Plain Virtualization

Recently I came across the sign-up form when you log into your myVMware account. This form is for those who are interested in being an education SME whether in developing the learning zone materials or as a certification development. One of the form requirement was to provide your VMW ID. This was something new to me as well. Doing a quick search there is a document here , which detail how you will find your VMW ID. Do note, this ID is the same throughout your certification path. With this ID, you will see all your certification ownership thus far. Head over to Certification Manager  (you will need your myVMware ID), you will see the banner which has a form link to sign up as an SME. Lastly, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone in the community.

A very busy month for me and also traveling to take a break from work. Finally to sit down and compose which got confused by many of my co-workers. It came across to me many people are confused over the windows 2016 licensing. I have previously explained how it is licensed here . However, there are cases where customer like to know what will be the break-even point if they are running on Windows 2016 Standard licensing instead of Windows 2016 Datacenter edition. Someone has also done up some scenario to explain the cost and break-even point here . Basically, the 13th Windows VM that you run on a physical server will make more sense to run Windows 2016 Datacenter edition license. That is if your consolidation is high which is subject to your server specifications as well as VM workload. Just to give you the explanation from my post previously, whether it is a standard edition or datacenter edition, the way you license in cores doesn't change. But in the standard edition, you...

Missed the vForum locally in your country especially the one in Singapore? No worries, there is still a chance to attend some of the tracks and win some gifts for yourself. Check out the events that are coming up this week  here . Don't miss out and chat with the expert and get your questions answered. Still not sure whether you can make it? Register first, and attend the sessions you are available to join. What are you waiting for?

Something new just starts out from VMware Palo Alto. There is a new twitter handler, VMware vExpert Pro . It just posted something a few hours ago. We know what is a vExpert program. If you do not do check out here . The vExpert came a long way from a general vExpert to now another three more tracks namely: vSAN, NSX, Cloud and now Pro. So what is really vExpert Pro? This is someone volunteered in the individual country as a vExpert recruiter. So how is the person been selected? A short requirement is as below: A current vExpert who excels in their local region, adding value to the program and giving back to the community. This person has a strong relationship with the local IT community in general, and works as an advocate to the vExpert program, recruiting, mentoring and training people. I am fortunate to be selected out of the many vExperts in Singapore. Not because I am an employee in VMware (initially information was sent to my personal email and the program team from...

There is three certifications release before VMworld 2018 announced here . Namely VCAP-DCV 2018 Deploy, VCAP-CMA Deploy 2018 and VCP7-DTM 2018. Here is something new is the naming convention. The certification is no longer tied to the version of the product. Though this is also mentioned in the article as well as in the certification page. This is a long awaiting certification since vSphere 6.5 was released more than a year ago and the Design exam was available since last year and Deploy was not till now. This applies the same for Cloud Automation exam too. For VCP-DTM, this is more of an update to match Horizon 7.5. I do welcome the naming convention as it also allows testers to know when they last took their exam especially VCP is valid for two years. As mentioned in my last blog on VCAP6.5-DCV Design, the difference between VCP and VCAP testing of capabilities is different. The way Design and Deploy testing criteria is also different for the different audience between an a...

The yearly VMware vForum 2018 Singapore is announced to be on 4th Oct and can be registered here just as when VMworld 2018 is running. You will be expecting some content from VMworld for sure. What's New? One new program that is coming out from vForum this year in Singapore, will be vWarrior Championship. This is going to be one of it's kind. This is going to be a Hands-on Lab competition and teams will be competing in completing tasks in the correct manner. Of course, there will an introduction session beforehand for those who ain't familiar. We don't expect everyone to know everything that is for sure to be fair. Here are the details: Grand Prize:  Go Pro Hero 6 Black per member Runner Up Prize:  Amazon Echo Dot 2 nd   Gen per member Short description:   Showcase your technical capabilities in our Hands-on Lab environment across the VMware portfolio of solutions in Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) and End-User Comput...

As a technical professional, it is always very ignoring to see honesty been bridge using marketing words. How many times have you seen creative words been used to justify for something which is not true? Or when they claim they are and they are not? That comes to the topic in my subject. Have you come across products stating that they are validated and compliance instead of Certified and Approved? And you have to explain the meaning behind this. There is a lot of confusion created due to the use of words and to clarify this, we will use an example with sources you can testify what is really Certified and Approved instead of following Validated guidelines or Compliance to follow certain requirements. Let's use VMware products as a discussion. You can find out that VMware vSphere, NSX and vSAN is an Approved DISA STIG solution. If you head over to STIG Viewer , you can see the guidelines given to all the approved solution. You find VMware vCenter, NSX, and ESXi as an approved l...

While I was doing some presentation slides for one workshop, I happen to look for 3rd party virtual switches support on vSphere. This is the KB that is from VMware. Just for those who are not aware, VMware has announced the end of support for third-party virtual switches on vSphere and vSphere 6.5 Update 1 will be the last release to support these switches with vSwitch APIs. While reading through the pointers I came across one point that caught my attention: What about Cisco AVS, which is part of the Cisco ACI solution? Are you also discontinuing support for AVS?   VMware has never supported Cisco AVS from its initial release. This might come as a surprise but there are customers who have implemented the above without knowing that VMware does not support. Just by using the above for discussion. there are many solutions currently on the market that claims or market to support certain hardware or software. However, with further research, this has been a one-sided clai...

Many times I have heard comments on software support from other vendors externally by customers as well as internally working in principle. The interesting part is many does not know how these support services measure their support quality or success criteria. This article is just to illustrate how a support ticket goes through and how it is closed or close temporarily till a user response. Typically when we raised a support request, there are always three levels or severity. I would go into the details. But you can check out my past  post on that. An engineer typically response to a support request upon receiving a support based on the severity SLA if it's raised online. If that is over the phone, the user will have to wait for the next available engineer to answer the user. Once a call is completed with the user, they will reply to the user based on what was communicated over the phone. This then follows the next step typically awaiting user to perform a certain task a...

With the release of vSphere 6.7, and the ability to have EVC on a per VM level instead of a per cluster level raise some questions. Before we start here is an article on how to check what level of EVC to use here . One of the questions often asked, does vMotion works across newer CPUs in the same generation without an EVC cluster? If you follow this KB , in the last paragraph: Once the virtual machine is power cycled: They are only able to move to other ESX/ESXi hosts that are at the same CPU generation or newer. What this state means if you have a new server with a new CPU generation, technically you can perform a vMotion without having the VM in an EVC cluster. However, there are cases where vMotion will fail even the CPU is of the same generation due to an older version of VM hardware which has a more stringent check. As stated here , due to the destination host with a newer CPU with ISA extension not found on the source host. In the above case, vMotion will stil...

If you are in Singapore, do remember to register for VMUG Singapore event sponsored by VMware and HPE. Look for the event details here . This is not going to be the usual evening session but going to start at 2pm coming Friday, 11th May. There will be several sessions on the updated release from VMware and HPE and a networking session, vBeer to interact with fellow professionals as well as a chance for you to find out more what VMware and HPE are cooking. We will also have our special guest Don Sullivan , author of Virtualizing Oracle Databases on vSphere . So don't look further, if you are in town, Join Us!

Today marks the release of the next iteration of vSphere. Most changes are the improvement of existing features and that includes what is embedded together with ESXi which is vSAN . First, vCenter Appliance will support Single Sign On domain with embedded PSC with Hybrid Linked mode. During this release, support for the upgrade with older vCenter Server with External PSC will not be possible at release. External PSC setup is still supported. There is a Hybrid Linked Mode which will support on prem vCenter Server 6.7 with VMware Cloud on AWS vCenter Server 6.5. Lastly, this is also the last release support for vCenter Windows Server as mentioned in the last release . There will be a backup tool and can be scheduled to help manage vCenter recovery process. In terms of migration to vCSA, the migration tool allows asynchronize background process to reduce the amount of downtime. The HTML5 Client (Clarity UI) has not feature priority up to 95%, up from version 6.5. Yo...

With the release announcement of vSphere 6.7 it comes with his in-kernel vSAN 6.7 upgraded together. With the big move to HTML5 client (Clarity UI), vSAN 6.7 will support Clarity and with much of its functions and management done in Clarity. That definitely better than using vSphere Web Client. Together with this release, a new assessment tool for HCI is introduced. This will work not just on vSphere but also Hyper-V and physical server. The best part is that this assessment tool is free. The long awaited support for WFSC is not possible with iSCSI target. Bigger improvement on destaging and data placement and failure handling. Check out the post here .

Recently I got asked how many characters can a VM name character support and any special character can be used? Been doing vSphere since version 3.x, it has never encountered to me there was a limit in that space. Having said that, there is a case where a customer would need this. Example, to have the VM name similar to the FQDN especially true in a multi-domain or tenant environment where VM name could be the same and only the domain or tenant is the differentiator. So doing a quick check here is the below KBs that state the limit: As of vCenter Server 4.1, the number of characters for a VM name is 80. KB Display names for any objects e.g. VM Name, Datastore Name, etc. should not contain special characters like %, &, *, $, #, @, !, \, /, :, *, ?, ", <, >, |, ;, ' etc are contained in names of vSphere entities such as virtual machine name, cluster name, and datastore/folder/file name. However, '-' and '.' is apparently supported.  KB Here...

Just back from my company's Tech Summit and waiting for the announcement to be made. The very next day an email came in and the announcement was made here . Did a quick check on the list of candidates, there was a total of 1525 who made it this year. Congrats to everyone who made it this year. Am glad to be part of this community for the 7th year running since I started paying forward this blog, discussion group, videos, etc. For those who didn't make it or have not apply for it, do attempt it you never know when you are actually making your effort rewarded. Update 19th Mar 2018 The number is still increasing to 1533 as there is some pending application that got approved. You can follow the stats here with breakdown  https://vexpert.vmware.com/directory/stats .

Recently encounter valid license key but not accepted by the system. This was done on vRealize Operations as shown below. Was adding the license key for vRealize Operations for Horizon Adapter. A license gotcha here, it seems that VMware has a fixed format for all the license key. It should come in 5 segments instead of 4, each with 5 digits. Sometimes simple things like this might just slip our eyes.

Recently a colleague hit into an issue with his setup on vCenter due to the expiry of license. A new license will be used however he is still hitting some problems. A quick check, he was using vCenter ROBO edition license and ESXi is running vSphere Enterprise Plus. So here is to clarify the different editions of vCenter from VMware and the features available and limitation. Do note some features is dependent on the vSphere editions. Refer to this KB for some of vSphere 6.x features comparison. I have also previously illustrated in vCenter 5.x here which basically stays the same other than new features in vCenter 6.x. For vCenter Desktop that would be another article here . vCenter Edition Essential Foundation Standard Availability Bundled in Essential/Plus Kit Sold separately. Manage up to 4 hosts (3 prior to 6.5 U1) Sold separately. Manage vSphere Essential/ Plus vSphere Standard and above vSphere St...

Been setting up POC environment for customer and this time wrong got involve with using Nvidia GRID. Encounter some setup steps that are missing from nVidia Deployment guide. In fact, every single setup guide uses the nVidia K1 & K2 card as a reference and those cards have EOA. Here will share with you if you are using any of the newer cards e.g. M60, M6, M10, etc. Here are some resources you should refer to when setting GRID on Horizon 7.x. Register an account on nVidia to download the vibs for ESXi and nVidia License server and Nvidia Driver for Windows OS. Deploying Hardware-Accelerated Graphics with Horizon 7 GIRD Virtual GPU I love to use this guide as a reference to what profile is available for each card type. In a summary what needs to be done on the master image: Install VMware tools Install Horizon View Direct-Connect agent (you know why this needed later) Shutdown VM Edit VM settings, add shared PCI device, select your GRID profile Take a snapshot (in...

Recently the most talk about security measurement against the two discovered vulnerabilities has raised a lot of talks. This all started and revealed by  Google Project Zero . I have also recently shared advice from VMware support and KBs to our Singapore VMUG users during our event yesterday. Below is a summary of questions and the approach you should be doing for patching your VMware environment. Details on Spectre and Meltdown https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2018/01/what-are-spectre-and-meltdown-and-why-should-you-care/ https://blog.barkly.com/meltdown-spectre-patches-list-windows-update-help Technical explanation:   http://frankdenneman.nl/2018/01/05/explainer-spectre-meltdown-graham-sutherland/ Side Notes ESXi is only affected by Spectre and all patches for ESXi 5.5. and above has been released. Removed due to retracting of code instructed by Intel. Check update below. ESXi is NOT affected by Meltdown as it does not have untrusted user ac...