizations to move towards hybrid cloud data infrastructures, while giving AWS an additional reach into those data centers. Overall a good set of enhancements by AWS who continues to evolve their cloud and software defined data infrastructure portfolio of solution offerings.

By the way, if you have not heard, its Blogtober, check out some of the other blogs and posts occurring during October here.

Ok, nuff said, for now.
Gs

Dell EMC VMware September 2017 Software Defined Data Infrastructure Updates

September was a busy month including VMworld  in Las Vegas that featured many Dell EMC VMware (among other)  software defined data infrastructure updates and announcements.

A summary of September VMware (and partner) related announcements include:

• Workspace, security and endpoint solutions
• Pivotal Container Service (PKS) with Google for Kubernetes serverless container management,
• DXC partnership for hybrid cloud management
• Security enablement via AppDefense
• Data infrastructure platform enhancements (integrated OpenStack, vRealize management tools, vSAN)
• Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud support along with VMware on AWS
• Dell EMC data protection for VMware and AWS environments.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/vmware-cloud-on-aws-now-available/

VMware and AWS via Amazon Web Services

VMware and AWS

Some of you might recall VMware earlier attempt at public cloud with vCloud Air service (see Server StorageIO lab test drive here) which has since been depreciated (e.g. retired). This new approach by VMware leverages the large global presence of AWS enabling customers to set up public or hybrid vSphere, vSAN and NSX based clouds, as well as software defined data centers (SDDC) and software defined data infrastructures (SDDI).

VMware Cloud on AWS exists on a dedicated, single-tenant (unlike Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) multi-tenant instances or VMs) that supports from 4 to 16 underlying host per cluster. Unlike EC2 virtual machine instances, VMware Cloud on AWS is delivered on elastic bare-metal (e.g. dedicated private servers aka DPS). Note AWS EC2 is more commonly known, AWS also has other options for server compute including Lambda micro services serverless containers, as well as Lightsail virtual private servers (VPS).

Besides servers with storage optimized I/O featuring low latency NVMe accessed SSDs, and applicable underlying server I/O networking, VMware Cloud on AWS leverages the VMware software stack directly on underlying host servers (e.g. there is no virtualization nesting taking place). This means more robust performance should be expected like in your on premise VMware environment. VM workloads can move between your onsite VMware systems and VMware Cloud on AWS using various tools. The VMware Cloud on AWS is delivered and managed by VMware, including pricing. Learn more about VMware Cloud on AWS here, and here (VMware PDF) and here (VMware Hands On Lab aka HOL).

Read more about AWS September news and related updates here in this StorageIOblog post.

VMware and Pivotal PKS via VMware.com

Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and Google Kubernetes Partnership

During VMworld VMware, Pivotal and Google announced a partnership for enabling Kubernetes container management called PKS (Pivotal Container Service). Kubernetes is evolving as a popular open source container microservice serverless management orchestration platform that has roots within Google. What this means is that what is good for Google and others for managing containers, is now good for VMware and Pivotal. In related news, VMware has become a platinum sponsor of the Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF). If you are not familiar with CNCF, add it to your vocabulary and learn more here at www.cncf.io.

Other VMworld and September VMware related announcements

Hyper converged data infrastructure provider Maxta has announced a VMware vSphere Escape Pod (parachute not included ) to facilitate migration from ESXi based  to Red Hat Linux hypervisor environments. IBM and VMware for cloud partnership, along with Dell EMC, IBM and VMware joint cloud solutions. White listing of VMware vSphere VMs for enhanced security combine with earlier announced capabilities.

Note that both VMware with vSphere ESXi and Microsoft with Hyper-V (Windows and Azure based) are supporting various approaches for securing Virtual Machines (VMs) and the hosts they run on. These enhancements are moving beyond simply encrypting the VMDK or VHDX virtual disks the VMs reside in or use, as well as more than password, ssh and other security measures. For example Microsoft is adding support for host guarded fabrics (and machine hosts) as well as shielded VMs. Keep an eye on how both VMware and Microsoft extend the data protection and security capabilities for software defined data infrastructures for their solutions and services.

Dell EMC Announcements

At VMworld in September Dell EMC announcements included:

• Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) and Hybrid Cloud enhancements
• Data Protection, Goverence and Management suite updates
• XtremIO X2 all flash array (AFA) availability optimized for vSphere and VDI

HCI and Hybrid Cloud enhancements include VxRail Appliance, VxRack SDDC (vSphere 6.5, vSAN 6.6, NSX 6.3) along with hybrid cloud platforms (Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and Native Hybrid Cloud) along with vSAN Ready Nodes (vSAN 6.6 and encryption) and VMware Ready System. Note that Dell EMC in addition to supporting VMware hybrid clouds also previously announced solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack back in May.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials at VMworld Bookstore

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press) at VMworld bookstore

My new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press) made its public debut in the VMware book store where I did a book signing event. You can get your copy of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials which includes Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) along with hybrid, multi-cloud, serverless, converged and related topics at Amazon among other venues. Learn more here.

Where To Learn More

Learn more about related technology, trends, tools, techniques, and tips with the following links.

• What's a data infrastructure? (Via NetworkWorld)
• Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press) book companion page
• Top 10 things to know about vSAN (Via Yellow Bricks)
• VMware vSAN Management Today and Future (Via Yellow Bricks)
• Integrated Data Protection for vSAN (Via Yellow Bricks)
• VMworld 2017 Video on demand (Via VMware)
• Top 10 VMworld 2017 hands on labs (HOL) via VMware
• Top VMworld 2017 sessions via VMware
• Amazon Web Service AWS September 2017  Updates
• Microsoft September 2017 Updates
• Dell EMC VMware September 2017  Updates
• Getting Caught Up What Happened In September 2017

What This All Means

A year ago at VMworld the initial conversations were started around what would become the VMware Cloud on AWS solution. Also a year ago besides VMware Integrated Containers (VIC) and some other pieces, the overall container and in particular related management story was a bit cloudy (pun intended). However, now the fog and cloud seem to be clearing with the PKS solution, along with details of VMware Cloud on AWS. Likewise vSphere, vSAN and NSX along with associated vRealize tools continue to evolve as well as customer deployment growing. All in all, VMware continues to evolve, let's see how things progress now over the year until the next VMworld.

By the way, if you have not heard, its Blogtober, check out some of the other blogs and posts occurring during October here.

Ok, nuff said, for now.
  Cheers Gs

Microsoft and Azure September 2017 Software Defined Data infrastructure Updates

September was a busy month for data infrastructure topics as well as Microsoft in terms of new and enhanced technologies. Wrapping up September was Microsoft Ignite  where Azure, Azure Stack, Windows, O365, AI, IoT, development tools announcements occurred, along with others from earlier in the month. As part of the September announcements, Microsoft released a new version of Windows server (e.g. 1709) that has a focus for enhanced container support. Note that if you have deployed Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) and are looking to upgrade to 1709, do your homework as there are some caveats that will cause you to wait for the next release. Note that there had been new storage related enhancements slated for the September update, however those were announced at Ignite to being pushed to the next semi-annual release. Learn more here and also here.

Azure Files and NFS

Microsoft made several Azure file storage related announcements and public previews during September including Native NFS based file sharing as companion to existing Azure Files, along with public preview of new Azure File Sync Service. Native NFS based file sharing (public preview announced, service is slated to be available in 2018) is a software defined storage deployment of NetApp OnTAP running on top of Azure data infrastructure including virtual machines and leverage Azure underlying storage.

Note that the new native NFS is in addition to the earlier native Azure Files accessed via HTTP REST and SMB3 enabling sharing of files inside Azure public cloud, as well as accessible externally from Windows based and Linux platforms including on premises. Learn more about Azure Storage and Azure Files here.

Azure File Sync (AFS)

Azure File Sync (AFS) has now entered public preview.  While users of  Windows-based systems have been able to access and share Azure Files in the  past, AFS is something different.  I have used AFS for  some time now during several private preview iterations having seen how it has  evolved, along with how Microsoft listens incorporating feedback into the  solution.

Lets take a look at what is AFS, what it does, how it works, where  and when to use it among other considerations. With AFS, different and independent systems  can now synchronize file shares through Azure. Currently in the AFS preview  Windows Server 2012 and 2016 are supported including bare metal, virtual, and  cloud based. For example I have had bare metal, virtual (VMware), cloud (Azure  and AWS) as part of participating in a file sync activities using AFS.

Not to be confused with some other storage related AFS  including Andrew File System among others, the new Microsoft Azure File Sync service  enables files to be synchronized across different servers via Azure. This is  different then the previous available Azure File Share service that enables  files stored in Azure cloud storage to be accessed via Windows and Linux  systems within Azure, as well as natively by Windows platforms outside of  Azure. Likewise this is different from the recently announced Microsoft Azure  native NFS file sharing serving service in partnership with NetApp (e.g.  powered by OnTAP cloud).

https://robertsmit.wordpress.com/2017/09/28/step-by-step-azure-file-sync-on-premises-file-servers-to-azure-files-storage-sync-service-afs-cloud-msignite/AFS can be used to synchronize across different on premise as well as cloud servers that can also function as cache. What this means is that for Windows work folders served via different on premise servers, those files can be synchronized across Azure to other locations. Besides providing a cache, cloud tiering and enterprise file sync share (EFSS) capabilities, AFS also has robust optimization for data movement to and from the cloud and across sites, along with management tools. Management tools including diagnostics, performance and activity monitoring among others.

Check out the AFS preview including planning for an Azure File Sync (preview) deployment (Docs Microsoft), and for those who have Yammer accounts, here is the AFS preview group link.

Azure Blob Storage Tiering and Event Triggers

Two other Azure storage features that are in public preview include blob tiering (for cold archiving) and event triggers for events. As their names imply, blob tiering enables automatic migration from active to cold inactive storage of dormant date. Event triggers are policies rules (code) that get executed when a blob is stored to do various functions or tasks. Here is an overview of blob events and a quick start from Microsoft here.

Keep in mind that not all blob and object storage are the same, a good example is Microsoft Azure that has page, block and append blobs. Append blobs are similar to what you might be familiar with other services objects. Here is a Microsoft overview of various Azure blobs including what to use when.

Project Honolulu and Windows Server Enhancements

Microsoft has evolved from command prompt (e.g. early MSDOS) to GUI with Windows to command line extending into PowerShell that left some thinking there is no longer need for GUI. Even though Microsoft has extended its CLI with PowerShell spanning WIndows platforms and Azure, along with adding Linux command shell, there are those who still want or need a GUI. Project Honolulu is the effort to bring GUI based management back to Windows in a simplified way for what had been headless, and desktop less deployments (e.g. Nano, Server Core). Microsoft had Server Management Tools (SMT) accessible via the Azure Portal which has been discontinued.

Project Honolulu Image via Microsoft.com

This is where project Honolulu comes into play for managing Windows Server platforms. What this means is that for those who dont want to rely on or have a PowerShell dependency have an alternative option. Learn more about Project Honolulu here and here, including download the public preview here.

Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) Kepler Appliance

Data Infrastructure  provider DataOn has announced a new turnkey Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) powered Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (e.g. productization of project Kepler-47) solution with two node small form factor servers (partner with MSI). How small? Think suitcase or airplane roller board carry on luggage size.

What this means is that you can get into the converged, hyper-converged software defined storage game with Windows-based servers supporting Hyper-V virtual machines (Windows and Linux) including hardware for around $10,000 USD (varies by configuration and other options).

Azure and Microsoft Networking News

Speaking of Microsoft Azure public cloud, ever wonder what the network that enables the service looks like and some of the software defined networking (SDN) along with network virtualization function (NFV) objectives are, have a look at this piece from over at Data Center Knowledge.

In related Windows, Azure and other focus areas, Microsoft, Facebook and Telxius have completed the installation of a high-capacity subsea cable (network) to cross the atlantic ocean. Whats so interesting from a data infrastructure, cloud or legacy server storage I/O and data center focus perspective? The new network was built by the combined companies vs. in the past by a Telco provider consortium with the subsequent bandwidth sold or leased to others.

This new network is also 4,000 miles long including in depths of 11,000 feet, supports with current optics 160 terabits (e.g. 20 TeraBytes) per second capable of supporting 71 million HD videos streamed simultaneous. To put things into perspective, some residential Fiber Optic services can operate best case up to 1 gigabit per second (line speed) and in an asymmetrical fashion (faster download than uploads). Granted there are some 10 Gbit based services out there more common with commercial than residential. Simply put, there is a large amount of bandwidth increased across the atlantic for Microsoft and Facebook to support growing demands.

Where To Learn More

Learn more about related technology, trends, tools, techniques, and tips with the following links.

• What's a data infrastructure? (Via NetworkWorld)
• Introduction to Azure Files (Microsoft Docs)    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/files/storage-files-introduction
• Azure File Sync (YouTube Video)
• Windows Subsystem for Linux (MSDN)
• Public preview of Virtual Network service endpoints for Azure storage and SQL database
• Azure debuts Availability Zones for high availability and resiliency (Azure)
• Azure and AWS   comparison (Docs Microsoft)
• What’s new in Windows Server clustering and storage: Hyper-converged SHAZAM (Ignite)
• Windows Server: Whats new and whats next (Ignite)
• Whats new in Windows Server, version 1709 for the software-defined datacenter (Ignite)
• Windows Server and hybrid cloud (Ignite)
• Step by Step AFS installation by Robert Smit
• Microsoft Windows Server, Azure, Nano Life cycle Updates
• Overview Review of Microsoft ReFS (Reliable File System) and resource links
• Maximize storage efficiency and conquer distributed file access with Windows Server and Azure Files (Ignite)
• Manage and monitor your Windows Server 2016 hyper-converged infrastructure (Ignite)
• Storage Spaces Direct: Be an IT hero with software-defined storage! (Ignite)
• Storage Replica: Save your job with Windows Server 2016 (Ignite)
• Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press) book companion page
• Amazon Web Service AWS September 2017  Updates
• Microsoft September 2017 Updates
• Dell EMC VMware September 2017  Updates
• Getting Caught Up What Happened In September 2017

What This All Means

Microsoft announced a new release of Windows Server at Ignite as part of its new semi-annual release cycle. This latest version of Windows server is optimized for containers. In addition to Windows server enhancements, Microsoft continues to extend Azure and related technologies for public, private and hybrid cloud as well as software defined data infrastructures.

By the way, if you have not heard, its Blogtober, check out some of the other blogs and posts occurring during October here.

Ok, nuff said, for now.
Gs

While working on a vSphere upgrade project for a very large install base , I faced the issue with the vCenter upgrade failing from vCenter 4.x to vCenter5 with a wrong JDBC URL failed message. This type of issue is already described in KB articles from VMware.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2006642

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2007301

wrong URL format for the JDBC reported by the vCenter Installer , . There is also a reference of JDBC URL Formats for the vCenter Server Databaseas how it should be entered.

The challenge that  we faced was to figure out what is the correct database used for the vCenter , to find out what is the correct database name used by the vCenter so that you can complete the correct JDBC URL. we followed the steps below.

Login to the machine where you have the vCenter database installed , open the SQL Server Configuration Manager , note down the Process ID in front of the DB instance name , under the SQL Server services option. For example here it is 1524.

Now open the Windows task manager go to services and match the process ID with the one in the task manager , this will be your database instance name used by the vCenter. In the example below it is SQLvm.

You need to use this as the Database instance name in the vCenter Installer screen as per the JDBC URL Formats for the vCenter Server Database . Once done click next and you should proceed with the installation.

Unmounting a LUN using the command line

To unmount a LUN from an ESXi 5.x/6.0 host using the command line:

    Now unmount the datastore by running this command:

    # esxcli storage filesystem unmount [-u UUID | -l label | -p path ]

    For example, use one of these commands to unmount the LUN01 datastore:

    # esxcli storage filesystem unmount -l LUN01

    # esxcli storage filesystem unmount -u 4e414917-a8d75514-6bae-0019b9f1ecf4

    # esxcli storage filesystem unmount -p /vmfs/volumes/4e414917-a8d75514-6bae-0019b9f1ecf4

    Note: If the VMFS filesystem you are attempting to unmount has active I/O or has not fulfilled the prerequisites to unmount the VMFS datastore, you see an error in the VMkernel logs similar to:

    WARNING: VC: 637: unmounting opened volume ('4e414917-a8d75514-6bae-0019b9f1ecf4' 'LUN01') is not allowed.

    VC: 802: Unmount VMFS volume f530 28 2 4e414917a8d7551419006bae f4ecf19b 4 1 0 0 0 0 0 : Busy

    To verify that the datastore is unmounted, run this command:

    # esxcli storage filesystem list

    You see output similar to:

    Mount Point  Volume Name  UUID  Mounted  Type  Size  Free

    ------------------------------------------------- ----------- ----------------------------------- ------- ------ ----------- -----------

    /vmfs/volumes/4de4cb24-4cff750f-85f5-0019b9f1ecf6  datastore1  4de4cb24-4cff750f-85f5-0019b9f1ecf6  true  VMFS-5  140660178944  94577360896

    /vmfs/volumes/4c5fbff6-f4069088-af4f-0019b9f1ecf4  Storage2  4c5fbff6-f4069088-af4f-0019b9f1ecf4  true  VMFS-3  146028888064  7968129024

    /vmfs/volumes/4c5fc023-ea0d4203-8517-0019b9f1ecf4  Storage4  4c5fc023-ea0d4203-8517-0019b9f1ecf4  true  VMFS-3  146028888064  121057050624

    LUN01  4e414917-a8d75514-6bae-0019b9f1ecf4  false VMFS-unknown  version 0 0

    The Mounted field is set to false, the Type field is set to VMFS-unknown version, and that no Mount Point exists.

    Note: The unmounted state of the VMFS datastore persists across reboots. This is the default behavior. If you need to unmount a datastore temporarily, you can do so by appending the --no-persist flag to the unmount command.

    To detach the device/LUN, run this command:

    # esxcli storage core device set --state=off -d NAA_ID

    To verify that the device is offline, run this command:

    # esxcli storage core device list -d NAA_ID

    You see output, which shows that the Status of the disk is off, similar to:

    naa.60a98000572d54724a34655733506751

    Display Name: NETAPP Fibre Channel Disk (naa.60a98000572d54724a34655733506751)

    Has Settable Display Name: true

    Size: 1048593

    Device Type: Direct-Access

    Multipath Plugin: NMP

    Devfs Path: /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.60a98000572d54724a34655733506751

    Vendor: NETAPP

    Model: LUN

    Revision: 7330

    SCSI Level: 4

    Is Pseudo: false

    Status: off

    Is RDM Capable: true

    Is Local: false

    Is Removable: false

    Is SSD: false

    Is Offline: false

    Is Perennially Reserved: false

    Thin Provisioning Status: yes

    Attached Filters:

    VAAI Status: unknown

    Other UIDs: vml.020000000060a98000572d54724a346557335067514c554e202020

This device is now successfully detached from the host. It remains visible the UI at this point.

If the device is to be permanently decommissioned, it is now possible to unpresent the LUN from the SAN.

    To rescan all devices on the ESXi host, run this command:

    # esxcli storage core adapter rescan [ -A vmhba# | --all ]

    The devices are automatically removed from the Storage Adapters.

    Notes:

    A rescan must be run on all hosts that had visibility to the removed LUN.

    When the device is detached, it stays in an unmounted state even if the device is re-presented (that is, the detached state is persistent). To bring the device back online, the device must be attached. To do this via the command line, run this command:

    # esxcli storage core device set --state=on -d NAA_ID

    If the device is to be permanently decommissioned from an ESXi host, (that is, the LUN has been or will be destroyed), remove the NAA entries from the host configuration by running these commands:

    To list the permanently detached devices:

    # esxcli storage core device detached list

    You see output similar to:

    Device UID State

    ---------------------------- -----

    naa.50060160c46036df50060160c46036df off

    naa.6006016094602800c8e3e1c5d3c8e011 off

    To permanently remove the device configuration information from the system:

    # esxcli storage core device detached remove -d NAA_ID

    For example:

    # esxcli storage core device detached remove -d naa.50060160c46036df50060160c46036df

    The reference to the device configuration is permanently removed from the ESXi host's configuration.

    Note: If the device is detached but still presented (highlighted step was skipped), the preceding command fails to permanently remove the device from the system, and the device is automatically re-attached. You must complete highlighted step for the device to be permanently removed.

Reference: VMware KB# 2004605, 2004684

Browse to http://www.uemtemplates.com and use the simple interface to search for VMware UEM templates.

Blogging in October can have big payoffs in more than one way.

CloudCredibility.com would like to offer some of the #Blogtober technical content that's being created this month as CloudCred tasks.

What's #Blogtober?

Blogtober – Tech EditionBlogtober – Tech Edition

Halfway through #Blogtober! Current Blog Standings

If you, or someone you admire, is blogging this month and would enjoy the added exposure, and added community engagement - around the work, please contact the CloudCred Community Mananger Noell Grier to make that happen:

Noell@aruba-consulting.com

To sweeten the deal, we'll throw in an Amazon Echo Dot or a My Passport Ultra 1TB Hard Drive to SIX lucky submitters, selected from all those who participate!

So keep blogging - and let's make the community even better by getting the content to CloudCredibility.com game-lovers.

SPJ Solutions, a leading VMware NSX partner, specializes in planning, design, implementation, knowledge transfer, and training on NSX, VRNI, VRA, SRM and other SDDC products. SPJ Solutions is based out of El Doardo Hills, California and has 10 trained NSX engineers, who came from various backgrounds, including networking, security, cloud, and virtualization.

SPJ Solutions has several engineers with VCDX, VCIX, and CCIE credentials who have wealth of experience in NSX, physical network, and physical security appliances. SPJ Solutions also specializes in the automation of Software Defined Networking and Software Defined Security using vRealize Automation. SPJ Solutions has implemented NSX and other SDDC products at over 50 production environments across the United States covering Healthcare, Manufacturing, Retail, Banking, Utilities, Public Sector (SLED), HiTech, Telecommunications, .COM, and Life Science industries.

SPJ Solutions is a part of NSX Last Mile mentoring program and work closely with NSBU Solutions Architects to ensure successful customer deployments.

Some key highlights of SPJ Solutions includes:

• AeroData Implementation and Case Study
  https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/casestudy/customers/vmware-aerodata-casestudy.pdf
• Engineering Paper “Load Balancer as Service”
  https://docs.vmware.com/en/vRealize-Suite/7.0/sddc-load-balancer-as-a-service.pdf
• Implemented several large micro-segmentation projects – PCI, HIPAA, PHI, FERC/NERC, Telco
• Implemented NSX for several use cases, including – Network Virtualization, Micro-Segmentation, BC/DR, Workload Migration, Network Modernization, and Regulatory Compliance
• Implemented NSX where strong application skill set (i.e. SAP, Oracle, IBM) was needed
• Helped customers to choose NSX over other competing solutions though “Solution Selling” approach
• Provide end-to-end NSX engagement services
• NSX Engineers that are also certified in: Palo Alto Networks, F5, Cisco, Dell, EMC

For more information, visit:

http://spjsolutions.com

Recently I have become subject to the issues of my vSphere and vCenter environments crashing due to the latest Flash update.

When attempting to access my environment I encounter an error:

Followed the error stating that 'Shockwave Flash has crashed'

While VMware is aware of this issue is updating to a beta version of Flash the only solution?