Hello all,
I am in St-Petersburg and am still traveling and working hard and yet today I head for Barcelona for VMworld (update - finishing this in Barcelona). So it explains why no interesting articles on my site lately. I did update my restaurant page however.
I should mention that I really enjoyed VMworld US and it was great to meet and chat with many of you. I was also lucky enough to meet some interesting customers, and future customers too.
I am now spending time checking out sessions I did not see at VMworld US and I will be sharing the names of the better ones - definitely some good stuff I have found.
BTW, if anyone uses the View Client on iOS - like I do - it is very good to know that the Apple Pencil works good inside the desktop - like a mouse. Quite handy.
I only got registered yesterday for VMworld EMEA and wow, most everything I want is already full. Never expected that but never booked so late before. It is good that I can review sessions I cannot get into!
But lots to share, and a plane to catch soon, so lets get started.
Michael
vCloud Extender
This replacement for vCloud Connector seems very cool - the ability to do warm (hot?) or cold migrations to the cloud. Find out more about this interesting functionality that will be in vCD 9.0 in this article.
List all ‘thick’ swap files on VSAN
Duncan has an interesting article that will remind you about swap files and how they are different - or can be different - on vSAN but also share a cool script. This is one of those things to think carefully over - does it make sense for you to do this or not?
VMware Cloud Services vs. VMware Cloud on AWS
So a nice article that explains these two options. I can see people getting a little confused so it is good to have some details to show the differences. I do disagree with the article on one thing - not all your tools, or processes will work in VMware Cloud on AWS. Most will, but not everything since there is a different permission model - so Veeam as example could not work until we made changes to it - and now it does. So you can say most but I would hesitate to say all. BTW, the different permission model means you don’t get root access to hosts, or admin access to vC. You get something less to vC and nothing to hosts. It is not as bad as it sounds though, as most things do work and work really well.
Upgrading ESXi hosts using VUM
Someone asked me about this lately and this article helps. This is a great way to update hosts! You can even use the tool in ESXi-Customizer-PS below to build your customer ISO to use in VUM.
Quick Fix: OVF package with compressed disks is not currently supported
Anthony had some issues deploying an OVF recently and here is his story about the problem and the workaround. I am tired in fact of hearing and experiencing issues with deploying OVA / OVF. It needs to get fixed. Wait. Maybe not. Maybe it needs to be implemented in HTML5 so it is rock solid and forget the flex client!
The Beginners Guide to managing the NSX Distributed Firewall with Security Polices
This very nice article is a good start to understanding what you need to know about distributed firewalls. Nicely done and some very good tidbits.
ESXi-Customizer-PS
A new version of this very useful tool is now available. This PowerShell script can help you build ESXi ISO that has custom drivers in it!
Dell EMC doubles down on VMware Portfolio
A short read on a subset of what Dell EMC has announced at VMworld, but definitely interesting stuff.
VMworld 2017 US, a CTO perspective
The EUC CTO wrote this article that talks about VMworld US 2017 and it is quite interesting with the details around EUC.
Ensuring Good with VMware AppDefense
Wade has a nice article on this new software which is good as it provides more details. This new product sounds too good to be true. I really need to play with it - I feel there is stuff being missed or not mentioned in the articles or comments I hear. It sort of sounds like it needs agents but they say no agents. It is in fact exactly what we need though, and it has the exact attitude that should work better in a our fight against malware so I hope it does work.
Burn down your DFW on-boarding with vRealize Log Insight
This is a pretty cool idea - using a Log Insight dashboard to help keep track of your on-boarding activity - in other words the dashboard should help you see the race to zero!
Monitoring DFW Heap Usage
A very nice article with some good education but also good ideas on how to do things. I quite like it! Many articles would have stopped at a script for seeing what the script usage is. But connecting Log Insight into things is very cool and very useful.
VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon with NVIDIA - Coming Soon
In this article you will learn that the Horizon Management Pack (I think that is the vehicle) will soon provide you with information on the NVIDIA usage in your Horizon environment. Very handy. I have long been a fan of the Horizon dashboards in vROps - in particular the help desk one.
vROps Webinar 2017 - Announcing Part 4: Optimizing Workload Performance using Automation
This should be a very interesting webinar about how you can have automation triggered by things happening in vROps. Very powerful - both scary and exciting I think.
Simplified Management of VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Operations
An interesting article that talks about how you can use vROps to manage your VMs in the VMC cloud or in your own datacenter, or of course in both!
VMworld 2017’s forecast, cloudy with a chance of containers
Another interesting read from someone at VMworld who knows a lot of people. I did notice a lot of sessions, or talks, or even some discussions, around containers.
VMworld 2017 presentations
Iwan has shared his presentations from VMworld. They are good ones but I also love how he shares the .pptx so people can tweak and use them. Nice! He knows about troubleshooting with vROps. Really a lot.
Wikibon’s VMworld 2017 trip report: What a difference two years makes
A different sort of read on this past US VMworld. Some good points though and an easy read.
VMware - VMworld 2017 - SER1166BU - Housekeeping strategies for PSC - Expert Talk
Some good info in this article from a tech talk at VMworld. If you want to learn more about the PSC that article will help. Really good info.
VMworld
You can find a nice set of links to VMworld 2017 stuff on this site. But, you can also find links to older stuff too.
Veeam vSphere Interactions with PowerShell
A German article - that has on the same page the ability to translate it into many different languages - if your browser doesn’t - about using some PowerShell functions to make your work with Veeam and PowerShell a little more easier. Very nice stuff!
Transforming your EUC experience: VMware Blast (“BEAT”)
An interesting comparison of resource usage between PCoIP and Blast Extreme. Very good stuff to know if you are designing a VDI environment. I have been doing View for a very long time - since it was called VDM in fact, and when I could do PCoIP it was pretty cool. As you know - if you read much of my stuff, I travel a lot. And when connecting from everywhere PCoIP made my desktop quite useful. So I default to using PCoIP but for larger environments it maybe is time to reconsider that.
Announcing Puppet Enterprise for VMware Cloud on AWS and App Defense
I am a fan of Puppet so I am glad it works in VMC and not surprised mind you, but I was surprised on how this article also mentions that Puppet is integrated with App Defense.
Migrate partitions with Veeam Agent for Windows
I really think that this article is a cool example of what is possible with the Veeam Agent for Windows recovery media. Is very cool stuff - I wrote a little about it here the first time I played with it.
Migrate vApps between vCloud Director Installations using Veeam
This is quite a cool article that Luca has in how he moved his lab from one datacenter to another. Nice use of technology.
Veeam Support troubleshooting series: Linux FLR appliance deploy fail
A new series from Veeam support and the first article is about solving issues around why a FLR appliance won’t mount. Good stuff and I look forward to more articles.
Using Keybase with GPG on macOS
Scott has a nice article about using Keybase, GPG Tools and more. But the end result is signing GitHub and emails!
Top 3 Features in Visual Studio Code for PowerShell Folks
A very interesting article about a new editor that is pretty interesting. If you spend a lot of time in PowerShell I think that this might be quite interesting for you.
Need an appliance to relay SMTP in your lab? Or fight SPAM?
Then check this out. It is an anti - spam appliance that can forward your home lab email. If you need a Windows choice this is what I use.
Find out if / why a server is dropping packets
An article about an interesting problem - dropped packets, which is useful for a Linux audience but still interesting to others I think.
Oracle finally killed Sun
You can find more about this in this article but it should not be much of a surprise really.
Network Monitoring with Slack Alerting
This is most excellent article about how you can have NMAP watching your environment or lab, and alert you to new open ports in Slack. The things you can do with Slack is pretty cool, not just the IM kind of stuff, but the integration.
Ransomware Payments: Funding the business of Cybercrime
This article is interesting and one of the fascinating things is that ransomware payments can be sized for the local market. Very interesting.
Sophos UTM fails to boot - Postgress SQL Schema Update
I know a number of you out there that use UTM for home lab protection - which is a pretty good idea I think and so you might run into this issue.
Thanks for reading or skimming this far,
Michael
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