Plain Virtualization

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...

For those who ain't aware that in the release of vSphere 7.0, support for Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA) will be deprecated. This has been published in this KB . The existing method of AD over LDAP, OpenLDAP will still works or the new feature in 7.0, AD Federated Identity (AD FS). Check out this article . To be honest, I would recommend to use AD FS if you are using a windows environment since this will prevent vSphere from talking directly to AD. Which in a way much safer and its a session based on the token method via OAUTH2 and OIDC protocol than to have user name and password been exposed. You can refer to the documentation on how to setup AD FS for vCenter Server here and also check out this TAM LAB video . With the support of AD FS, this will allow MFA to be implemented. However, this is still limited as due to the number of support on AD FS.

The start of February also mark the great launch today by VMware.  Another milestone achieve with more to look forward to which will change the way things will run in an infrastructure. Today has been the long awaiting launch of vSphere 6.0 (which many thought was during vSphere 5.5 but finally it made it), there are also some changes to some add-on products changes as well as bundle update. The General Availability (GA) for vSphere will be in Mar 2015.  The training courses are found here . What's New vCloud Suite will be updates with vSphere 6.0 and vCloud Director and vCloud Network & Security will be deprecated as announced last year and no longer seen in this bundle.  This also get updated with the new vRealize Operations (vROps) Suite to 6. vSphere with Operations Management (vSOM) will be updated to 6.0 which include vSphere 6.0 and vRealize Operations (vROps) 6.0.  Finally those on vSOM 5.5 have been asking for vROps 6.0 has been granted t...