Newsletter: April 13, 2019

Hello all,

An interesting week in the lab and chatting with customers.  So a great combination.  And heading out to the office in Prague to meet with co-workers and partners.  Pretty good stuff. But I am in a bit of a rush so lets get started.

Last week I shared a link about Learning PowerShell scripting in a month of lunches.  Turns out I was sharing out a link to the source which is not what I intended.  I thought it was free but it is not free.  The proper link is here.  I know this is good learning material so it is worth paying for. I do apologize for this confusion.

Some of my co-workers were on a Cloud Field Day thing, and you can catch the excellent videos and background in this article. I watched and it was full of great info.

I installed the latest version of Runecast and updated my article on it. I really like this software and hope to share some articles on it soon. I finished my vRA article series - we went from nothing, to being able to provision VMS.  Very cool.  Here is part 1, part 2, and part 3.  I will do more articles on this subject as I find it interesting and powerful.

Have a great week,

Michael

What is the impact of the VMKlinux Driver Stack Deprecation?
This is an important article since the VMlinux driver stack will not be present after 6.7.  That could potentially impact many people.  It is nice that the article has a script to help you answer the question in your world if it will impact you.

vCenter Server 6.7 Update 2 now GA
Here is the release notes for this new release. We have seen lately really a lot of articles that talk about this release so we know it is a big one. Here is the bits. Make sure before you upgrade that anything you depend on that connects with vCenter is compatible.  Such as backup software, and things like Horizon View. Here is an article about the Converge Tool enhancements in this version. I have seen some twitter traffic just now that View is are supported yet.

Updates to VM Compatibility and VMware Tools with vSphere 6.7 Update 2
You can learn more about the updated compatibility and tools in this article. The new compatibility mode - 15, means you can have VMs with 256 vCPU’s and 6 Tb of RAM.  Wow.

VMware vSphere Update Manager Enhancements in vSphere 6.7 U2
You can learn about some great enhancements to VUM in this article.  They all sound great!

Enhanced vCenter Server Audit Event and Logging in vSphere 6.7 U2
This are very good improvements that William talks about in this article.  Very cool actually if you are a Log Insight user! I think it safe to say some of these we have been waiting for!

VMware ESXi 6.7 Update 2 now GA
Here is the release notes, and bits. Be sure to check out the release notes, I am impressed that we have automatic unmap processing on some storage arrays and devices now.  And a native driver for a 10 GB / 40 GB network adapter is pretty nice.  Too bad it is one I never heard of and do not own.

vRealize Log Insight 4.8 now GA
You can find the release notes easy for this new release but I was not able to find the bits.  Likely some sort of access thing.  There is a lot of cool stuff in this version but I really like how you can do data retention based on time!

vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 now GA
Here is the release notes.  We have seen a fair number of articles on this release so far. The what’s new section of the release notes is pretty big.  But curious what that means in the UI? Here is the bits. Here is the first article of a four article series that is a technical overview of this release.

vRealize Automation 7.6 now GA
You can find the release notes and the bits.  It has a number of enhancements and bug fixes. You can learn more about what is new in this article.

vRealize Orchestrator 7.6 is released! Updated Web Client
Cody has an interesting article about this new release. And he likes it - which is a good thing! BTW, here is the release notes for vRO, and the bits.

How to upgrade ESXi 6.7 U1 to 6.7 U2 via esxcli
A good reminder there is more than one way to upgrade.  I love using VUM and default to using it since it works so well. But it is good to have options and being able to use a command line is very handy.

StorageMinute: vSAN Encryption and Key Rotation
Jase has an interesting article on this subject and it is good info.

vSphere Enterprise ROBO - Even better for vSAN ROBO
Jase has an informative article on some of the changes in the ROBO space.  Good info and clarity.

VMware Cloud Foundation Starts with vSAN
Jeff has an interesting article on vSAN in the Cloud Foundation.  It is interesting and powerful combination of a variety of software - with vSAN doing the storage.

vSAN - Controller driver is (not) VMware Certified
This can be a frustrating issue and it is good to see an article that talks of it and shows how to deal with it too.

vSphere HA virtual machine failed to failover error on VMs in a partitioned cluster
Duncan talks of something that he got a couple questions on and is interesting too.

Aquantia 10 GbE ESXi Driver for Apple 2018 Mac Mini
An interesting article from William on how you can get the 10 GB network card in the Mac Mini working with vSphere.

VMware Cloud on AWS Release Notes
They were updated a few days ago, and I found them interesting so here they are.

Build a Cloud Automation Service Ready CentOS Template
You can find out more on this topic in this article.

Exciting News - NimbleOS 5.1 Now Available!
You can read all about this new update in Nimble in this article. Looks like a big release!

3 reasons for switching to HPE Nimble Storage H5 vCenter Plug-in
It is good to hear that HPE has a HTML5 plug-in for vCenter, and that it can do so much.

Operationalize Your World
An interesting article with some good points.  I too have seen these sorts of issue at customers and so it is good that they are trying to help people understand.

Veeam Management Escalation Form
You can find a form here that you can use to compliment, or complain, about things Veeam related.  It can be about a typo in a marketing document, or about how you appreciate something or other.  This is a good idea as I think it can help Veeam to be more in touch with customers and partners.

Disaster Recovery and Resiliency with Veeam Cloud Tier
Anthony has an article that explains some things that are important and I think not a lot of people understand.  Cloud Tier is cool stuff, and to learn more check out Anthony’s article.

Cloud Connect Replication partial failover - example
Anthony has another article on how Cloud Connect replication can do a partial failover instead of a full failover. The option to do partial is important, not all DR events are full but rather many are partial.

Veeam Extract - Restoring Data when all hope is lost
I have talked with a lot of customers on the extract tool.  It is very good to know.  So it is very nice to see this article.

Released: Veeam Availability Console v3.0 - Reseller, Licensing, and Scalability Enhancements!
You can learn about this updated release in this article.  It is a big release!

How to get App ID, App Secret, and app password in Office 365
This article will help you get multi - factor authentication working in Veeam Backup for MS Office 365.

Dude, where is my Veeam Free Edition?
You can find out all about this, and the very good news too, from Michael in this article.

Certified Kubernetes Administrator Study Guide
I have done a little basic learning about Kubernetes which is how I came across this article that others might find useful.

Microsoft’s April 2019 Updates are causing Windows to freeze
The bad news is in this article.  Some serious issues in fact. If you use Sophos, Avira or Avast you better check out this article.

EU Tells Internet Archive that Much of it’s site is “Terrorist Content”
Good grief.  Check this article out.

A Regulatory Framework for the Internet
This article talks about a British government whitepaper that hints and suggests on how it will regulate tech companies but will probably end up doing censorship on social media and impact end users.

Go Get a ProtonMail Account and protect your Online life
Stephen has a very good idea, and I agree with him that this is the most secure email provider.

GPS Time Rollover Failures keep happening (But they’re almost done)
In this very interesting article Stephen talks of an issue with GPS I was not aware of. It is pretty amazing that we have this sort of issue after we have lived through Y2K.  I am happy to say my Garmin GPSMap 66st did not have an issue.  Good thing.

Thanks for reading or skimming this far,

Michael

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