Newsletter: March 24, 2017

Hello,

I hope that everyone had a good week?  I presented the first, and beta, Veeam Availability Orchestrator class.  It was a lot of fun educating people on VAO and BCDR.  I am lucky I have good bosses that don’t mind me doing things like teaching a class. I have some articles pending on VAO and anti - virus but they are not quite ready yet. Should see them soon.

I am working on this newsletter in an airport.  Soon to be airports.  It is dark, and very early.  I am sitting beside about 30 very noisy teenagers.  I suspect it is their first time without supervision.  They are enjoying themselves though and it is good to see actually.

BTW, I have heard of a few customers that have installed Veeam in VMwareONAWS and been unhappy.  Veeam works fine on AWS but only within the security and config that VMware provides us.  So a few things don’t work - you can learn more in this KB article.

Lets dive right in.  Have a great week!

Michael

vSphere vCenter 6.5 Update 1g
This update is about security patches.  You can find the release notes and if you need help doing this update you can get it here. I heard there was also ESXi fixes but was not able to confirm that or find release notes (once in the lab I could see outstanding ESXi host patches).  I guess after you update your vCenter - hopefully a VCSA - you can use VUM to figure out if the hosts need an update. BTW, here is the KB article on this update. My VCSA build after this simple upgrade was 6.5.0 8024368.

New Resource - The VMware vSphere 6.5 Upgrade eBook
Emad has an article that talks about his new upgrade eBook that will be very handy for anyone that is contemplating 6.5 upgrades. I do recommend this ebook.

What vSAN admins need to know about Intel Optane
Pete has an interesting blog about how this new tech from Intel will help vSAN be even faster!

VMware ESXi and ESXTOP “P” key is new in vSphere 6.5 - Did you know?
No, as a matter of fact I did not know of this new key ion ESXTOP. It is interesting and is about monitoring power - learn more in this article.

Using Runecast in a vSAN environment
I am a fan of Runecast and in this article you can learn more about what it can do in a vSAN world.

VMware Cloud Services - Introduction
Steve has an nice intro on VMware Cloud Services and I expect to see more as time goes on.

vRealize Orchestrator VVOL Workflow Package
In Cody’s article you can learn more about the Pure VVOL vRO stuff.  Very nice to see it.

Verify new Spectre mitigation patches using PowerCLI and vDocumentation
These very useful PowerCLI scripts have been updated again, this time to cover off how Intel has released BIOS updates for all products sold in the last 5 years. Learn more in this article.

Windows Server 2019 Announced
You can learn more about this new server OS that will be out in the last half of 2018 in this article. I do like the idea of Project Hon0lulu being the management tool as it seems pretty good.  Of course, I have Win2K8R2, Win2K12, and Win2K16 in my lab.  I need to clean up the number of Windows server OS I have!

Windows Spectre Patches are here, but you might want to wait
In this article it talks about these patches, but I do agree on waiting.  I will not install these patches but wait for my host firmware patches which I think should be out now or soon. I also quite like the InSpectre tool he suggests and uses. Better to patch the host!

Veeam: Backup and Restore workloads to Microsoft Azure - Introduction
Jorge has an article (series) on using this functionality - and it looks like it will be a good one.

Change the number of displayed Veeam ONE alarms
You can find out how to change the number of the displayed alarms, which is quite useful when you expand your screen size.

QuickBackup stops working on Cisco Hyperflex snapshot
If you have Cisco Hyperflex and Veeam this article will help you with issues that you likely may experience.

Nutanix Veeam Backup & Replication v9.5 U3 BPG Update
You can find here the notice of the updated Nutanix & Veeam backup guide.  Nice stuff!

5 Reasons to get Proactive Support
I agree completely with this article - proactive support is great.  In his example they use StarWind, but the same could be said about Support Insight from VMware or others.

A field guide: Microservices vs. Containers
This article does an OK job at helping to understand microservices, and containers, with nice examples.

23 things only 90s Sysadmins will remember
This article is pretty cool.  I was in Professional Services in the 90’s.  I remember many of those things - and I was a Master CNE and a Principle Lotus Notes guy too. It was interesting times for sure!

How to teach Siri to pronounce a name correctly
You may have heard on occasion Siri have an issue with saying a name.  Maybe one like Skookumchuck?  Well if this is important to you this article might just help.

Facebook never earned your trust and now we are all paying the price
I do not like Facebook.  I am not a member or user. But not because of anything specific about Facebook, but, just because I did not like it.  This is a very interesting article and it has some very good points - what happened recently with Facebook is not a breech or a leak.  It was legit and you Facebook users supported it.

Backup vs. Disaster Recovery Best Practices
Trevor has some good info that is part of the thought process on BCDR. BCDR is so much more then tools.  There is a lot of investigation and decision making that is part of it and is required if you want to be succesful.

The Apple TV 4K’s HDR Nightmare
First, I need to confirm that while this title is not mine, it is in fact true.  I have a brand new TV, with a brand new Apple TV 4K and 4K is easy to get but the HDR is complex.  I am not sure that I have it yet or not.  Things look very good, but, not sure if that is HDR.  In this article you can find some good help.

Thanks for reading or skimming this far,

Michael

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