Plain Virtualization

If you are not aware, there is a new tool announced during VMworld US 2019. That is the vSphere Assessment Tool (vSAT). To access the site, you can go here . The tool can be run on any endpoint that runs Windows, Linux and Mac. Upon login, you will see the screen below. Clicking on the Download, you will see the supported binary for the endpoint of choice. You will need to set a Passcode at the site so when you can upload it with the passcode. This passcode is to ensure the data is tie back to your account. Do note that your endpoint that runs the tool, must have access to your vSphere environment to collect the information to perform the assessment. You can add one or many vCenter to the assessment tool. Once completed, you can download the JSON file from the assessment tool and upload to the portal. You can check out the file, it does not contain sensitive data related to your environment but more of vSphere component versions. Feel free to open up and check it ou...

With the announcement and also from the datasheet , it seems to be pretty lots of functionalities been added.  However there are some critical ones that are more appealing and wanting to see approvement or resolution to those who are already using since vSphere 4 and prior till today which are not make known to many. Storage There were many discussion over storage UNMAP via thin provisioning and many called it a "myth".  This was also discussed heavily in our Facebook VMUG - ASEAN group.  This was due to many changes since VMFS3 to till VMFS5.  Cody wrote a long history of what are the changes for those who have missed out here . A KB was also release and this create some discussion VMFS3 with different block size would benefit thin provision so to speak before vSphere 5.0 Update 1.  Sadly after which, all UNMAP was not possible via GUI or automatically other than via command line or script. I try to ask internally as well and luckily Cormac with his f...

This morning got brought to attention by my colleague, Iwan regarding this bash Code breached.  I am no linux or unix guy but when comes to security this is not to be play with especially in industry where security and compliance is highly evaluated. A security vulnerability was detected known as "Shell Shock" which is a bash shell commonly found in unix and linux platform.  You can refer to CVE-2014-6271 , CVE-2014-7169 . VMware was fast to publish this discover as well and you can read the post here and also to follow up with this KB on what products will be impacted.  So check back the KB to see which product from VMware is impacted and how to mitigate. Note: that ESXi are not impacted with this "Shell shock" vulnerability. As for other platforms, you would have to look back to your respective principle to find out if it is affected and the solution to resolve. Update 29th Sept 2014 As extracted from CSOOnline , CentOS versions 5-7, Ubuntu 10.04,...