Category Archives: VMware

vRealize Automation 8.0 announced at VMworld

Leave a reply

That was unexepected and many of you may have not heard about it, but it is here. vRealize Automation 8 was announced at VMworld 2019 US.

New Architecture

vRealize Automation 8.0 Architecture

vRealize Automation 8 comes with a new and modern platform built on a container-based architecture that offers more scalability and performance than in previous versions.

No more Windows Server machine is required for the installation. Yes, you read right! Administrators and Engineers working on vRA 6 and 7 would be more than happy to hear that, as previous installations were a real pain and especially with vRA 6.

Only one VM can now run all vRA services but the infrastructure can also be extented to support a three nodes configuration if more scaling and high availability is required.

Continue reading →

Google welcomes VMware to its Cloud Platform

Leave a reply

It’s official! VMware and Google Cloud team up to deliver a new Cloud platform to customers.

This new partnership will allow VMware to extend once more its muti-cloud portfolio and run VMware Cloud Fondation into Google Cloud.

So what’s up with that new offering?

Google will leverage on their platform the full VMware stack that include of course vSphere, but also vSAN and NSX-T, and Google Cloud will be in charge of the support. It is worth to mention that this solution is developped by CloudSimple, the same company that brought us VMware on Microsoft Azure.

The new solution will be available in late 2019, no region has been mentioned yet for the launch but my guess is it will be the US as usual.

This is becoming really interesting because if you remember well, VMware first teamed up in 2017 with AWS to reveal the WMware Cloud on AWS offering, then was announced a partnership with IBM and more recently at the last DellTechnology World was revealed the VMware Cloud on Microsoft Azure solution.

Now VMware’s customers have again the opportunity to expand their on premise infrastructure to a hybride cloud with the provider of their choice and take benefit of their public cloud services.

Now the question is, which one will be the best fit for you and your workloads ? 2020 is gonna be for VMware a year full of multi-cloud awesomeness!

VMware vExpert 2019

Leave a reply

I’m really proud and honored to become a vExpert this year and more especially because this is my very first time!

Many of you may know what is the vExpert program but for those who are not aware of it, here’s a description that you could also find on the official vExpert website.

Continue reading →

My experience on implementing VMware Datastores into VPLEX

4 Replies

The purpose of this operation was to encapsulate existing datastores into VPLEX to take benefit of the synchronous and high availability features of VPLEX Metro between 2 sites.

Unfortunately I got into trouble with an issue that I really didn’t expect and anticipate. This is why I thought important to give you my experience on this and hopefully help anyone planning to do the same. But before going any further, let me give you some info regarding the customer environement and VPLEX.

Résultat de recherche d'images pour "vplex"

VPLEX is a virtual storage system that stands between your storage arrays and your hosts. It virtualizes all arrays connected to it and then presents as one storage system your volumes to hosts.

So basically, you attach any compatible storage to VPLEX and then the magic goes, all your hosts will see just one array with the volumes you’d like to present. I won’t go into details on how to configure VPLEX as this is out of scope in this article.

One of the strength of VPLEX is that it’s a great storage system and perhaps the best allowing to have a real active-active infrastructure and migrate VMs easyly between multiple sites. But is good also for migration of multiple storage arrays.

Continue reading →

VMware released vSphere 6.5 Update 3

Leave a reply

VMware just released vSphere Update 3 that includes mainly security fixes and enhancements.

So what’s new with ESXi 6.5 U3

The ESXi 6.5 Update 3 release includes the following list of new features.

  • The ixgben driver adds queue pairing to optimize CPU efficiency.
  • With ESXi 6.5 Update 3 you can track license usage, refresh switch topology and see improvements in the search and Developer Center in the vSphere Client.
  • ESXi 6.5 Update 3 provides legacy support for AMD Zen 2 servers.
  • Multiple driver updates: ESXi 6.5 Update 3 provides updates to the lsi-msgpt2, lsi-msgpt35, lsi-mr3, lpfc/brcmfcoe, qlnativefc, smartpqi, nvme, nenic, ixgben, i40en and bnxtnet drivers.
  • ESXi 6.5 Update 3 provides support for Windows Server Failover Clustering and Windows Server 2019.
  • ESXi 6.5 Update 3 adds the com.vmware.etherswitch.ipfixbehavior property to distributed virtual switches to enable you to choose how to track your inbound and outbound traffic, and utilization. With a value of 1, the com.vmware.etherswitch.ipfixbehavior property enables sampling in both ingress and egress directions. With a value of 0, you enable sampling in egress direction only, which is also the default setting.

To see the full release note it’s here : https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.5/rn/vsphere-esxi-65u3-release-notes.html

And what’s up with vCenter 6.5 U3

Continue reading →

WMware Cloud on DellEMC announced at DellTechnologies World

Leave a reply

At DellTechnologies World, some good announcements have been made including also new partnerships that we’ll talk about in another post.
But before going further, it is important to remind you guys what happened last year at VMworld.

The project Dimension was revealed, which is a new way to deliver the SDDC on hardware as-a-service to customer’s on-premises. It can be implemented on either your datacenters or on an edge location.

So basically, you can have hardware as-a-service on-prem where you can then implement your SDDC stack and never care about hardware maintenance, upgrade, patching etc.. because VMware does it for you. This is a brand new concept which I think is the best combination for Hybrid Cloud to also get rid of CAPEX.

Continue reading →

[VMware Tips] How to unlock an ISO file mounted to a VM running vCenter

1 Reply

You might be wondering why the need to add a dvd drive to a VM running vCenter in the first place.

Well, I recently had to upgrade a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) from version 6.5 to 6.5 U1e for a customer by using the offline bundle rather than the online method. This is why I needed to add a dvd drive to the vCenter VM and then mount the VCSA update ISO file. Everything went just fine and my VCSA was up to date and running after a couple of minutes and a reboot.

The thing is that I didn’t immediately un-mount the ISO file and remove the dvd drive from the vCenter VM after the upgrade ; and a few days later I had to configure VCHA (vCenter High Availability) which allow to have a passive vCenter to go online in case of failure of the active node. I won’t go into further details as this is not the topic today.

Continue reading →

VMware released vSphere 6.5!

Leave a reply

As many of you already know, VMware unveiled vSphere 6.5 during its yearly event VMworld last month in Barcelona.

vsp6-5

vSphere 6.5 has now been released and can be download here, so you can experiencing it, test it out as you like or even implement it in order to upgrade your production environment.

 

So, let’s recap what’s new in that new version of vSphere.

At VMworld, VMware announced a lot of new interesting features an improvements in their flagship product. Let’s discover some of them in that new release.

Continue reading →