Plain Virtualization

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....

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 ...

Just some sharing that I chanced upon. This might be most useful for those who are building their demo labs when you try to nested environment or simulate your disk as Flash when it is actually magnetic disk (MD). It is also applicable where your Flash Disk/SSD is detected as a normal MD but you need to mark is as Flash disk or revert it when needed. This is typically very true in a Virtual SAN (VSAN) environment.  When you need for a disk group with a minimum of at least one SSD. If you refer to our KB , you might have to go through a list of commands.  However in vSphere 6.0, the web client has the function to do it via the GUI. Below is a screenshot taken from my home lab.  My ESXi server has a normal SATA disk and a SSD disk.  So upon selecting either of them the icon will change to allow you to change it.  Technically you can even build a all Flash VSAN without having to own a VSAN license only different is the read and write ratio remain the same...