Although it is the summer holiday season in Europe, we don’t take a break when it comes to releasing new podcast content. This episode features one of the first VMware bloggers ever (maybe the first!?), who now is responsible for Cloud at Oracle, Richard Garsthagen. Richard introduced us to the world of Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. Very interesting stuff if you ask me, and with some unique capabilities compared to other public cloud offerings. (Especially from an operational point of view!) Listen now on Spotify (https://spoti.fi/3bB5QXE), Apple (https://apple.co/3SCPoa2), or anywhere else you get your podcasts! Or simply use the player below.
Top 15 VMware Explore Sessions to attend!
Every year over the past decade or so I have done this “Top 15/20 VMworld Sessions to attend” post, although VMworld no longer exists and VMware created this new event called VMware Explore, I feel that this tradition does need to live on! I went over the full catalog and picked the 15 sessions I feel are “must-watch” content. Now, to be clear, this is my opinion and you may not agree, and that is fine! If you feel a session is missing, just drop a note in the comment section so people can see what else they should consider watching/attending!
Before we start the list, I do want to mention that Frank Denneman, William Lam, and I will be part of a panel session hosted by Pete Flecha and John Nichsolson, aka the Virtually Speaking Podcast crew. The Title of the session is: “60 Minutes of Virtually Speaking Live: Accelerating Cloud Transformation [MCLB2804US]“. Make sure to register as soon as you can, as I am sure that this one will fill up fast!
Here we go, please note that this is a mix of “live/in-person” and “on-demand” sessions, and the sessions are in no particular order!
- Project Monterey Behind the Scenes: A Technical Deep Dive [CEIB1576US] by Dave Morera and Meghana Badrinath (In-Person)
- Deconstructing vSAN – A Deep Dive into the Internals of vSAN [INDB2406USD] by Pete Koehler and John Nicholson (On-Demand)
- Get to Know the Next-Generation of vSAN Architecture [CEIB2172US] by Rakesh Radhakrishnan and Wenguang Wang (In-Person)
- Core Storage Best Practice Deep Dive [CEIB1382USD] by Cody Hosterman and Jason Massae (On-Demand)
- How Your Future Server Purchase Should Be Ready for Tiered Memory [VIB1390US] by Richard Brunner (In-Person)
- Project Capitola – Vision for a Disaggregated Memory World – Addressing Capacity and Cost Challenges for Business-Critical Applications [CEIB1268USD] by Sudhir Balasubramanian, Sridhar Kayathi, Arvind Jagannath (On-Demand)
- A Technical Deep Dive into Container Security [SECB2366USD] by Haim Helman and Stephane List (On-Demand)
- VMware Edge Compute Stack Reference Architecture Deep Dive [CEIB2325US] by Ken Guo and Michael Wright (In-Person)
- Architecting Multi-Cloud Horizon [EUSB2088USD] by Hilko Lantinga and Richard Terlep (On-Demand)
- Designing a Secure Multi-Cloud Infrastructure with VMware and Google [SECB2398US] by Wade Holmes and Chris McCain (In-Person)
- Tanzu Application Platform – A Deeper Dive for Developers [CNAB2045USD] by Ben Wilcock and Alex Barbato (On-Demand)
- Advanced Networking and Security for VMware Cloud on AWS [NETB2287US] by Sandeep Sharma and Jeremy Anderson (In-Person)
- Tanzu Platform for Kubernetes and the Multi-Cloud Journey [KUBB1940US] by Kendrick Coleman, Scott Rosenberg, Katarina Brookfield (In-Person)
- Technical Architecture and Advantages of VMware Cloud for Your Workloads [CEIB1429USD] by Niels Hagoort and Oleg Ulyanov (On-Demand)
- Vision for Data Protection as a Service and What’s New in VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery [CEIB1236US] by Nabil Quadri and Yoomi Yong (In-Person)
Unexplored Territory Podcast #021: Talking core storage with Jason Massae!
Some episodes are just going to be more popular than others, sometimes it is a surprise which episode will be popular, and sometimes it is a given. Episode 21 is all about VMware core storage, and who better to invite than Tech Marketing Architect Jason Massae. Jason owns core storage at VMware, and shares with us all the different new features introduced in vSphere 7.x, with a focus on both vVols and NVMe over Fabrics. Listen via Spotify (https://spoti.fi/3AW335F), Apple (https://apple.co/3aqSqwP), your podcast app of choice, or via the embedded player below.
How do I set an advanced setting which is not listed through esxcli on the commandline?
Someone asked this question recently, and it is a valid point, it seems that some namespaces are not available through esxcli when it comes to the advanced settings. Now you can of course set the advanced settings via the UI, but in some cases you may need/want to script them. This is possible when you use one of the older CLIs available on your host, namely “vim-cmd”. Now, vim-cmd was never really intended to be used by administrators so I would urge caution. However, in some cases it is very difficult to get around it, and for instance, setting “Config.HostAgent.ssl.keyStore.allowSelfSigned” to “true” is one of those. You can’t, to my knowledge, currently do this via esxcli. You can, however, simply do this via vim-cmd. The syntax is as follows:
vim-cmd hostsvc/advopt/update name.option type value
In my particular case, that means the command would look like this:
vim-cmd hostsvc/advopt/update Config.HostAgent.ssl.keyStore.allowSelfSigned bool "true"
Where “update” is used to update the value for the advanced setting. If you just want to list all settings first you could use the following command:
vim-cmd hostsvc/advopt/settings
I hope that helps someone out there!
Introducing vSphere+ and vSAN+
VMware just announced vSphere+ and vSAN+ today. I was reading up on the offering and personally was very intrigued about it. I have to be fair, at first I was under the impression that vSphere+ and vSAN+ was only about subscription-based licensing, but it is not, it is much more than that. If you like to head more about it, Frank and I invited Himanshu Singh to the podcast to provide us a quick overview, in ~20 minutes you know everything you need to know at this stage, make sure to listen to it below or open up the podcast in your favorite podcast app.
I am not going to type up a summary of the podcast, but I do briefly want to share my thoughts. First of all, as mentioned already, vSphere+ aka Project Arctic is about much more than just subscription-based licensing. Yes, the platform is subscription-based, but it also delivers additional capabilities to your on-prem environment. Details of pricing and packaging is still to be announced, but Himanshu mentioned to us that VMware will provide an upgrade path from perpetual licenses to vSphere+ taking into account that you have already bought licenses. Mind, most of you renew SnS every X years, this would be also included in vSphere+. But that is not what excited me, what excited me is that you get access to the Cloud Console, which basically provides a holistic overview of your VMware estate, with today a focus on vSphere and vSAN, and the extra capabilities the platform provides.
This Cloud Console is, no surprise I guess, running in the cloud and connects your on-prem VMware environment to cloud services. In order to do so, you will need to deploy a Cloud Gateway and connect your vCenter Server instances to the gateway, do note that each Cloud Gateway in the initial release can manage up to 4 vCenter Server instances. You can, however, deploy multiple Cloud Gateway of course if you want to manage more vCenter Server instances.
Now, when you get access to the Cloud Console, it immediately shows you what the value is, you will get an instant overview of all resources available in your VMware environment. Not only that, but you will also get centralized alerts and events, a global inventory, VM provisioning capabilities, and enhanced vCenter upgrade capabilities, which is my favorite feature! This upgrade capability is very useful as it shortens the downtime/maintenance window for vCenter to roughly 5 minutes. It also provides the ability to do a rollback if needed. There’s much more, but I will leave that for a follow up podcast with one of the vSphere+ specialists!
The two last things I want to point out is the fact that additional services will also be provided through this platform. There are the Developer Services and there are Add-On Services. The Developer Services are included, the Add-On services are not included in the price, but are fully integrated and can be subscribed to individually. A great example of an add-on service is VMware Disaster Recovery as a Service solution. Of course, developer services is all about Kubernetes as it includes Tanzu Standard Runtime, and Tanzu Mission Control Essentials!
Hopefully this provides a decent enough overview of what vSphere+ is. Make sure to listen to the podcast episode, it is only ~20 minutes and it provides a bit more background and detail!