VMworld 2019 US Two Days Summary

If you have been following what VMware has been up to by acquiring several companies and mainly related to Cloud Native Applications solutions especially days before VMworld such as Pivotal, you will know what will likely be announced.

So let's go through some of the big announcements and the respective article that was released at the same time.

Day 1
VMware Tanzu. Check out the two articles here: 1, 2.
What VMware Tanzu encompass are three areas: Build, Run and Manage.

Build bring together Pivotal and Bitnami to orchestrate and package blueprints. So customers who are already on Pivotal will enjoy what they are doing today with no change. This include Heptio services which bring together Contour, Velero, and Sonobuoy.

Run brings your Project Pacific, where vSphere is re-architect with Kubernetes baked in. This together with NSX and vSAN to complete the whole platform for Kubernetes. Check out the video by Kit Cobet. A technical overview of it can be found here.

Manage brings Mission Control together Wavefront and CloudHealth to manage your clusters and have the policies and configuration in one place whether its in public cloud or on premies. Check out the video.

With all this new stuff, where would one learn all this knowledge? VMware at the same time introduces Kubernetes Academy to help everyone to pick up from somewhere depending on your experience. What good about this is this is free! Head on over and sign up an account.


Day 2
We saw Cloud Automation Service which includes Cloud Assembly with Service Broker and Code Stream offered as a service. Today, vRealize Automation 8, is announced. This brings the Cloud Assembly to on premies.

vRealize Operations 8.0 with the new feature to support Intent-Driven onto VMC on AWS and integration back to vRealize Automation 8.0. Check out the article to get to know most of the feature introduced.

vRealize Lifecycle Manager 8.0 is released to help update all vRealize solutions. It is needed to install vRealize Automation 8.0 to simplify deployment.

Next in the line up was NSX-T 2.5. The biggest feature in this release is NSX Intelligence. Also together with NSX Cloud, this release allows one singular policy-driven across hybrid cloud deployment both with agent-based and agentless.

Lastly, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is now available! For customers with edge locations with no IT staff, this provides a single contact point to deploy an infrastructure without the need of mobile staff and remote management of edge locations.


Update 29th Aug 2019
Now you can catch both days general session here.

vExpert 2019 Second Half Results Announced

Congrats to the new vExpert 2019 second half applicants. The result has been announced here.

A total of 119 new vExpert 2019.

Congrats once again to those who have been accredited vExpert. Keep your community contribution going. For those who didn't make it, don't be despair. Start building that contribution and be ready for the application next year for vExpert 2020.

VMware Configuration Maximum

One of the many documents that we always refer to for vSphere is the configuration maximum. Back in the days, I still remember VCP was tested on it.

Though this document is good to refer to, there are other components such as NSX, vRealize Operations, etc. that have a certain maximum that we would search high and low for it.

VMware has released a site that contains all these maximums information. Though this is not complete, this will be the single source of truth when you find that documentation might not be updated.

Not only do you get to see the maximum, but you can also even compare previous versions limits.

It is very easy to use, Just 1) Choose a product, 2) Select the version, 3) What type of maximum, you can choose more than one, 4) To display the limits.

Now head over to try it out.

VMUG Singapore Cloud Automation Services

You see it right. You hear it right. Its Cloud Automation Services that you will be seeing during this coming VMUG Singapore event on 17th Jul, Wed.

You will not only get to see Cloud Assembly Service but also how it integrates with Code Stream and Service Broker which was announced late last year. Find out more here. With that together, how you can easily provision and automate process into multiple public clouds and even to your on-prem private cloud easily. How developers can leverage infrastructure as code and perform the whole process of CI/CD.

But wait, this is not done just by anyone. You will be hearing from our Cloud Solution Strategist, Clement Wong. He has spoken at several events but recently invited as one of the speaker and panelist during GovTech Industry Briefing and StackX.

On top of that, we will also have our fellow Senior Technical Trainer, Habeeb Mohammed sharing on PKS Enterprise. Find out how you can easily manage, deploy and operate your containers workload.

So wait no further register for the event now!

VMware vExpert 2019 Two Subprograms Are Now Open!

A few days ago, the vExpert 2019 second half application. Now the vExpert Cloud Management and vExpert NSX subprograms are open.

Please note this is based on your past year contribution on the two specific categories namely NSX and Cloud Management. This year Cloud Management is new into the subprogram.

So head over here, and apply for the subprograms if you specialize in this area.

VMware vExpert 2019 Second Half Application Now Opens!

The application for VMware vExpert 2019 has now opened again! As usual, there will be two application period one at the beginning of the year and one in the mid of the year.

For those who have missed the first time round, this is your last chance. For those who have not accepted into the program in the first application, this is your time to prove your worth into spending thoughts of your contributions to the application.

The announcement can be found here. The application can be found here. Before you can apply, you would need to create an account. The closing date is 12th Jul 2019.

As usual, you can read about the three tracks, Evangelist, Partner and VMware Partner Network.

As a vExpert Pro together with others, we assessed the applications together with the vExpert Program team. Please put some effort into the applications.

Some common mistakes we see. We have seen simple one-liner application which there is no justification to grant anyone the credential of vExpert. Also, past years effort is good, but vExpert is a yearly renewal credential which requires a yearly contribution. So if you have stopped doing it, and was a vExpert in the past, it is unlikely you will be granted vExpert 2019 if no effort was done in the past one year. Lastly, do not just state you have spoken in an event without any evidence. Show us some links to it, or even point it to your LinkedIn past post or something.

If you need help or advice or need a mentor on how to achieve vExpert, feel free to approach any of the 46 vExpert Pro from the above link for guidance. I am sure every one of them is more than willing to help.

I am offering myself to guide or advise anyone who needs any help in the South East Asia region since I am based in Singapore and timing works just right. Ping me if you need help.

You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn and we can schedule a call to get it through.

Good luck!

VMware vCenter High Availability (VCHA)

With the release of vCenter 6.5, a built-in native High Availability (HA) feature was introduced. This has been a long-awaited feature since the end of availability of vCenter Server Heartbeat since vCenter 5.x.

With the release of VCHA, I came across many times people asking how can we implement it?

There are a few articles from VMware that show some of the supported topologies. However, with the realize of vSphere 6.7 U2, the recommended vCenter Server deployment is with embedded PSC. In this case, we will just look at the topology that has an embedded PSC. This is welcoming since we have less component to handle and need not require a load balancer just to load balance PSC.

Let us go through some of the common questions been asked.

How many instances does VCHA deploy?
With VCHA, you would have three instances of vCenter namely: vCenter Server  (Active), vCenter Server (Passive), vCenter Server (Witness).

How many vCenter Server licenses do I need and which edition?
The licensing requirement for this case only needs one vCenter Server Standard license to utilize this feature without having to license all three instances.

In VCHA, the vCenter Server instance is of the same configured sizing for all three, can we resize the witness?
Yes. In the Basic configuration, this is done automatically for you. If you are doing in Advanced, you can change the vCPU and memory to 1 vCPU and 1 GB respectively.

Can I place the witness on a 3rd site?
Yes, you can but why do you need to. There is no strong value. The reason is VCHA is a local site availability to keep vCenter Server available at the local site and not a disaster recovery solution. It is not used for site failure purpose but local site component failure. Placing the witness to another site is not wrong but you added complexity when there is a breakage between the site where the witness lose connection to the main site. The bandwidth round trip time (RTT) requirement for the three instances between each other needs to be within 10ms. The recommendation is to place all three instance on different ESXi server in the same cluster or if you are worried on cluster outage, then across cluster within the same site.

Can the witness run as a physical server?
No. As VCHA instances are all preconfigured virtual appliance, it cannot be installed on a physical machine. VCHA is only available in the virtual appliance option so you cannot do your own installation.

Can the witness run on a standalone free ESXi hypervisor?
Yes, however, the free ESXi hypervisor does not have a license attached to it. Naturally, the witness will not have VMware support even though you have purchased support for the vCenter Server.

How to upgrade VCHA?
The easiest way is to destroy and upgrade the vCenter Server and deploy VCHA again. Refer to this article.