Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vSphere Breakroom Chats benefits of containers and some challenges customers face!

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I was recently invited to join the vSphere Breakroom Chats video series and had a lot of fun with Shobith going over the various challenges customers are seeing, but of course, also discussing the benefits for customers when running these workloads on a virtualized platform. Wanted to use my blog at least to share the outcome of our discussion with all readers. Just watch it below, or go to this link and watch it on youtube directly. We discussed the following topics:

  1. Benefits of containers and why they are so entrenched in the IT industry.
  2. Challenges that enterprises are facing in scaling containers in their environment
  3. How is Kubernetes solving these issues faced by enterprises? And how VMware is helping IT admins with this?
  4. The future direction of Kubernetes and microservices technology
  5. Tips for IT professionals wanting to educate themselves on Kubernetes, containers, and microservices.

If you have a podcast by the way, or you have a youtube channel and would like me to be a guest, don’t hesitate to reach out. Always happy to join for a fun conversation!

Unexplored Territory #023 – Introducing Oracle Cloud VMware Solution with Richard Garsthagen

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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!

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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!

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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?

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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!