Hello all,
Yes, I am doing this again in an airport. Looking out at planes of all different types. Some big like 747, and in front of me a very small CRJ I think. But I have had a very interesting week - visiting customers in New Orleans, Houston, Austin, and Dallas. Met some great customers and worked with some pretty good Veeam people too. Heading home now, so I actually have time to start this off.
I did some articles recently that are pretty good - I love the As Built Report - it produced some wonderful documentation on my lab and it was most excellent. Even had a table of contents. Very useful stuff. I have started to get Bitdefender working in my lab and detailed that in this article, as well as this article on installing clients. I also updated my Installing PowerShell on a Mac article with the info on updating to PowerShell Core 6.1.
Last newsletter I shared an article that a co-worker wrote about File Copy jobs. What I learned recently, and the article did not make clear enough,is that this file copy is more about migration. It does a full copy each time. So if you have a lot of data it will always take a long time to copy it.
I do have a lot to share, so lets get started.
Have a great week!
Michael
VMware Tools 10.3.2 Now Available
Recently we knew there was an issue with 10.3.0 that could do great harm to a host (PSOD), and so it was nice to see so quick a fix. See more here. Here is a little more on this subject.
Discovering VMs with Specific VMware Tools Versions
Kyle has an excellent article about using PowerCLI to easily tell what version of VMware Tools exist in your environment. Very handy.
VM Creation Date now available in vSphere 6.7
This is most excellent! I actually use a tag to keep track of when a VM was created so being able to use PowerShell to do it now is very nice. It is only for vSphere 6.7 created VMs - which makes sense mind you. I know I asked for this a variety of times when I was at VMware so I really want to thank William for wearing them down and getting it in.
UNMAP / TRIM Space Reclamation on vSAN
In this article you can learn about a very nice new feature in vSAN that I think most every customer will really appreciate.
Everything you need to know about UNMAP in vSphere
A very nice writeup and good info on UNMAP. This is very good coverage of this very interesting functionality.
vSAN Managed Object Browser (MOB) in vSphere 6.7 & vSphere 6.7 Update 1
William has an interesting article about MOB in 6.7 and 6.7 U1. This is pretty cool - not because of the API as I am not an API guy like William, but I use MOB for other things like dealing with extension issues. But for whatever reason, this is cool stuff.
vCenter High Availability Deep Dive
I have heard people lately discussing vCenter HA and making it work. So I thought I would share this article and this one. Good articles. This HA solution is most excellent and useful.
Faking vCenter alarms
This article shows you how to test a vCenter alarm. I use them, for things like MAC address alarms, but for other things too, and testing them is hard! So very good to see this article. In particular, if you install vSphere for customers, and set some alarms for them, you should definitely know this info on how to test them!
HCI1998BU - Enable High-Capacity Workloads with Elastic EBS-Backed vSAN on VMware Cloud
Duncan has an article that has an overview and links to the session as well. This is very cool functionality - think about it. You have 14 TB that works good, but than you buy a company, and have more data that you need to play with, and you need more storage you can have it added easily. Stretched I think might be a way to explain it.
vSAN Maintenance Mode - RAID-1 and RAID-5 using “Ensure Accessibility”
An interesting article that helps you understand more about MM. In vSAN when you do MM there are various outcomes possible and potentially they are impacted by R1 and R5 differently. So check out the article!
VMworld 2018: A first look at VMware Cloud Assembly - Cloud Management-as-a-Service
This is quite interesting as it provides a method to manage dissimilar clouds. Not just management but also make things more like IaaS among the clouds. Pretty cool stuff.
VMworld 2018 presentations
Iwan shows in this article his different sessions, and graciously shares his sessions as PPTX which makes them more useful! Good learning materials!
CTO3509BU: Embracing the Edge: Automation, Analytics, and Real-time Business
Again Duncan talks about an interesting session. This is definitely interesting stuff about the future that will be important. This is definitely forward thinking.
vSphere Upgrade Series Part 4: Upgrading VMware Tools and VM Compatibility
Nigel has another episode of his very nice series on doing upgrades. Great stuff!
Tech Paper DRS Enhancements in vSphere 6.7
Frank talks about an updated paper where you can learn about the DRS enhancements in vSphere 6.7. I missed the release of this paper so very good that Frank shared it. There is some good info in the paper around initial placement and host maintenance mode changes.
HA Admission control: How can I check how much reserved resources are used?
I have been asked about this before so it was good to see that Duncan has written it up now.
New Steps to use HyTrust KMIP with vSAN Encryption
Cormac gets vSAN encryption working with HyTrust but there is new steps that are different so it is good he shares the info for the rest of us.
My VCP-NV Examp Prep
Matt shares what he did to prepare for the VCP6-NV test. Which I happen to know is sort of hard! So nice help if you are going to study for it.
Visio stencils for VMware Validated Designs
You can find more about the stencils in this article. This is great stuff if you use the VVD and want to have a nice diagram, but guess what? They work if you don’t use the VVD but you do use VMware stuff!
Runecast 2.0 Released with New Historical Interactive Chart
I am a big fan of Runecast (get help installing it in this article) and it is nice to see the new version. Find out more in this article. You can see the announcement from Runecast in this article.
Release Notes for Pure Storage plug-in for Veeam Backup & Replication
If you are a Veeam customer, and have Pure storage this is for you! I now know several of you that need this. This updated plug-in can also be downloaded from the article.
Veeam B&R: Flow matrix and Transport modes
This article can teach you about ports, and flow of data in Veeam, and its proxy servers. So good info if you work with Veeam.
Backup jobs using Virtual Appliance (HotAdd) transport mode takes longer after update to 3a
If you have seen your backups get longer after you have upgraded to 9.5 U3a and you are using HotAdd mode you can fix that with the patch and info in this article.
Veeam Backup and Restore to Azure
If you want some help working with VBR and Azure this article can help. Pretty interesting stuff.
Create Veeam vCD Job using Powershell
Hal has a really interesting article about how you can have a tenant portal where a customer can create / manage backup jobs via PowerShell. Cool stuff.
Veeam log file analysis with PowerShell
Another interesting article from Markus - this one about using a script to look through the log files that Veeam Backup & Replication produces. He did it right after an upgrade which is a pretty good idea, and I think I would do it before too.
More tips for getting start with PowerCLI
Here is an interesting article for tips on PowerCLI. Some interesting stuff, including a link to a Pluralsight learning course on PowerCLI. As well, I did a series on learning things around PowerCLI - find it here. It is a little dated but most of it still works good.
PowerShell: Put Number in a Filename in front of the filename
This article is a little bit awkward, but it shows off a useful example. How to sort files when the sort parameter is inside a filename and not at the beginning of the file. So pretty interesting.
NVMe over Fabrics for Absolute Beginners
A very nice article to learn more about NVMe over fabrics. Very nicely explained!
Windows Server 2019 - What is coming next
The next major generation of Windows Server OS is discussed in this article. There seems to be a very large amount of new stuff, or so it is implied.
Supermicro wraps crypto-blanket around server firmware to hide it from malware injectors
Interesting article about a security issue that is pretty serious but is fixed already (almost) and in a simple way that likely should have already been in place.
Postmortem: VSTS 4 September 2018 AND Azure issue RCA
You see what was said about the recent outage for VSTS in this article - and very well said I think too, and for Azure you can learn more in this article.
Announcing PowerShell Core 6.1
I saw this article about the next release of PowerShell. It now supports 1900+ cmdlets that are in Windows 10 / Server 2019 and performance improvements. Of course I had to update (see how in my install article) and I did a few simple tests with PowerCLI and they worked. So hopefully they are compatible.
A Review of Ubiquiti Wireless
I went with EERO mesh wireless when I needed new wireless and it is quite good. I than bought a Ubiquiti Security Gateway and realized I should have bought Ubiquiti wireless. Here is a review of their wifi.
What is the Dark Web?
I have explained this to people before when I have been asked. But here is a good article on it. There is much the article doesn’t cover but it does a good job with what it does talk about.
Affinity Photo for iPad gets major new update
I was asked recently if I knew of a good photo editing package for iPads. I do in fact know of one, several people I have met use it, and I have seen some very good demos. It is called Affinity and here is an article about it.
Skype Now Integrates Call Recording …. and it’s Terrible
An article about a new feature of Skpe and somehow I am not so surprised it is poorly done.
VMware and IDC 2017 Cyber Security Reality
You can find an infographic on this topic and it is pretty interesting. Find it is here.
How to prepare iPhone and iPad for iOS 12
I saw this article and thought to share it but then realized I could do better. In prep for iOS 12 do these things: 1) accept all the updates of apps first so none are outstanding when you do your upgrade, 2) have your Apple ID handy, 3) do a backup - in fact I suggest you do one with a password and using iTunes as that way you will backup your security credentials includeing passwords (which doesn’t happen when you do backups OTA), 4) do not do an over the air (OTA) upgrade, 5) do the upgrade using a computer and iTunes - it is MUCH easier for the upgrade to go smoother and be successful that way.
All of Apple’s Big announcements from the 2018 iPhone event
I did not know it was going to be an iPhone event. And I have not been able to see it yet. I was hopeful for another MacBook Air. But we will see. Here is a nice breakdown of what happened at the event. I have been using Mojave in beta for a while and it is quite well behaved. Here is an article about the breakdown specifically for the iPhones. BTW, here is a nice article on the XS and XS Max. If I buy a new iPhone, and I am thinking about it, it will be the XS.
Thanks for reading or skimming this far,
Michael
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