Plain Virtualization

The year of 2024 is coming to an end. VMUG Singapore had hosted few events this year and it has been fruitful. They are not stopping there.  Starting 2025, VMUG Singapore is hosting their first event in 2025 on 14th Jan. Do register to join us. This year I am helping out for this event as a former VMware employee. This time round for a start we are doing something very different. 1. We will still have our product update from Sanjan and Iwan who will be at the first item to answer questions regarding where VMware product is heading and why on what they are doing. 2. We will have our education to update on training and certification changes. 3. For the very first time. We will be sharing career development with speaker, Jeremy Cheong from Juel Search. Some market statistic and giving you some data points on how you can grow your career. We are not just going focusing on technology but also helping our community to grow with us. I will be sharing some job trade secret which companie...

It the time of the year to apply and renew your vExpert for another year for your effort contribution back to the VMware community over the last 6-12months.  The vExpert 2025 application is now open starting from 6th Dec 2024 and will closed on 10th January 2025. So hurry start your application and fill up all your contribution. You do not have to do it once through, you can always save it in draft and add on and submit before the closing date. If you have doubt reach out or look for your vExpert Pro nearest to you to to advise you accordingly. This year has been a very different year for VMware. However, the vExpert program was valued and carry on. The perks this year been a vExpert will be very different from the investment from Broadcom.  Head over and sign up now. Good luck! Update 13 Dec 2024 Check out the vExpert application announcement here .

As mentioned in this article , VMware has release vSphere Enterprise Plus edition offering and I think this is a great add-on having it got removed after end of perpetual offering. Though the Standard and Essential is good enough but there are many cases where vSphere Enterprise Plus is needed yet only made available in VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) which customer have to purchase just to use the vSphere Edition in it. Further on, the vSAN entitlement for VVF is also increased from 100GiB to 250GiB. This definitely make the usage of vSAN much more appealing in VVF. As I have create a calculator previously here , I have updated to include the 250GiB per core in VVF. I have not added any for vSphere Enterprise Plus since it can be used with the existing vSphere Standard since there is not special limitation for the new offering. Just to note the previous KB preferred to on the license entitlement for vSAN is however, not updated at the time of writing....

If you have read in my previous article , back in Aug 2024, that a number of Aria Operations Management packs will be retired from general support on 1st Oct 2024. Without the build in management packs provided, what can you do next? Aria Operations does come with a Management Pack Building which many are not aware. I like to share from this article  that I came across that illustrate how easy to just pull the wanted metric that you need to build your own dashboard. If those existing dashboard from management pack that is end of life, you can then see what metrics are been pulled and customize your own to keep moving forward. Alternatively, you can seek any system integrator to help build such dashboard easily if you have no such engineer in house to help.

Broadcom has release an update to address the below two vulnerabilities. This affect vCenter Server 7.x and 8.x. VMware vCenter Server heap-overflow vulnerability (CVE-2024-38812) This carries a CVSSv3 score of 9.8 VMware vCenter privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2024-38813) This carries a CVSSv3 score of 7.5. Both are addressed with resolution with a new binary update for vCenter Server 7U3s and vCenter Server 8U3b. This will affect any VCF 4.x and 5.x which contains either vCenter Server 7.x or 8.x. It is always recommended to get this updated as soon as possible with such rare critical severity. Check out this article for more information.

Today marks my last working day in this great company, VMware. Starting as a sales engineer coming from a delivery background in 27 Dec 2011 to managing a country team of 15 solution architects was a magnificent milestone. A good 12 years, 7 months, 28 days race. There are so many people to thank, and words alone can't fully express my appreciation. I am deeply grateful to everyone I've crossed paths with, both within and outside the company. You've all played a part in shaping who I am today, and for that, I am truly thankful. Some may see me as a representative of VMware in Singapore, perhaps due to my long tenure or my visibility within the community. While that's a bit of a joke, the truth is, technology has been the driving force that kept me passionate during my time at VMware. Without it, I might have lost that spark long ago. What truly made my journey memorable were the incredible people I met along the way—from sales to engineering, partners to customers. They...

Coming 1st Oct 2024, the Aria Operations Management Packs will be end of general support (EoGS). Here is the KB . The affected management packs are as follow: vRealize Operations Management Pack for VMware Integrated OpenStack vRealize Operations Federation Management Pack VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack for CloudHealth VMware Aria Operations Management Pack for Flowgate VMware Aria Operations Management Pack for Aria Hub VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack for VMware Smart Assurance Aria Operations Management Pack for Aria Operations for Apps Aria Operations Management Pack for VMware Tanzu Application Service Aria Operations Management Pack for Microsoft Hyper-V Aria Operations Management Pack for NetApp FAS/AFF Aria Operations Management Pack for Microsoft SCOM Aria Operations Management Pack for Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops Aria Operations Management Pack for Dell EMC OpenManage Enterprise Aria Operations Management Pack for HPE OneView Aria Operations Manag...

You might have come across the above concern one that was published here . Since the day VMware vSphere was made available, ESX Admins user group if created in Active Directory will be given admin rights to ESXi when a user is place as a member of ESX Admins group. This was not new. I think some people do not know this existed. Moving forward, it seem hackers are now targeting this function to gain admin rights to the hypervisor. For companies that have concern over this and like to change this group membership name, you can follow this KB . Hope this address the concerns.

With the release of NSX 4.2 together with the General Availability of VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2, there are some important points to take note of. With NSX 4.2, overlay support for bare metal servers are no longer available. Moving forward, NSX will only support for virtual machine which is running on vSphere. The NSX Network introspection for Security will be deprecated in 4.x and will no longer be support after. NSX Manager APIs and NSX Advanced UIs will deprecated in this version. Just to name a few. But one major change in this release is an entitlement change in regards to NSX Native Load Balancer (NLB) or NSX Load Balancer. Entitlement Change for the NSX Load Balancer In a future major release of NSX, VMware intends to change the entitlement of the built-in NSX load balancer (a.k.a. NSX-T Load Balancer). This load balancer will only support load balancing for Aria Automation, IaaS Control Plane (Supervisor Cluster), and load balancing of VCF infrastructure components. VMwar...

This is definitely one of the good news that the vSphere 7.x End of General Support (EoGS) has been extended to 2nd Oct 2025 instead of the original Apr 2025. You can find this in the lifecycle website  https://support.broadcom.com/group/ecx/productlifecycle . Yes the website is not as good as the previously lifecycle.vmware.com as the dropdown does not work and you have to search ESXi in their search field instead. This definitely is more welcoming as many customers are running short of time to upgrade to vSphere 8 and given that new hardware are often required, there is some gap in the timing. At least now Broadcom has extend the General Support. That means we have 6 months more time to quickly plan for it.

In South East Asia, VMUG Singapore chapter has always been the most active and constantly having a meetup almost every quarter. With the new Broadcom acquisition, this will be the first session by VMUG Singapore with VMware by Broadcom with VMware Cloud Foundation Product Managers on some of the recent innovation and update on VCF solution. If you are based in Singapore, do not miss this out. It is rarely we have product managers and this will be one not to be missed. Register your seats here . Seats are limited so do it fast. Do remain considerate as community, if you are not able to attend due to any reason, do give it up to those who might. I will be there so see you there! Broadcom Singapore Pte Ltd Floor, Suntec Tower 4, S038986 6th, 038986 Singapore, NA, SG VCF Updates, 2024 and beyond   Thursday, 27th June 2024  

Many of our customers have done vulnerability assessment (VA) on vSphere ESXi and often highlighted out the vulerable items such as SHA1 and TLS 1.0, etc.  Some of it were there but not in used and we could not manually remove them such as SHA1, MD5, etc. While some of them were to support lower version such as TLS 1.1 and 1.0.  With vSphere 8, the security enhancement has made uplift to remove unwanted security bundles and as well to support only secured transport connection via TLS 1.2. On top of that, it also added daemons to now run in their own sandboxes instead of in the hypervisor world needing higher permissions which were unneeded and prone to vulnerability attacks. What is new for security is a timeout for SSH shell when enabled on ESXi host. So administrators, no longer are to leave the SSH shell connected for infinite time or even worse forgetting to disconnect and logout of the endpoint where they are connected to the ESXi shell. Lastly, if your hardware used for ...

There are lots of content available nowadays especially with the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, there are many on how to migrate off VMware and feature function comparison. One of the great content that is easily digestible from 2TekGuys . Below is a breakdown from the video on the features that was mentioned available on other hypervisors in comparison with VMware vSphere. I am not going to go into feature beyond mentioned in the video. Here are the list of features mentioned: Load Balancing : Moving using live migration of virtual machines (VMs) between hosts to due to contention. Backup : Support of backup from popular backup vendors or from hypervisor vendor themselves. Storage : Able to utilize external network storage/SAN or hypervisor own hyper-converged storage only. Live Migration : Ability to move VMs without any downtime between hosts. Having specialized on VMware vSphere for a long time in my career and been in a technical role from picking up VMware. I am always amazed by...

New changes are coming your ways for VMware certifications. A blog article just been release. 1. Prices of VCP, VCAP, etc. are all standardize to one single price, USD250. This is definitely beneficial for many especially those who are keen to persue the advanced level exam but having difficult to afford the exam fee which was much higher. 2. A mandatory course is no longer needed as an exam requirement. This will help many professionals who are experienced to get certified without having to go through boring course and spend to drag through the requirement.  Will this then bring down the certification value since course was required to ensure certified professional walk the talk as what they hold in credential? Answer to point 2, for people who are new and managed to pass the exam and get certified by other means, it can be identified easily. As the digital badges will be differentiated whether the exam was passed with a accompanied course or not. So during an interview, it can i...

If you have not read this blog from Broadcom by Hock Tan check it out . It helps to outline few things that has been confusion for many. First, the old perpetual licensing from any vendor including VMware, are sold in two parts. 1. perpetual license, 2. Support and Subscription (SnS) Part 1, basically let you own the license and do what you deem fit with it. And part 2, allows you to log a case for support assistance, and upgrade or downgrade the license and have patches and security release whenever its available as long the product is still supported. From the blog, it clarify once again that part 1 is true, customers are allow to use the perpetual license even if its out of support as long as they deem fit. " To ensure that customers whose maintenance and support contracts have expired and choose to not continue on one of our subscription offerings are able to use perpetual licenses in a safe and secure fashion, we are announcing free access to zero-day security patches for sup...

The Truth Yes, the news of VMware acquired by Broadcom has come to a realization. We cannot denied the truth since 22nd Nov 2023. Prior the acquisition, if you have made a multi-year purchase before that, you will have whatever you can consume after the acquisition. VMware after the acquisition has release new bundle of all their offerings and end the perpetual licensing offer to the market. The individual products are not make available and cannot be purchase as a standalone. But are offered via two bundle namely; VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). Both of which are all subscription licenses. It also ends all sales and renewal of any perpetual licenses. Honestly, VMware has been trying to end its perpetual license and into subscription for the longest time. With the Broadcom acquisition, VMware has been one of the last major player that has moved to subscription license. Customer who are on VMware, has been enjoying the great pricing with no limit of cores...

VMware has release important patches based on the advisory affecting all the hypervisor including ESXi and desktop hypervisor i.e. Workstation and Fusion which contain vulnerabilities that has a CVSSv3 of 7.1-9.3. Most of the listed are all USB related. Most of this might nto affect ESXi since most do not use USB controller on them but more towards the desktop hypervisors. Patches are released fro ESXi 7 and 8 and Workstation 17 and Fusion 13. And since this is a critical severity, VMware has release patches for out of support ESXi 6.5U3v and 6.7U3u for customers on extended support. This also include VCF 3.x that happens to run such version of ESXi.  I hope everyone should have upgraded as a best practice to at least ESXi 7 to avoid such issue where you are not on support and yet running critical workload. If you are still on ESXi 6.5U3v and ESXi 6.7U3u, I would assume you have extended support to tie you through. Do note that if you manage to get the patches from other source wi...

A big congratulation to all the vExpert accredited for year 2024 that is  announced ! This year we have a total of 1226 vExperts and you can find them here . Those who didn't make it or miss the application, fear not. The 2nd application period will be in Jun 2024. You will have time to make up if you are missing some activities to proof your worth. I am fortunate enough to be part of list. Also as a vExpert Pro helping with the application was not easy.  Having been assessing the applications with many other Pros, here are some of the do's and don'ts when applying: Don't be lazy and submit your past application details as it is. Assessment for vExpert for the year look at your past contribution to the VMware community over the last 6-12 months. If you are just submitting as it is, your activities will be unlikely be recent at all. Provide evidence of your contribution. Do not just state them. It will be impossible to verify what you say. If it is a blog please provide ...

With the announcement of the end of perpetual license for VMware products moving forward, there are also other changes especially in regards to the free ESXi. As per KB on 12th Feb 2024 states, the free ESXi or free vSphere hypervisor is no longer made available. This came as a surprise to me. In fact, many of our home lab and evangelist are using the free hypervisor to learn VMware solution. With this gone, this will definitely affect the fan base and results in many to use alternative. Didn't expected this to come. But understandable that Broadcom might want to stop those who are leveraging on free hypervisor for commercial use. Which I know of some who does. I would rather they change the EULA and make it fully personal license, which mean Broadcom can actually use legal action if found anyone using it for commercial reason.  But sadly, this got to happen. At least the free ESXi has a good run.

VMware has been trying to transit to subscription licensing for a long time which what all other software companies have already done. With Broadcom acquisition, the perpetual licensing availability is no longer available as announced  here and a KB on this. There is a good blog article that just got release to show where each product packaging is replaced with. There are just some things I like to highlight. vCenter Server is no longer available as it is no longer selling as a standalone product but it comes free as part of the new subscription licensing. Another item, vCloud Director, which will only be available to Cloud Service Provider (CSP) and not to end user which this article is addressing to. Many might say that why is VMware by Broadcom removing the perpetual licensing. Let's take a moment, it has been a long overdue move that just got accelerated. In fact, if not all, software companies such as Microsoft, Citrix, etc. are all on subscriptions and VMware has been one ...

With the new SKU release in simplifying customer purchase, there are certain guideline in place in purchasing the different license SKU.  To help architects from partners and also end user, I have created this simple calculator for ease of sizing the license needed. Do note this is accurate at time of publishing and there might be changes. Here is the link to VMware License Calculator. Feel free to leave me any comments below. Update 13th Feb 2024 The minimum requirement for vSAN Add-on has been removed. There is no longer a 8TiB per CPU requirement as updated on KB .

After the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom, there has been announcement on simplifying the way VMware software licensing will work. That was a very bold step to really help customers. There maybe lots of comments over it, but if you have never been into an architecture discussion and having to also coming out a licensing strategy, you might not appreciate this change. In additional, in totality, customer will find that the cost might just be much affordable than before. Contact your VMware Account Manager to find out more. So let's go back to the present. Existing customer who might have renewal ending and would definitely need to know how much license they would need to procure. The well known William Lam, definitely not leaving VM Admin challenges. He has created a PowerCLI script to help customer pull out those needed information to help existing brownfield customers forward.  Next to help understand what are the new criteria needed to purchase the new license, this is a kb ...