Plain Virtualization

If you are not aware when vSphere 7.0 Update 1 was release, there is one improvement made to Cross vCenter Migration. For those who didn't follow, in the past, Cross vCenter Migration can only be done between vCenter Servers within the same SSO domain. This created a limitation especially when one company merge or acquire another, they are unable to move the workloads but have to resort to the traditional methods either from backup and restore, etc. With vSphere 7.0 Update 1, vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1 improve this function. There is no longer a requirement of having both the vCenter Servers to be part of the same SSO domain. This resolve lots of use cases out there in the field. This feature came as a Fling and eventually made it to be part of the official product. However, there are some things need to be clear on the requirements. You need to make sure the vSphere edition needs to be at least Enterprise Plus. For Standard and the old Enterprise edition (if you didn't upgra...

Recently a colleague hit into an issue with his setup on vCenter due to the expiry of license. A new license will be used however he is still hitting some problems. A quick check, he was using vCenter ROBO edition license and ESXi is running vSphere Enterprise Plus. So here is to clarify the different editions of vCenter from VMware and the features available and limitation. Do note some features is dependent on the vSphere editions. Refer to this KB for some of vSphere 6.x features comparison. I have also previously illustrated in vCenter 5.x here which basically stays the same other than new features in vCenter 6.x. For vCenter Desktop that would be another article here . vCenter Edition Essential Foundation Standard Availability Bundled in Essential/Plus Kit Sold separately. Manage up to 4 hosts (3 prior to 6.5 U1) Sold separately. Manage vSphere Essential/ Plus vSphere Standard and above vSphere St...

Been to many customers and have many questions on how our vSphere 6.5 Security enhancement does and how different is it from others. So to clear some of the questions and also the articles that are available below will provide more details. A good place to start is read up this VMware blog post by Mike Foley.  This post detail the new UEFI for ESXi and for VMs and on VM Encryption.  Let us break down some questions that are asked often or unclear: 1) Does all OSes support UEFI? Modern versions of OS like Microsoft Windows 2012, RedHat 5 and Suse Linux Enterprise 11 SP2 and above .  Unless we are talking about older OS that are dependent on BIOS. 2) Who provide the UEFI firmware? The hardware server vendors that allows OS or hypervisor to be installed on to be boot from.  Hypervisor or virtualization software vendor that allows running of virtual machine to boot from. 3) How can we prevent BIOs, hypervisor and OS been compromise? The use of UEFI is to en...

Having to release a newer version of Horizon Mirage from 4.2 to 4.3, there are some new features and with some limitations as well. Here is the release note for Horizon Mirage 4.3. You can see that in the What's New section, Horizon Mirage can now manage Persistent desktop from Horizon View.  This was not support for any virtual desktop previously as the dedup functions uses up all the CPU cycle and resulted a over demand on the ESX server.  In this release it is now only supporting full clone desktops.  You will see new upload policy setting as show below: You can see that you can also disable client end throttling and choose that end point for this policy is optimize for LAN environment. The next big feature is apply app layer during Windows 7 migration from Windows XP.  Previously only a base layer can be applied for migration and subsequently any new app layer/s need to be applied separately and this result some disruption to the user.  With this...

Have met some customer who are tight on budget and is on Essentials or Essentials Plus. There are some confusion with the packaging of the vCenter editions and I would like to clarify some of this with some of the links around VMware sites for easy understanding. Essentials or Essentials Plus are bundled with vCenter Essentials while vSphere Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus is often quote with vCenter Standard. So what does this mean?  With the different vCenter Edition, there are some hard limitations.  If you refer to my vRAM entitlement post here , I have mentioned that there is a hard 192GB vRAM entitlement and limit to 3 hosts to one vCenter for Essentials and Essentials Plus.   vCenter Essentials bundled ONLY in vSphere Essentials or vSphere Essentials Plus kit is limited to manage hosts up to 6 CPUs or 3 hosts whichever comes first.  This is due to the limitations from this vCenter edition. Also with vCenter Essentials, there is no linked mod...