Hello all,
A week on the road, but not with as many customer meetings as I hoped, but with a few and they were outstanding. I love helping people with the ability to not only survive IT outages, but to also change IT operations in positive ways like testing tier 1 app updates in test failovers before it is done in production. Of course this kind of week really means very busy so no new articles even though I have some ready to start.
I was able to update one of my articles, the one on how to make the As Built scripts work. Which does an amazing job of producing a Word document of your environment. I also got vCheck working in a lab and I used an old article of mine to do it and it worked good.
I have not said it lately I suspect, but I really do love VMware HA. I had a host lose communications in my home lab, and yet there was only a very short outage as all that hosts’ VMs were started on the other host in the cluster. Very nice indeed! I was alerted of this thanks to Pingdom monitoring (externally) my Horizon View and Mail servers. But I was also alerted to things coming back to life pretty quick.
I would also like to share my sympathy and prayers with the people of ChristChurch, NZ. What happened there is horrible and terrible. I have seen in the news how some of the people of ChristChurch tried to stop the terrorists. I am not surprised about that as New Zealand people are pretty special, and that is becoming something more people need to do - try and stop the bad guys.
But lets get started, and yes, there are a few things to share!
Have a great week,
Michael
Update Your Chrome Browsers - and why!
I recently mentioned to people about how important it was to update your Chrome Browsers but I did not know the details but here they are now.
Watch the Top vBlog 2018 results show live on 3/21
You can find out who the top winners are for virtualization blogs in this show which should be pretty good. Likely you will find new blogs that can help you learn. I am also curious to see how I do in it!
Horizon 7.8 Now GA
You can find the release notes easy enough, but there is a lot to read in them. Some nice improvements in fact. I have not done the update yet but will let you know when I have.
VMware Unified Gateway 3.5 Now GA
This interesting product has a new version, and some of the things mentioned as new sound interesting - like improving load balancer monitoring. Here is the release notes.
StorageMinute; Elastic vSAN
This crazy short article still has some good info, and it has links to more info, but this is a good start if you want to learn more about Elastic vSAN.
64 GB memory on Intel NUCs?
William answers this question and shares the good news for all NUC owners!
VMware Tools 10.3.10
Here is the release notes for this new release, but as always I have to mention you should not just lightly use VMware Tools from a download. If it has functionality you need, and you cannot wait for it to show up in ESXi hosts then yes, use it. But be aware you will need to remember that you did that and sometimes will need to confirm that they work with something else. There is in fact some interesting functionality in this version.
Top 10 VMware Tools podcast and RVTools 3.11.6
Duncan mentions the excellent podcast and talks about a new version of RVTools. I listened to that episode and it was quite interesting.
Backup Infrastructure at your fingertips with heatmaps
This is one of the very cool things that was part of Update 4 for Veeam ONE. Check out Ricks article to learn more.
Pure Storage overcomes dedupe blocking with end to end encryption in flash array
This article talks about an interesting situation in Pure arrays and how they deal with it. Pretty impressive actually - and I see the use of it.
Scripting VDI by Day and Compute by Night
This is very cool stuff - I had not heard this terminology before, but it makes a lot of sense to me and I do believe a variety of customers and home labs could use this cool script.
Switching on NFS 4.1 in the Home Lab
This interesting article will help you get your Synology working with NFS 4.1 and vSphere and that is pretty cool. So good reasons to do this. But listen to his last paragraph, I have heard of others having issues with it.
Exploring the GPU Architecture and why we need it
We hear a lot about GPU, from some people about they help games out, and others for engineering apps, and in this article we can learn a lot more - like why we need GPUs. I love good learning blogs like this, and the author even has links to more learning too.
Veeam Backup Validator Powershell GUI
A very nice UI has been done so help you make it easy to do a validation of your backup files. This is a cool tool to help you with checking out your backups in a different way. I think SureBackup jobs are pretty good way to check things too.
New era of Intelligent Diagnostics
Melissa talks of two new features in Veeam ONE 9.5 Update 4, including one I am very fond of - Veeam Intelligent Diagnostics. This functionality will alert you to problems found in the Backup & Replication logs. BTW, actions can be part of any alerts - even ones that are not part of Veeam Intelligent Diags.
Veeam: Cloud Tier / Capacity Tier in Microsoft Azure Blog - Config of Veeam Backup & Replication Scale-Out Backup Repository
Another article by Jorge about some of the interesting new functionality in Update 4 that enables some cool stuff in the cloud. Chrome translated this article for me instantly so it is not an issue that it is in Spanish. If you like the article it is part of a series and you can find links to them at the bottom of it.
Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4 - valuable secrets
Andreas has a good list of things about U4 that you may not know about, and likely should.
Sysinternals Video Library - tour of the Systinternals Tools
You can get the introduction of Sysinternals in this Video series. Quite historic actually as in the past Sysinternals was pretty important. Quite a bit of depth in this series, and for useful stuff like learning more about Process Explorer.
First Look - Runecast adding support for VMware HCL
I am very fond of Runecast. And to see what is coming is pretty nice - I love the idea of VMware HCL support. Find out more in this article - thanks to Anthony.
AWS Architecture Icons
I know partners really like to have icons and shapes available for their diagrams that they use for Customers. You can find the AWS icons here.
F5 acquires NGINX
This was a bit of a surprise but you can find out more in this article which is more of a press release.
Extracting Bitlocker Keys from a TPM
This article was quite surprising for me to see, as I had not known this sort of exploit was possible.
Best Mail apps for the Mac in 2019
If you don’t want to use the Apple Mail program, and are not a Office 365 customer that gets you the Mac Outlook client, there are a number of other mail apps, and some of them are quite good. Find the info in this article.
14 Siri Tricks You Can use Right Now
If you have an Apple device the odds are Siri works with it, bu t if you are not sure what the range of Siri commands you can use are here is a good list of them.
NetSpot Wifi Scanner Review: Get to know your Wifi network
I am a Wifi Explorer user but I saw this review of a different tool and it looks interesting. So if you need a tool to help with your Wifi network it might do the trick.
Share your Wifi password from your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch
I saw this functionality quite some time ago by accident and it blew me away. I really like it and if you are not sure what it is check out this article. The article doesn’t cover off the situation in that you will be prompted to share your password if your friend is trying to connect and you are in each others contact list (and you have the password). Very cool. I also have a Siri action that will share my wifi password via a QR code that is also handy.
Thanks for reading or skimming this far,
Michael
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