Newsletter: July 11, 2015

Hello all,

It is very good to be reaching out to you again!  I hope everyone has had a good week and enjoyed some quality time with friends and family?  I spent the week at home and in the lab.  Some interesting stuff!  I am working on things you will see at VMworld - or maybe a little sooner if you are a vExpert!

I created a vR Ops install outline for me to help but it ended up causing me to update a number of other vR Ops articles (that were connected). So that is pretty good.  I also had a chance to go do some Via Ferrata with some friends and that was very fun.  So I updated my article on that.

BTW, is there any really good virtualization freelance instructors out there?  Some very good people I know have a need for additional freelance instructors.  The subject is things like vRO, vRA but what they are looking for is really good technical instructors and if you are that let me know.  If necessary they are happy to teach you vRO and vRA but they know they cannot teach you to be a really good technical instructor.  This is a great opportunity!

I guess you have likely heard that AT&T Park is the scene of the VMworld party, and that music will be done by Alabama Shakes and Neo Trees?

I have another week in the lab, before I head back to the Mother ship,  and so hopefully will find some cool things to share.

Have a great day, and a wonderful week!

Michael

ThwackCamp - July 15 - 16
SolarWinds does a really good job on this sort of thing.  You can learn good things from them about their tools, and how to use those tools to solve your problems.  They have both an industry track and a technical track.  Find out more here but I do recommend it.

vSphere 6.0.0b now GA
This was released recently and is all patches.  See the vCenter and ESXi release notes.  I see a variety of good fixes in this!  The vCSA update is not exactly intuitive so you can be reminded of how to do that here.  I will do the update after I get this newsletter out - I will let you know how it goes in the next newsletter.  If it goes poor I will blog it out sooner!

vSphere VM Memory Statistics
This is an area I often hear people have trouble with.  This article helps around VM Memory Statistics.

vSphere 6 ESXi memory states and reclamation techniques
An interesting breakdown of the memory states and reclamation techniques can be found here.

Unable to access new Administration and Licensing features in the vSphere Web Client 6.0
I have not heard of this being seen in the wild with anyone I know, but I know it was pushed pretty hard so I suspect it is a common thing.  Full info here.

vSphere 6 Foundations: Install and Configure vCenter and ESXi
David Davis has released another vSphere 6 course.  I watch and enjoyed his previous one.  This new one is the vSphere 6 Foundations and if you want to learn more about install / configure of vC and ESXi this is a very good way to do that.  There is really a lot of new stuff in vSphere 6 and this will help you with getting going with it.

Windows guest customization fails after cloning a VM
This is something i have seen before and is very frustrating.  Definitely something I have seen people do, and it is something to be avoided, but if not avoided understood.  Actually understood is a good idea.  Check out the article.

vSphere 6 Webcast - July 7 2015 - PowerCLI
You can see the video of this webex if you want to learn more about PowerCLI in vSphere 6.  Nice job Brian!

Want to learn more about VSAN from the guy who thought it up?
Stephen Foskett did one of his Storage Field days at VMware to learn more about VSAN.  And it is pretty good!  Christos Karamanolis is the architect for VSAN.  A very smart dude, and great to learn from.  See the info here.  This is a few months old but I know that some of you missed it!

What is a Platform Services Controller (PSC) in vSphere 6.0
The PSC is a pretty important part of vSphere 6 and you can get some good info about it here.

Upgrading from embedded SSO 5.5 to External SSO (PSC) 6.0
I was talking recently with someone about upgrades from 5.5 to 6.0.  I have done that and of course I do not like what I ended up.  Meaning I went from embedded SSO 5.5 to embedded PSC 6.0.  So that means I cannot ever easily have more vCenters connected.  So I strongly recommend people who have embedded 5.5 SSO to upgrade to external PSC in vC 6.0 and that means you have more flexibility.  You can learn more about how to do this here.  Here is an FAQ on PSC.

Reviewer’s Guide for View in Horizon 6
I sometimes use the Reviewer’s Guide to learn something quickly or to understand a little bit more about something.  The Reviewer’s Guide for View in Horizon 6 is very useful to help you learn a little more about View and get it going in a Lab so you can play a little more and learn more.  View is a great product and so if you not got it going before this is a good way to get started.

How VMware EUC Solutions Can Help with Windows 10 Desktop Migrations
A very salesy article on how Windows 10 will be quickly and widely adopted and how Horizon View, and Fusion, and Workstation can help.  No surprise - right?  It does reference an article that I enjoyed more.

Word to the wise: In vRA, disable “Reconfigure” on all IaaS machines w/RDMs
Thanks to Jad, I heard about this serious issue.  If you use VMs with RDMS and they are provisioned or managed with vRealize Automation, you should turn off Reconfigure - if you don’t there can be some interesting and frustrating problems to solve.  More info can be found here.  You can find the Support Alert here which has a little more info.  I would also wonder why RDM’s are in use too?

vRA Enterprise Level Distributed Installation
This article is about an enterprise deployment of vRA and of course that means it is pretty handy for those of us who have not done big vRA installs.  To really get an idea of how complex this is check out the logical diagram in the article!

Signing vRA certificates using an internal Microsoft CA signing authority
Here is some help if you want to start using an internal MS CA for vRA.

Increasing vRA’s Concurrent Provisioning Operations
A great article from Jad about how you can increase the concurrent provisioning and of course that is something many have asked for.  I echo Jad’s comment about backup and test!

vRA 6.1 Entitlement Actions Missing
If you are a new user on 6.1 you will likely run into this issue.  It has an easy fix that may be a little hard to find.

vRealize Operations Manager Content Pack for Log Insight
With v6.01 of vR Ops and later the Log Insight Linux Agent is installed in the vR Ops appliance.  However it needs to be configured for your environment.  It is a little complex and you can find all you need to get it done here.  Much appreciate this article!

Is any of your ESXi vmnics saturated?
Iwan has a great article that shows you how to do a vR Ops dashboard to show if you were saturating any of the host networks.  Nice!

Automating vSphere Replication and SRM with vRealize Orchestrator
This is a little old, but it is very good info.  Find out how you can add more automation into your work with SRM and vSphere Replication.

Can you Replace Your Home Lab with Ravello Systems?
This is a most excellent look at if it is possible in fact to have Ravello as your home lab.  I think he did an excellent job of looking at the costs, and the pros / cons.  I believe that there is a lot of people that will have a better home lab with Ravello.  Others will have just a cheaper home lab in Ravello.  So interesting article and be sure to check it out.

Re-imagine replicated VMs with Veeam and DataGravity
My coworker Gabe has done an interesting article about how you can use Veeam to replicate VMs to a DataGravity array and get file analytics on the replicated VMs.  Since the replicated VMs are still VMs it is easy for DataGravity to crack them just as if they were created on the DataGravity array.  Incidentally, this all would be true if you used Storage vMotion and migrated to the DataGravity array.  So that replication that Gabe talks about could in fact be for migration rather then DR.

Installing the EMC Virtual VNX (vVNX) Community Edition
This is a great way to learn more about the VNX, but also a great way to test patches and ideas out too.  So if you need help getting the vVNX working you can find it here.  I don’t have time right now to play with this but I would like too. It looks like it has the info I would need to get the vVNX working.

Office 2016 for Mac is here!
I have been using the beta for quite some time, and I am very happy with it.  I am not a sophisticated user by any means but for doing documents and presentations it has worked out very well.  I happy to see that the product has GA’ed and I am looking forward to upgrading.  Find out more here.

Configuring Network Scan Settings in Symantec Endpoint Protection
This came up recently and one of my coworkers shared this article out.  One of our customers wanted to know how to scan the SMB shares that they were using that were provisioned from their DataGravity array.

What you need to know about Bitcoin
Someone needed to learn what Bitcoin was and I found this.  The bad news it is audio, and you need to listen to about 2 minutes of crap first.  But if you don’t mind this you will learn more about Bitcoin.  I don’t like sharing links like this so likely I won’t again.

Illumio: What a differences few months makes!
Steve Herrod was at VMware almost the whole time I was and he was really important. I often got to hear him speak, and I really liked that.  I like how anyone and everyone could interact with him.  I have watched after he left and have always been impressed with what he did.  One of the choices he made was Illumio, and he has an update on it here.

iOS 8.3 How-to: Report iMessages as junk
Someone asked me about this recently, and it is sort of handy and helps you manage iMessages junk mail.  Check it out here.

Official Apple TRIM Support for 3rd party SSDs
Here is the info on how you can enable Apple TRIM support for 3rd party SSD.  You do not need to do that if your SSD is installed by Apple.  You do need this if you installed your SSD.

OS X El Capitan first look: A smarter, more polished experience for your Mac
A very nice review of the next generation of OS X that will drop in the fall sometime.  If you checked out Apple’s WWDC you already saw a little of this but I do like the look of things.

Nine secret Siri commands for Apple Music
I do not know anyone personally who is using Apple Music (other then my wife) Update - I do know one other person now - Jad. Which is too bad as I am quite fond of it.  But if you are using it, you can find some very cool Siri commands for it in this article.

iOS 9 FAQ: What you need to know!
This will not ship until Septemberish but if you are curious what iOS 9 will be like you can check it out here.

How do I find out the status of Apple Services like iCloud?
You can use this to see what the status of any of the apple services.

Why I Blog
RNELSON0 has an interesting article about why he blogs.  This is the guy that has done some amazing Puppet articles for vSphere admins.  I understand and agree with his reasons, especially with his most rewarding reason!

Thanks for reading or skimming this far!

Michael

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