Plain Virtualization

With the release of vCenter 6.5, a built-in native High Availability (HA) feature was introduced. This has been a long-awaited feature since the end of availability  of vCenter Server Heartbeat since vCenter 5.x. With the release of VCHA, I came across many times people asking how can we implement it? There are a few articles from VMware that show some of the supported topologies. However, with the realize of vSphere 6.7 U2, the recommended vCenter Server deployment is with embedded PSC. In this case, we will just look at the topology that has an embedded PSC. This is welcoming since we have less component to handle and need not require a load balancer just to load balance PSC. Let us go through some of the common questions been asked. How many instances does VCHA deploy? With VCHA, you would have three instances of vCenter namely: vCenter Server  (Active), vCenter Server (Passive), vCenter Server (Witness). How many vCenter Server licenses do I need and which edit...

Awhile a go I wrote an article about how the different vSphere Desktop licensing is for and the entitlement. Having meeting many customer with big and small environment, projects or used cases for certain requirements.  There were some question revolving around vCenter licensing especially for the desktop related. Here is an article of the FAQ on vSphere Desktop licensing.  One of the question in this article states: Q. Do I need a separate vCenter Server for my VDI hosts?  A. Yes, like Horizon 7 deployments on vSphere 5.x, you will need a separate VMware vCenter Server® for your VDI hosts. vCenter is not included in vSphere Desktop.  Let me further explain the above.  If you are running a 3rd party VDI solution riding on vSphere Desktop licensing, vCenter is not included.  You would need to purchase vCenter Standard to manage that environment. However if you are a Horizon customer, the bundle include vCenter Desktop use to manage a vSphere Des...

Last month of the year and today have a some talk over lunch with a colleague and decide to pen this down which I see lacking on the market. I have spoken to customers and also spoken to some colleagues and realize the IT paradigm as changed quite substantial.  However many are still operating the wrong way which end up even with virtualization, cloud or Software Defined Data Center, etc. it is still not helping them achieve in a big scale. Recently I did a session on BC/DR: Implementing a Holistic Strategy with VMware Solutions session at APJ vForum in Singapore.  I mentioned a few things that was abstracted from VCDX Design Defense Blueprint page 11.  This diagram has helped me in a lot of discussion and I see many are still not aware.  The five things: Availability, Recovery, Security, Manageability, Performance. Taking an example today, when a Application owner request a machine with certain specification in terms of CPU, Memory and space from an Infra p...