Plain Virtualization

There are multiple What's update and overview when vSphere 7.0 Update 2 was released on 9th Jan 2021. I am not here to list down those however, you can check it out below. VMware vSphere 7.0 Update 2 VMware vCenter Server 7.0 Update 2 Release Notes vSphere 7 Update 2 Part 2  (updated 18 Mar) What I like to pinpoint out here is what I find will be useful for an architect choosing the right solution for the right use case and be aware of what is useful to help customers in running it after deployed. I will break this down into three portions in the area of vSphere with Tanzu, AI/ML Platform and vSphere improvement. vSphere with Tanzu As you know vSphere with Tanzu or TKG-s has been introduce when vSphere 7.0 was released. With update 2, it now able to leverage on NSX Advanced Load Balancer (previously known as AVI), an enterprise grade Load Balancer for Supervisor Cluster, Guest cluster (TKG) and Kubernetes Services of Type LoadBalancer deployed in TKG clusters. Check out this articl...

Right before VMworld, VMware has announcement some new releases. Two of which that has lots of new stuff to look forward to is vSphere and vSAN. Here I am going to list down all the resources that you can read or watch to find out more on what is new in both vSphere 7.0 Update 1 and vSAN 7.0 Update 1. vSphere 7.0 Update 1 Check out the announcement  here  and the youtube video  here . AMD SEV-ES Support in vSphere 7 vSphere With Tanzu - Networking with vSphere Distributed Switch vSphere 7 Update 1 – AMD SEV-ES   AMD SEV-ES Support in vSphere 7 ( video ) vSphere Clustering Service (vCLS) (updated) vSphere Lifecycle Manager Improvements (updated) Unprecedented Scalability (updated) As usual, with almost in every release, you see the maximum supported numbers goes up. However, one of the key supported on CPU security is from AMD on SEV-ES. Check out the article  here . vSAN 7.0 Update 1 Check out the announcement  here  and video . Duncan Epping have ...

If you haven't heard, VMware is implementing a new licensing on his products which will be effective 30th April 2020. This means, if you were to purchase any license prior to that, it will still have no restriction. So what is new in these licensing changes? Basically, VMware is introducing a physical core licensing to its per-CPU license. VMware software has always been licensed by per physical CPU with unlimited physical cores on that CPU. With this change, each CPU license will be limited to 32 physical cores. Will the customer be affected? Most customers, will not be affected since most servers are using Intel CPU which currently has not exceeded 36 physical cores. However, those running the latest AMD CPU, will be affected as there will be more licenses required. Here is the VMware announcement. This will apply to all VMware software. One of the questions that are commonly asked, will be if my CPU has more than 32 cores (example 48 cores) and I am using two physical C...

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...