Plain Virtualization

Together with Valerie Lee who our newly appointed vExpert Pro, we are hosting a session with VMware User Group Singapore, to introduce you to VMware vExpert Program. This will be an overview session to give you an idea what this program is all about and who can apply for this accreditation. How can you prepare for it or work towards it. Find out why your application didn't got accepted if you have tried before in the past and be successful this time. The details are as below: Date: 3rd Jun 2020, Wed Time: 13:00 SGT Register your participation here by registering an account at VMUG.com if you do not have an account. See you there!

Recently I sign up for VMware vSphere Instructor Certification Workshop (ICW). I have never attend other instructor workshop so far but I must say, the one from VMware is not as easy as it is not just going through a typically training to be VMware Certified Instructor. You can check out more details of the requirements here . It is an intense 5 days workshop. I am fortunate to have two of our senior technical trainers from VMware, Habeeb and Murali . Together we have 6 candidates including myself. Some are having their second attempt while some like myself is attending for the first time. Everyone are from different background. Some candidates are also trainers for other products. We were given the course materials for vSphere 6.7: Install, Configure & Manage workshop including the instructor slides and student's notes and lab toget ourselves equipped. At the same time, we were given our first day module to present. We do have amble time for the first presentation treating ev...

I treat this as an important post as it affects a lot of design today when upgrading to vSphere 7.0 and as well as new deployment. In the release of vSphere 7.0, there are a few things that are removed or deprecated. To name a few obvious ones below: External PSC (removed) vCenter Server for Windows (removed) vSphere Web Client (removed) vCenter Server .next Image based backup (deprecated) And yes, you read it correctly the last one. vCenter Server Image backup. Thanks to Michael White for pointing this out. I beg many of us did not read the release notes. Here I am going to direct you to the release notes of vCenter Server 7.0 release notes . Deprecation of Image-Based Backup and Restore Support for vCenter Server Image-based backup and restore for vCenter Server is deprecated in vCenter Server 7.0 and will not be supported in a future vSphere release. What the above statement in layman terms: the image-based backup is going to sunset in 7.0. Which means version 7.0 will be the last ...

With the release of vSphere 7, there are many feature that has been announced. However, there is one feature new in vSphere 7 that wasn't heavily marketed. That is Clustered VMDK. So what is Clustered VMDK? Basically it is a VMDK shared by clustering solution on a VMFS volume. In the past, this was not possible especially in cluster requirement such as Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) or Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC). The reason that this is possible is because of the support for SCSI-3 Persistent Reservation for VMDK. With this, you can fully reduce the need of Raw Device Mapping (RDM). Of course this is not just a vSphere 7 feature. It requires the below and many is similar to a RDM LUN: Your array must support ATS, SCSI-3 PR type Write Exclusive-All Registrant (WEAR). Only supported with arrays using Fibre Channel (FC) for connectivity. Only VMFS6 datastores. Storage devices must be claimed by NMP. ESXi does not support third-party plug-ins (MPPs) in clustere...