Hello all,
I should mention that I apologize for the late delivery of the newsletter last week. I was traveling and I used a new tool to write and publish. But the publish did not work. When someone mentioned to me where was the newsletter (thanks again) I looked and saw even though I published it wasn’t. Worse, is that I also as I investigated, I ended up publishing the newsletter but also the AD troubleshooting article too. I was keeping that one unpublished until I did more work. But that can be an update now! I have been updating my Meltdown article too.
If you are Veeam Agents for Windows user don’t forget about the rescue disk. They have a large range of functionality. I used one today and it was very handy. When I first saw this amazing functionality I wrote about it in this article. Very handy tool.
Incidentally, I need a little help. I was contacted by a Quest person about changing some links on my site. I have lost that email or comment. I would love to change the links to the new location. Not sure how I lost the comms but I sure wish the person would reach out again. If anyone can help with this I would appreciate it. I will keep digging through email and other stuff to see if I can find it.
I really have a fair bit to share this week, and definitely some interesting stuff so as always, I hope to have something for everyone to be interested in.
Have a great week,
Michael
VMSA-2018-0006 vRealize Automation Security Advisory
This advisory actually covers off vRA, VIC, and the AirWatch console. The advisory covers off the problem and also the mitigation - there are patches. As if I have not had enough patching lately.
Verify Hypervisor-Assisted Guest Migration (Spectre) patches using PowerCLI
William updated (1/23/18) his very nice script to take into account recent VMware announcements so make sure you download it again as he has updated it and the updates are important.
Designing vSAN Disk Groups - All Flash Cache Ratio Update
John has a very detailed article that talks about the flash cache ratio and how it has changed for the AFA vSAN. Great info. Make sure to check out the article and the FAQ. Great info.
VMware vSAN 6.6 - Number of votes and witnesses explained
Eric has an article explaining some odd concepts in vSAN. Detailed stuff but interesting too.
STOP! It’s dangerous to upgrade VMware 6.5 alone. Read this
I hope VMware dev’s read this article and think about how they can improve the upgrade process so that end user or admins cannot make these kind of mistakes. In the meantime, we admins need to stay sharp.
VMFS5 vs VMFS6
I heard some talk recently about the two versions of VMFS and shared this article to help explain things.
Add VMware Tools v10.2 to your vSphere environment
In this article you learn a good way to add VMware Tools from the outside distribution to your vSphere environment and in fact it is a very nice way to do it. Better than in the past. BUT, I must warn you that once you update the VMware Tools yourself, you now have to start check compatibility guides more often. Other VMware applications may expect the default version of tools and you don’t have that any longer! I do not add VMware Tools new versions to my environment unless asked to by support or there is a very strong reason too. It adds complexity that is not always necessary.
VMware vCenter High Availability
This interesting series - part 1 here, has a new part 2 and it is all pretty interesting. This VCSA HA feature is useful and not that common. So it is good to have nice info like this.
Getting Started with vRealize Orchestrator and VVols
Cody has an article to help you get started with vRO and how VVols makes things a little different and how to interact with them. Very good info if you are going to use his vRO workflows with Purity.
VMware NSX: Install, Configure, Manage [6.4] - beta
This is a very good opportunity to learn more NSX and quite frankly, doing it in a classroom is a very good idea if you are new to this - or even new to networking. Find out more in this article.
VMware AppDefense & CB Defense Demo
You can get a demo about how Carbon Black enhances the security that AppDefense provides. Very cool demo actually.
Ensuring Endpoint Device Compliance for VMware Horizon Access
I do not like sharing articles that have no date associated with them, but I know the author in this very interesting article so I am sharing it anyway. Very interesting stuff actually. It really is handy when you can make sure that people connecting to your VDI are compliant with admin policies.
VDI in the Time of Frequent Windows 10 Upgrades
Sean has some good things to think about in this article. I have seen some of the issues myself in my small lab. He seems to have a powerful plan to help and we should see more on it in the future.
Understanding VMC Integration with AWS Services - Part 2 - VMware and RDS
Brian has an interesting series going on how VMC can consume AWS services. Very cool info actual and in part 2 he talks about RDS. This is a really good example of how powerful the VMC solution is - not just the management model you are used to, and the normal tools still work fine, but how you can introduced other things easily into your world from AWS.
VMware Visio Stencils and PowerPoint Icons (2018)
An amazing collection of VMware shapes - mostly EUC but also vSphere and NSX, and they work in Visio OR PowerPoint. So very handy. Thanks very much Ray!
Assess performance impact of Spectre and Meltdown patches using vRealize Operations Manager
This is very cool indeed. You can use vRealize Operations to track your patching activities and the impact on performance by your patching. Very cool stuff! Definitely something most of you should do!
Virtual Volumes on Pure Storage FlashArray
It sounds like - via this article - that Pure has done a spectacular job of VVols on its array. What do I mean? Replication is supported, the VASA provider is built into the array so no customer configuration is necessary, and it has Active - Active VASA providers so you are better protected from outages. Very nice job!
PowerCLI Offline Installation Walkthrough
I saw a few people asking about how to do this when not connected to the Internet. Then I saw this article. Handy.
Inspectre
I have a whole page of links of what is good to know on Meltdown and Spectre. But there is a new tool I have found that does a very good job in the audit of things. It only works on one VM or desktop at a time, but it provides very good info and can be used to test things. Has good background info too.
Veeam PN is now GA
Matt has an article about a new product that Veeam is shipping now and it is free! The solution is about how you can recover your backups in Azure and it helps with the networking. But, this cool product can be used outside of that solution and used for connecting your laptop to your home network, and it works pretty easy.
Managing Veeam Agents in Backup & Replication 9.5 U3
Jason - of Coffee Crisp fame - has an article that will do excellent to get you backing up with agents in the Veeam VBR console. Nice job Jason.
Veeam: Veeam Availability for AWS, AWS workloads now protected thanks to the purchase of N2W Software
You can learn about the most recent acquisition by Veeam in this article.
Veeam Replication - WAN Accelerator
Michael has an interesting article that is a nice intro on the Veeam WAN accelerator which is a very useful feature and part of the Veeam B&R product. If you have not used it before, using it when you replicate up to VMWonAWS would be a very good place to start it.
Veeam SureBackup - failed to create process with net logon
Tim has an article that helps with the error above. Why it occurs and a workaround. Pretty interesting workaround actually. I am a big fan of SureBackup jobs and love that when I see the email the next day I am confident in what I can restore.
Veeam Replication - SureReplica
Michael has another article in his Replication series on something very useful - SureReplica’s and something I think more Veeam customers should be using. Would you like to know how to do a real test of your replicas? I don’t means just turn it on and see if you get a heartbeat. But much more.
Cloud Connect and VAC Portal Maintenance Modes
Anthony have a very good article on some new functionality and how it really works in Veeam Cloud Connect and the VAC portal. So very good info for SP’s and certainly good learning too.
GDPR: Lesson 1, KNOW your Data
Danny has an article about GDPR and it is interesting. It is part of a series and I think over time you will get more and more help. GDPR is something that more people are impacted by then what you might expect. And the potential fines are significant. We have even added functionality into Veeam Backup & Replication to help you organize where your data is, and we have nice reports to support that in Veeam ONE. And this is the starting point of us helping you with this GDPR situation.
My Lab environment in Ravello’s Cloud on bare metal
An interesting story of working in Ravello and the bare metal option. I like to have my lab local, but, if not, then I like to have it in VMWonAWS.
Building healthier containers
Interesting article that does a little bit on why VMs are not containers, what is different between them and then teaches a bit about containers.
Configure VPN Device Tunnels in Windows 10
This is very interesting technology - User Tunnel in a VPN is something we all have likely used, but what is new is the Device Tunnel. This is something that is always connected (where possible) and is used to push out things like GPO. Interesting.
Want to see all data Windows 10 sends Microsoft? There’s an app for that
You can learn more about this very interesting affair in this article. Amazing amount of info!
How to disable Windows IPv6 Temporary Addresses
I had no idea that IPv6 had the idea of temporary addresses and I certainly see how that could be frustrating for the security and firewall operations. Bob has an article about how to get ride of them.
PowerShell Core 6.0 and Why Windows PowerShell is No Longer Being Developed
Interesting article about Core and a bit about the future of PowerShell. As well it has some other info in it like how you can install various versions which I can see the value of.
What is StarWind Deduplication Analyzer Free Tool
This sounds like a useful tool to see what the potential dedupe is in a system. Find out more in this article.
You should be listening to video game soundtracks at work
This interesting article got me thinking. It sounds like they may have a good idea or rationale. I am in fact testing it out now to see how it goes. I have both of their suggested lists. I do normally listen to music as I work, and in fact I know some works better than others to help me along. Words don’t seem to bother me. We will see how it goes.
Instant recovery & dedupe are not friends
In this article the author makes some good points. I an not necessarily a fan of hot sites, but rather warm sites. It means that they are working sites (and thus have things like DNS, AD, and monitoring), but your workloads from the production site are cold. But nevertheless, the article is interesting and has good info.
HomePod arrives February 9, available to order this Friday
This press release is about the HomePod - which I want to buy - and how you can order it starting this past Friday. It is not available yet in Canada but it is in the US, Australia and the UK. In the Spring France and Germany will have it. I have three zones of SONOs and we are very happy with it. I know several people that have tested Sonos against the HomePod and it has much better music and it has Siri so that is sort of cool. I hear that this year Sonos will have AirPlay2 so that makes things quite interesting. Here is the iMore Buyers Guide on the HomePod.
macOS High Sierra 10.13.3
This update is pretty small in terms of only a couple of fixes it has, but there is also some security patches too. I updated two Macs (older MBA, and new MBP) with no issues. There was some talk that the low level security fixes may break software that connects with the kernel but that doesn’t seem to be the case on my laptops. You can learn more about this update, and others, in this Tidbits article.
Apple Releases iOS 11.2.5, macOS 10.13.3, watchOS 4.2.2, and tvOS 11.2.5
I talked about my iOS 11.2.5 in this article, but I can say as well my tvOS upgrades (on two TV’s) went fine too. But you can learn more about each of the updates in this article. In all of these updates security is important. So update.
Odd Problem - missing default gateway
I have had two servers - both Win2K12 I think - that over the last 2 or 3 months have had missing default gateways. Google suggests that this occurred when I changed them from DHCP to static. This is not the case as they have never been DHCP. But if you have Win2K12 servers and one day you decide to patch them and when you try and run Windows Update it fails, think about this missing gateway thing I mention.
Thanks for reading or skimming this far,
Michael
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