Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

cloud

vSphere 8.0 U2 and vSAN 8.0 U2 just shipped, learn all about it here!

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vSphere 8.0 U2 and vSAN 8.0 U2 just shipped, and of course the Unexplored Territory Podcast has already covered this. If you want to learn all about it make sure to listen to the episode below. Or of course read the release notes (vCenter, ESXi, vSAN).

You can find the vSAN 8.0 U2 episode on Spotify (https://bit.ly/3QNjpFk), and Apple (https://bit.ly/3QPt7XL), as well as any other podcast app, or simply listed via the embedded player below!

You can find the vSphere 8.0 U2 episode on Spotify (https://bit.ly/3snOh5l), Apple (https://bit.ly/45lRK2Q), as well as any other podcast app, or simply listed via the embedded player below!

Unexplored Territory #048: Introduction to Runecast with Stan Markov!

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I have mentioned Runecast a fair amount on my blog, dating back to 2017, but somehow I forgot to blog our episode with Stan on the topic of Runecast on the Unexplored Territory Podcast. I just noticed it, so I figured I would share the episode with you folks. I have been a fan of their solution from day 1, and I would encourage people to look and what they have to offer, and of course listen to the episode. Listen via Spotify (bit.ly/3Nr16nz), Apple (bit.ly/43AlZlB) or the embedded player below!

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!

Introducing vSphere+ and vSAN+

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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!

Does the Native Key Provider require a host to have a TPM?

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I got this question on the VMTN forum this week, does the Native Key Provider require a host to have a TPM? (Trusted Platform Module) The documentation does discuss the use of TPM 2.0 when you enable the Native Key Provider. Let’s be clear, the vCenter Server Native Key Provider does not require a TPM! If a TPM is available on each host then it will be used by the Native Key Provider to store a secret on, which enables us to encrypt and decrypt the ESXi configuration. Again, as stated, it is not a requirement to use a TPM. I have asked to get the documentation appended so that it is officially documented as well, just posting it here so that it indexed by google.