Hello all,
This was a tough week for me. Busy at work, but also a bad water leak that caused a lot of damage, and almost hurt my lab but didn’t. Then, one of my two storage arrays in the lab because a serious issue. I turned it off while the construction guys pulled out all the wet and damaged ceiling in my home office. When I turned it back on it would run all of the fans at full speed with no let up. So it was not good. So along with work, and dealing with damage in the house, and my wife getting sick, I had to deal with losing half of my lab storage. But hopefully I will have 3 usable TB in FreeNAS by Monday. So very happy it is the weekend, but it also means lots of work. I have two really good Veeam VAO article on the way but had to stop on them with my lab pain. I love getting ideas for blogs from customers and both of these are at the request of customers.
In my work trying to get some server hardware to be a FreeNAS server I had to run GPartEd on 5 or 6 drives in it. And the DVD / CD did not work, plus, the two plug-in CD drives I have, did not work. So I used UNetbootin on Windows to burn the GPartEd ISO to USB. It worked great - nice boot, nice menu, and GPartEd worked good too. It has not only GPartEd on it but Memtest86++ as well.
Recently a friend and I worked in VMware Cloud on AWS and used the Veeam KB article to make things work. It was not the best KB article and it has now been updated - a lot in fact. Much appreciated.
BTW, a co-worker (thanks Hannes Kasparick) provided me with a nice permissions table that I added to my article on working with Application Consistency in Veeam.
I should mention, since a number of you have asked, and I will not be at VeeamON. I was very much looking forward to it but nope.
But lots to share, and I need to move things along a little quicker today, so lets get started.
Have a great week,
Michael
New vSphere 6.5 DRS White Paper released
Frank has a new DRS whitepaper that is quite interesting and you can find all about it in this article. A great way to learn more, and pretty interesting also. I had trouble with getting a PDF of it to read offline but if you poke around you can find it.
Use PowerCLI to manage users on an ESXi host
This interesting article can help you do local users on your ESXi host and that is certainly helpful. Plus interesting script usage!
vRealize Automation 7.4 now GA
Nice to hear that vRA 7.4 is now GA. Lots of improvements and fixes in it. You can read all about it in the release notes. Here is the bits.
vRealize Automation 7.3.1 Release Notes recently updated
Not sure if you saw that the vRA 7.3.1 release notes changed and it looks like they forgot to mention they updated the SLES template for a security issue along with a few other things. Look for the red New.
Making vRA Email easy with custom notifications
This is fascinating stuff - you can use custom notifications in the SovLabs module to do some very nice emails, and pretty easy too.
vRealize Operations Manager 6.7 now GA
This big release is now available and you can learn more about it in the release notes. There is really a lot of new stuff in this release. Here is the bits.
Self-Driving Operations: What’s New with vRealize Operations 6.7
You can find a link in this article to a what’s new webinar on vROps 6.7.
Workload Optimization - The key to your self-driving DataCenter
Another article on what is new in vROps 6.7 - and it really does seem like a lot of new stuff.
VMware Realize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2 now GA
You can see the release notes. If I was still a partner, or if I worked for a big company, I would be all over this product. BTW, could not find the bits. I really like the new install pre-checker as I think that pretty handy.
Moving vRealize Automation blueprints between environments with vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2
This is an interesting story, being able to use this tool to move content from one vRA environment to another. Very interesting stuff.
VMware Launches Log Intelligence
This is a cool announcement in that I think it can be pretty useful for people. It is your log being presented to you in the SDDC console, but with some smartness applied. Very cool stuff. The people working on this are pretty darn smart and there is a lot of possibilities!
vRealize Business for Cloud 7.4 now GA
This tool is now updated to 7.4 and it has a lot of enhancements particularly with VMware Cloud on AWS. See all the info on this release notes. The bits can be found here.
NSX-T Automation with Terraform
I saw this article had a lot of attention among people I know and made a lot of people happy. I do not work with NSX or Terraform. But happy to share something that people are interested in and think highly of.
NSX 6.4.0 error: The following serial keys are invalid
You can learn about a frustrating issue in this article. In fact, you also learn the fix too! I suspect that a lot of NSX people should be impacted by this.
New Snapshot Integration for Pure Storage now available for Veeam Backup & Replication
Michael has a nice article that talks of the new Pure Plug-in for Veeam. Important note that this storage plug-in is not the same as some of the others like Nimble as it does not manage replication. This is due to the Veeam API and not due to Pure. If you would like to learn more about the install and how this works check out this article.
Veeam & GDPR - The Journey to Being GDPR Compliant
Michael has an article that has a list of the GDPR resources that Veeam has, including some written by the General Counsel.
Veeam Availability Console series #6: Publish VAC over Internet
Someone was asking about this recently and it was cool to find Luca’s article had already answered the question.
Veeam: High Level End user case study, from an Engineer’s perspective
Dean has an article about a high level use case that is an easy read and interesting. Some good points.
Veeam Cloud Connect reference architecture is now an online book!
This book is something Luca put a huge amount of work into, and it has been very useful for partners. I quite enjoyed going through it. Find out more in this article. Most excellent what Luca is doing.
Dell EMC Unity Storage Integration best practices
You can find this new whitepaper on integrating Veeam and Unity and it is full of useful info.
Get out of any cloud for free with Veeam Agent free edition
The Veeam Agents, either the free or not free ones, are pretty useful and powerful. Learn about a slightly unusual use case in this article.
Watchdog your entire IT environment with Veeam ONE
In this nice article you can learn more about the very useful monitoring that ONE can do.
Top 10 Best Practices for vSphere Backups
In this WP you can learn about some good things to know about backup in a vSphere 6.5 and Veeam backup world. Good info and some good reminders too.
Project Honolulu and Windows Server 2019
I do like the sound and look of Project Honolulu and I think it is a nice improvement, but of course it does mean I need to hurry my project to upgrade my Win2K8 servers. Learn more about Win2K19 and Project Honolulu in this article.
Gmail’s new design will include a ‘Confidential Mode’
This article talks about some upcoming new version of Gmail that has a confidential feature. I remember a very long time ago having this feature in Notes and it was quite useful. Sounds like some nice improvements. I think I heard something about this in that they will not do adword searches of email anymore. What does that mean? Obviously I am not a Google user. Or certainly not much I should say.
Supermicro X11SDV-16C-TP8F Review
This is an amazing motherboard and I expect some pretty cool servers will come out with it. But, with the ability to do 512 GiB of RAM will be scary expensive.
FreeNAS 9.10 Lab Lab Build - Part 1
If you are going to build out FreeNAS as a VM this article series is very useful. Find the first one which has a table of contents too.
Microsoft Office and the Files App Finally play nice together
This is a very nice improvement - the MS apps using the File App to help with storage. Very handy in fact and glad to see it. I am really impressed with Office on the iPad.
Office 365 Business Essentials
I heard that someone was using Office 365 Essentials in their home lab environment and I was surprised. But when I looked into it I found out what it was cheaper - and at 6.10 CAD per month per user that is pretty good price. But, it has none of the software but all of the services, so you get mail for example, but none of the apps. You do get the web version of the apps including Outlook mind you. You can find the prices and feature comparison in this article.
What is Swordfish?
If you in the past tried to use SMI-S to connect storage to something - like a management tool, then Swordfish is what you were dreaming of when you heard about SMI-S, and yet were delivered SMI-S. It is quite a bit improved over SMI-S and you can find out more in this article.
DroneShield
I heard some guys recently in the airport talk about how they are irritated with drones flying over the property. There are a number of ways to deal with that, including with Hawks, but recently I heard about an interesting way to destroy the drones. The company is Droneshield, but the product I like is this one. An autonomous detection and countermeasure sentry. Very cool.
My 9.7 iPad (2018) review: Drawn, written, edited, and produced with an iPad
I include this article as this new lower cost iPad is pretty useful and I think a great option for kids, as well as other people that have not had an iPad before. This article was completely done on the iPad that the author was reviewing so that is pretty cool.
Thanks for reading or skimming this far,
Michael
=== END ===
