Newsletter: December 1, 2018

Hello all,

It was nice to be at home for a week.  Got a lot of work done.  Even did some work on three sessions I submitted for VeeamON.  They are all really useful and interesting but I am not sure if any will get in. They are all technical, and some more than others and I know that was one of the big requests at the last VeeamON.

I am trying to increase the capabilities in my lab, and as part of that I installed Exchange 2016. So of course I wrote that up! I am not an Exchange guy, but the article works, and has some good info too.  I also updated a little my installing PowerShell / PowerCLI on a Mac article.

I would like to remind everyone that VeeamON Virtual is this week on December 5th.  I will be there and talking about automated testing in Veeam Availability Orchestrator.  There will be some very smart people talking about technology and it is all at your own desk.  Find out more here. Some technical learning, prizes, and some looking into the future too.  Think it should be good. Hope to see you there!

BTW, my PowerShell on several different machines is having troubles.  Cannot do Update-Module without a sea of red about unable to find repository.  Sort of like this article but no solution.  If anyone has any suggestions I would love to hear them.

Lots to share so lets get moving!

Have a great week,

Michael

vCenter 6.5 Update 2d now GA
On Friday 6.5 U2d was released.  This is important as it has a lot of bug fixes in it. I think that this may be an important release and you can find the release notes. The bits are here. If you do not see this update in the VCSA you can learn why and get some help in David’s article.

Health Checks - Delivering a more Intelligent vSAN and vSphere
Pete has done a really interesting article, and I cannot agree more about how nice it is to have new health checks pushed out!

How to update any VMware ESXi Hypervisor to the latest using ESXCLI for easy download and install
I will strongly urge people to always use VUM to do updates and upgrades, but, when you cannot than this article will help you do ESXCLI updates pretty easy.

Automating migration of VMFS-5 to VMFS-6 Datastores
Interesting article to help you with upgrading your VMFS datastores to version 6 which is a darn good thing to do. I have talked with several customers who forgot to upgrade their VMFS. So this info can be useful!

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 2.0 patch update
This patch update is quite important if you are going to be using vRSLCM 2.0  Thanks to Kim for sharing.

Updating PowerCLI Local OS Support
If you are a PowerCLI person check out the OS changes coming in the future.  This change means less QA which may mean more features out in the same time line, or less features out more quickly.

Will 2019 finally be the Year of VDI?
An interesting article that does a nice job of breaking down VDI and the state of the market as well as making a good case that this coming year will be the Year of VDI!

Fun with PKS, K8S, VCP, StatefulSets and Couchbase
Cormac has an article that is full of amazing stuff.  I can tell he is having fun.  Good learning too for the rest of us who are not playing in this space but want to learn a little more.

vSphere arrives on ARM, but not for the reason most admins are thinking
An article about vSphere and ARM and some interesting info. I am looking forward to the improvements in ESXi that runs in my lab where the improvements come from all the work to make ESXi work on ARM chips. For example, maybe some improvements in the area of memory utilization?

Deep Dive into the Nitro System
If you want to learn more about Nitro this video is very good.

VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts: Cloud Managed SDDC for your Data Center
William has a great read on Outposts and it is detailed and easy to understand. VMware and AWS are doing some very smart things. I see a great demand over time for Outposts. You can also see Raghu’s article on the same subject - it is a little different. As well here is the product page for Outposts.

Measuring Performance in VMware Cloud on AWS
Doing performance measurement right is pretty hard, in fact doing it poor is hard too.  But doing in in VMware on AWS is harder still again so it is very good to see this article that shows you how.

MFA it up a notch.  Add an extra layer of security to a jumpbox with DUO MFA
An interesting article that helps you get multi - factor authentication working and that is a very good thing.  I have heard of Duo being used with a range of people and it seems everyone likes it.

PowerShell Scripts for your Exchange Server Toolkit
In this article you can find an interesting collection of scripts that can help out Exchange admins.  Great stuff actually.

Solarwinds Exchange Monitor
This free tool for monitoring your Exchange server is pretty nice for a free tool!

What is NetApp ONTAP Select and when to use it. 
This article talks about what ONTAP Select is and when to use it.  Select is one of the storage virtualization products that NetApp has.

Quick and Easy Replication for VDI Golden Images
In this article you - I was anyway - are reminded of the hassle of golden images.  It is very interesting to see how Datrium changes the game and in such a nice way!

HPC is sexy
So the title of this article caught my attention and the article is pretty different but also interesting.

Rogue Raspberry Pi
So an IT manager finds a Raspberry where it should not be and asks Reddit for help.  Unbelievable, they should have hired an actual security professional for help.  In my old days of security it wasn’t a Pi I found but a gameboy.  And it was hacking Windows passwords and sharing it with someone in the Ukraine. So pretty serious.

Windows 10 update history
Thanks to Anton for sharing this link.  It is pretty interesting as it shows the history of Windows 10 as well as Windows 2019.

Runecast Analyzer VMware Horizon Beta Ready for Testing
This is very interesting, Runecast will now start helping you with Horizon.  Very nice in fact as I use and love this product.

Apple walks Ars through the iPad Pro’s A12X system on a chip
This interesting article talks about what makes the new iPad Pro’s pretty amazing. This is part of the reason why iPads are seriously better than most of their competitors - Apple makes the hardware - all of it - so that they can pair and match things so much better.

How to speed up macOS Mojave
This article will help you with some important things, but it will also push CleanMyMac which is a nice utility that I do use.  But even if you don’t this is good info. I can say that my machine does not need speeding up but it was good to see what was in the spots the article suggested.

Full Disk Access and Why you shouldn’t be afraid of it
In the latest of macOS Mojave we learned about how anti - virus software, and backup, need Full Disk Access. So far it was all done manually too. In this article it provides some info on what Full Disk Access is and means.  BTW, I have had no application crashes on macOS Mojave.  I had anti-virus that would not work until I updated it but that was it.  So don’t take the articles suggestions about crashes being common too serious.

SQL management on a Mac
This came up recently - a SQL guy wanted to manage db’s on his Mac and was not happy he could not find any ideas on how to do that other than RDP.  But, than I heard about these tools. I downloaded one and tried it out.  Worked good - but it doesn’t have all of what is in the SQL Management Studio but it does a lot of stuff.

Mute Background Noise
I saw this software demo’ed and it worked amazing.  It filters out background noise in the Slack or Skype that you are listening too. Only at your end and without using a cloud.

Thanks for reading or skimming this far!

Michael

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