Hello all,
A busy week for me - a variety of things took my attention this week, but the best, and the one I will actually remember is all of the lab time with my product - VAO. It is coming along nicely and hopefully I will soon start being able to share cool info about it.
Apple released both watchOS 3 and iOS 10.0.1 this week, and I am very happy with both. I really like the re-org on the watch, and the performance improvements.
I have a storage problem in my lab that I have been thinking about how to solve. I am starting to have an idea - but we will see. I have also now got a NUC, and a Supermicro designed for home labs. I hope to do an article on both of them soon! I think it will turn out as a less expansive / more expansive home lab article. We will see. I hope to get the EMC Unity VSA working in my lab soon - did you know that with Veeam B&R 9.0 Update 2 we support it for Storage Explorer type stuff? Pretty cool.
I did an article about getting the HTML5 Web Client working. It was unexpectedly awkward and hard but my article makes it easy. This is the future Web Client.
BTW, middle of next week I am heading out on the road again. Wait, not road, but airplanes. South Africa (Cape Town), Russia (St-Petersberg), and Spain (Barcelona). And of course incidentally, Germany and the US. Funny how air travel works. I am looking forward to meeting lots of interesting people!
But, as always, lots to share, everyone have a great week,
Michael
Second Annual IT Professionals Day on Tuesday - September 20
This occurs every third Thursday of September and it is all about celebrating IT people and thier profession. And, quite frankly there is a lot of Celebration due. Find out more here. Here is a t-shirt giveaway, and a video too. I love the video!
Anyone want to join me in the VMware Hackathon?
You can see what I am doing - and everyone else - in this doc. Sign up to have some fun. And for sure, sign up on my team as I really need some help! If you want to learn more about what this is check out this article. I have heard a bunch of people say this was the best event at VMworld US. Here is a great article to learn more about PowerCLI, and here a link to the getting started articles on PowerCLI I did.
Cross Cloud: Why the VM shouldn’t be the base unit of Measurement
Anthony has some really good points in this article. I can tell he has thought a lot about it, and I agree with his concerns.
vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Migration Tool officially GAs w/ vSphere 6.0 U2m
This is a great thing to have happen. Glad that this new migration tool is out as I think many customers should in fact move from Windows vC to the VCSA. I did that a very long time ago and have been very happy with it.
Virtual SAN Availability Part 3
Jeff is continuing his VSAN series with Part 3 talking about the network. Definitely a great series to learn more about VSAN. Here is part 2, and part 1.
My VMworld Presentations on VSAN are now available
Cormac has an article that shares out links to his preso’s from VMworld. So good stuff!
Top 10 reasons to start using VVols right now
In this article there is in fact 10 great reasons to be using VVols right now. And there is a surprising number of vendors that do in fact support VVols currently. If I had more time, or an intern or two to help, I would have a Nimble VSA in my lab right now that supports VVols and it is easy to start testing. So it really is time to get moving on this - after all snapshots that don’t suck, and better disk utilization are powerful reasons. Here is an article with a video on this subject that goes quite deep.
Why Virtual Volumes Matters to you
My very good friend Andy has a great article on why VVols matter. And they really do.
Certificates for Dummies - Part One: VCSA and PSC Certificate Overview and Configuring PSC with Intermediate VMCA
An article that can help you with replacing certs in vSphere. Interesting he is using a Win2K3 CA and of course when I saw that I had to check the date of the article and the tool he was using but all was good! He will have a part 2 dealing with the VC and I wish he would have a part 3 where he deals with the hosts.
Accommodating for change with Virtual SAN
A reminder that VSAN scales nicely which is handy when you are designing things. See more here.
The Evolution of VMware’s vMotion
I still remember introducing customers to vMotion. I was in professional services at that time and it was thrilling. I also remember before vMotion, so it is quite interesting to see this article that talks about how vMotion has grown through time.
How to shrink thin-provisioned disks
A nice article that explains some good stuff and has a script to help you find and shrink thin-provisioned disk. This is one of those activities that is not often done, but can in fact really help out with disk footprints.
VMware ESXi Claim Rules unleashed
One of the VMware GSS guys explains ESXi Claim rules in some detail. Quite well done.
A guide to vSphere Command Line Management Tools
You can get a list of the different management tools in this article. It talks a little about how this has changed over the years and it certainly has changed!
Updating an Expired vCenter Server License
This could happen to you or me, so it is good info. Once vCenter license expires things get a little bit more difficult. So good the info is here.
How to backup NSX?
This article explains how to do a backup of your NSX environment, but it talks about it as a component of the bigger picture. Good info, and the how of backing up NSX is not quite what you likely thought.
Integrating ADFS with vRealize Automation
Grant has an interesting article about how you can connect ADFS via SAML to vRA. Pretty interesting and definitely useful.
Horizon View 7.0.2 is GA
I had a few articles last newsletter when 7.0.2 was not available, but it is now. See this article which also has relevant links for more info now that 7.0.2 is in fact available.
VMware User Environment Manager 9.1: Continuing to Enhance Profile & Policy Manager
I have not used this product, but I certainly see the power. In this new version they have hash authorization. This means that you could authorize or de-authorize the use of an app by hash, which means where it happens to be installed it will be authorized or not authorized. Very cool. I see that in the previous version you could even control folder redirection which is also quite powerful.
VMware products with Log Insight Agent installed
I have been asked about this recently and I was not sure. So very cool that I saw that Steve has answered the question in this article.
A new vPlanet is born - your one source aggregator for vBlog content
A very cool service where you can subscribed to one feed and get all Top 100 blogs. More info here.
Extending the Use of the PowerShell ISE
I know a number of you that use the ISE to work with scripts. I saw this article on how you can enhance that experience and thought it was cool.
Dell EMC and Nutanix.. this is awkward or is it awesome?
Chad has an interesting article about how Dell EMC and Nutanix is going to work together. He also mentions also about don’t be enemies. I quite agree with that. I see too much crap flying about in our industry.
Seting up Duo 2FA for Fortigate admin authentication
An interesting article about using two factor authentication (2GFA) with something that doesn’t really support it. Very good to know!
Advanced ReFS integration coming in Veeam Availability Suite 9.5
Some of us Evangelists at Veeam think that this is the single biggest feature of the 9.5 release. The difference the support of ReFS will make in terms of the disk footprint, and backup time is quite interesting. See how Rick describes it in this article. BTW, here is an article about the scalability of the 9.5 release.
Did you know that Veeam supports EMC Unity as of Update 2?
As of Update 2 for Veeam B&R the EMC Unity array is supported for backup from Storage Snapshots and the Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots. I hope to get a Unity working in my lab this weekend to test this out. BTW, if I do get to that I will be using this article to help. In case you missed this, here is the release notes on Update 2 to remind you of what was included!
Seeding Veeam Cloud Connect - Part 1: Backup copy jobs
Luca has a very nice article that shows you how to seed the cloud so your first backup job to the cloud will go much quicker. Very cool. As a result of that, I added a link to his article to my article on setting up Cloud Connect enhanced jobs.
CloudPhysics: Rightsizing Intelligence and Cost Calculator for Private Cloud
Anthony has an article that talks about some of the new stuff from CloudPhysics. I am very fond of both the people and the product of CloudPhysics and this was a nice article to see.
Using Read-Only vCenter permissions for InfoSight and VMVision data collection
This was a nice article to see - how to configure a service account for least privilege that would still work as required. Very good to know if you are a Nimble shop.
How this magic machine tricks you into seeing any car it wants
This is a most amazing article about how a car can in fact change what it looks like. Radically. This is so cool I keep expecting to hear it is a scam or a movie add - make sure to watch the video. Thanks for sharing Irfan!
Sully and the Impossible Turn
I have heard some very silly stuff about Sully and the movie, from people who truly do not know what they are talking about. It is likely me, but it seems like we have more of those kind of people now. Or maybe it is the internet that allows us to hear them so much better. But here is an article by a pilot who actually fly’s airplanes and it will help make things more clear - and technically accurate.
SUPERNAP
When I was in my last position at VMware - a really great job and very powerful at improving software - we had a data center in SUPERNAP. It was the best data center I ever saw. Find out more here.
Some interesting Apple reading
I read a very well done article on the Apple Watch series 2, and watch OS 3. Good info actually. I also read a very interesting article about how hard it is to compete with the hardware specs in an iPhone. Very interesting indeed. I have often told people to NOT do over the air (OTA) upgrades, and once again they are the ones that had an issue doing this upgrade. You should do all upgrade via iTunes if you can. Highly recommended, and of course if you use encrypted backup most of your passwords will be preserved. They are not preserved if you don’t. BTW, if you are like many who are moving to new iPhone 7 here is a nice article on that. And yes, I recommend strongly if possible to do it via iTunes. Here is an article about the 10 highlights of iOS 10. Here is a longish, and detailed article on the iPhone 7. Want to get the actual story on why no more headphone jack - check this article out. This one is quite important and will be a very big deal - it talks about Apple Pay on the web, and in a week on the Mac. Here is an article about everything new in iOS 10.
Thanks for reading, or skimming this far,
Michael
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