Plain Virtualization

When I join NetApp from VMware after spending a good 13 years, I was amazed and taken aback how much NetApp got to offer to customers. It not just a Data fabric company but lots more in the space of how data are managed, stored, secured, and much more surrounding data. The first thing I learnt about is ONTAP, the powerful software operating system that powers all NetApp hard and soft boxes at the very beginning. It also not just a storage but it is the King of Files for a reason. The unique of NetApp is in its way of storing data, Write Anyway File Layout ( WAFL ). Its ability to handle large amount of small files makes it elite on its own. Today NetApp is the ONLY vendor able to handle File, Block and Object all at the same time with ONTAP. NetApp also have acquired a few solutions over the years specific to how data are created, managed, used and secured. Let's leave that to another post for now. Let me drill into 3 key takeaways on why NetApp how it differentiate itself as the ...

Looking at the trend of data referencing from here . We can see that data has been growing phenomenally. In actual fact, looking at the trend, the boom started in 2020 and has not stop ever since. Source: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/data-generated-per-day  In today infrastructure, we have two major solutions for data management. One is our traditional storage array and the other is HyperConverge Infrastructure (HCI). The latter only started picking up in early 2011 where some of the known names such as pivot3 and the major players after such as Nutanix and VMware vSAN which exist most commonly in most data center infrastructure. As data volume increases and the the adoption of AI, capacity and performance for data management become a crucial requirement. Taking example from the like on virtualization, you can have all the compute resources for your virtual machine, but if your workload data IO and capacity cannot be serve, the bottleneck still exist.  In the wor...

You hear me right. Was browsing through some documentation and wanted to see any storage vendor is supporting Proxmox, the new player in virtualization. To my surprise, NetApp not only support, but all functions of ONTAP are also supported just like how it supports other virtualization platforms such as VMware, RedHat, Microsoft. Any virtualization platforms that support external storage solutions.  Check the virtualization overview documentation site . NetApp has extensive partnership with VMware to support day zero feature function. This can be seen from the support of vSphere vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) on vVols. RedHat OpenShift, Microsoft Hyper-V and Promox. NetApp allows customers to choose to consume storage in any shape and form namely, on premies physical storage array, in the cloud as first party files services from AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, Cloud Volumes as third party service in CSP's market place and ONTAP Select (virtual appliance). With tr...

Yes you hear me right. Check out the vSphere 8.0U3e  release notes . VMware is releasing the ESXi 8.0U3e as an entry-level hypervsor.  To download, head to https://support.broadcom.com/ and create an account if you have not done so.  Follow the screenshot below: Software> VMware Cloud Foundation>My Downloads Next click on Free Software Downloads available HERE. Scroll down to VMware vSphere Hypervisor and click on it. You will be lead to it. You will be able to download it. It will be about 618Mb That is definitely a good news for those who needs it for Home lab testing. But not sure if this going to be a one off. Also to note, it is on a 60 days trial but not sure if it behaviour the same as pre-broadcom after expiry. Thanks to Joey Ware for tipping off in Facebook group.

As per the article and confirmation from email from Broadcom to all their partners, there will be a minimum purchase for New VCF license purchase for new order starting 10th April 2025.  What will be your impact to customers like yourself? Basically for any new project, a minimal purchase of 72 cores license is required whether or not your compute workload is going to be lesser. This does not change the minimum purchase of 16 cores per CPU which still stand. While that is true, the above statement only applies to new purchase, if you are doing expansion or renewal of licenses, this does not change. So if you really just need a small setup using 3 servers each, taking a supported Dell PowerEdge R350 with vSphere 8.0U3 as per VMware site , with a minimum of 8 cores per CPU, you will need 24 cores license which will have a surplus of 48 cores (72-24). That is a bumper. For the above example, this will be wastage. However, as I mentioned, expansion and renewal are not impacted....

VMware vSAN is a Hyper-Converge Infrastructure solution which is part of VMware Cloud Foundation  (VCF) or VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) bundling.  While VMware vSAN helps customer to achieve a SAN like storage pooling using local HDD on each server together, it is still limited on features it encompasses in comparison to a physical SAN. This is where NetApp ONTAP Select which will complement the missing gap. ONTAP Select is the virtual appliance of the well known ONTAP that runs on all NetApp Unified Storage appliance. One of the major function that ONTAP Select brings to vSAN is on Data management and Protection. This is very useful for protection specific applications especially application aware application by ONTAP Select. Some of the enterprise applications supported can be found here . A detailed kb from Broadcom can be found  here . With ONTAP Select, these applications that are supported can be protected via SnapMirror which can provide an application consiste...

First of all congrats to all vExpert 2025 announced . This year, there is some additional entitlement not made known to the community. I was surprised when I received the below email: And yes, you got it. All vExpert 2025 are given a year of VMUG Advantage entitlement. This includes a 50% one time certification fee and many more which you can find out more here . This is definitely an icing on the cake.

Back in the days of VMware, I was fortunate to talk to many customers and involved in numerous discussion on helping them from on premise to private cloud, hybrid cloud to public cloud and MultiCloud to today, Intelligence running in the cloud. Many thought that might change when I move on to my next career. In fact, I carry on that discussion with my customers today the same way I did in the past. That was also one great reason I joint NetApp. Let me show you where this happens: Reference link As changes of IT evolved, the amount of data customer have to collect, manage, protect and secure is way more than before. More so around complexity and managing the amount of data threats. In 1996, NetApp introduced ONTAP to solve the issue with local data siloes with NAS to help customer manage the large amount of data in files and block. When virtualization take place, NetApp supported a wide range of solutions such as VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, etc. helping customers manage that data growth. Even...

The year of 2024 is coming to an end. VMUG Singapore had hosted few events this year and it has been fruitful. They are not stopping there.  Starting 2025, VMUG Singapore is hosting their first event in 2025 on 14th Jan. Do register to join us. This year I am helping out for this event as a former VMware employee. This time round for a start we are doing something very different. 1. We will still have our product update from Sanjan and Iwan who will be at the first item to answer questions regarding where VMware product is heading and why on what they are doing. 2. We will have our education to update on training and certification changes. 3. For the very first time. We will be sharing career development with speaker, Jeremy Cheong from Juel Search. Some market statistic and giving you some data points on how you can grow your career. We are not just going focusing on technology but also helping our community to grow with us. I will be sharing some job trade secret which companie...

If you have read in my previous article , back in Aug 2024, that a number of Aria Operations Management packs will be retired from general support on 1st Oct 2024. Without the build in management packs provided, what can you do next? Aria Operations does come with a Management Pack Building which many are not aware. I like to share from this article  that I came across that illustrate how easy to just pull the wanted metric that you need to build your own dashboard. If those existing dashboard from management pack that is end of life, you can then see what metrics are been pulled and customize your own to keep moving forward. Alternatively, you can seek any system integrator to help build such dashboard easily if you have no such engineer in house to help.

Broadcom has release an update to address the below two vulnerabilities. This affect vCenter Server 7.x and 8.x. VMware vCenter Server heap-overflow vulnerability (CVE-2024-38812) This carries a CVSSv3 score of 9.8 VMware vCenter privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2024-38813) This carries a CVSSv3 score of 7.5. Both are addressed with resolution with a new binary update for vCenter Server 7U3s and vCenter Server 8U3b. This will affect any VCF 4.x and 5.x which contains either vCenter Server 7.x or 8.x. It is always recommended to get this updated as soon as possible with such rare critical severity. Check out this article for more information.

Today marks my last working day in this great company, VMware. Starting as a sales engineer coming from a delivery background in 27 Dec 2011 to managing a country team of 15 solution architects was a magnificent milestone. A good 12 years, 7 months, 28 days race. There are so many people to thank, and words alone can't fully express my appreciation. I am deeply grateful to everyone I've crossed paths with, both within and outside the company. You've all played a part in shaping who I am today, and for that, I am truly thankful. Some may see me as a representative of VMware in Singapore, perhaps due to my long tenure or my visibility within the community. While that's a bit of a joke, the truth is, technology has been the driving force that kept me passionate during my time at VMware. Without it, I might have lost that spark long ago. What truly made my journey memorable were the incredible people I met along the way—from sales to engineering, partners to customers. They...

You might have come across the above concern one that was published here . Since the day VMware vSphere was made available, ESX Admins user group if created in Active Directory will be given admin rights to ESXi when a user is place as a member of ESX Admins group. This was not new. I think some people do not know this existed. Moving forward, it seem hackers are now targeting this function to gain admin rights to the hypervisor. For companies that have concern over this and like to change this group membership name, you can follow this KB . Hope this address the concerns.

In South East Asia, VMUG Singapore chapter has always been the most active and constantly having a meetup almost every quarter. With the new Broadcom acquisition, this will be the first session by VMUG Singapore with VMware by Broadcom with VMware Cloud Foundation Product Managers on some of the recent innovation and update on VCF solution. If you are based in Singapore, do not miss this out. It is rarely we have product managers and this will be one not to be missed. Register your seats here . Seats are limited so do it fast. Do remain considerate as community, if you are not able to attend due to any reason, do give it up to those who might. I will be there so see you there! Broadcom Singapore Pte Ltd Floor, Suntec Tower 4, S038986 6th, 038986 Singapore, NA, SG VCF Updates, 2024 and beyond   Thursday, 27th June 2024  

There are lots of content available nowadays especially with the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, there are many on how to migrate off VMware and feature function comparison. One of the great content that is easily digestible from 2TekGuys . Below is a breakdown from the video on the features that was mentioned available on other hypervisors in comparison with VMware vSphere. I am not going to go into feature beyond mentioned in the video. Here are the list of features mentioned: Load Balancing : Moving using live migration of virtual machines (VMs) between hosts to due to contention. Backup : Support of backup from popular backup vendors or from hypervisor vendor themselves. Storage : Able to utilize external network storage/SAN or hypervisor own hyper-converged storage only. Live Migration : Ability to move VMs without any downtime between hosts. Having specialized on VMware vSphere for a long time in my career and been in a technical role from picking up VMware. I am always amazed by...

New changes are coming your ways for VMware certifications. A blog article just been release. 1. Prices of VCP, VCAP, etc. are all standardize to one single price, USD250. This is definitely beneficial for many especially those who are keen to persue the advanced level exam but having difficult to afford the exam fee which was much higher. 2. A mandatory course is no longer needed as an exam requirement. This will help many professionals who are experienced to get certified without having to go through boring course and spend to drag through the requirement.  Will this then bring down the certification value since course was required to ensure certified professional walk the talk as what they hold in credential? Answer to point 2, for people who are new and managed to pass the exam and get certified by other means, it can be identified easily. As the digital badges will be differentiated whether the exam was passed with a accompanied course or not. So during an interview, it can i...

If you have not read this blog from Broadcom by Hock Tan check it out . It helps to outline few things that has been confusion for many. First, the old perpetual licensing from any vendor including VMware, are sold in two parts. 1. perpetual license, 2. Support and Subscription (SnS) Part 1, basically let you own the license and do what you deem fit with it. And part 2, allows you to log a case for support assistance, and upgrade or downgrade the license and have patches and security release whenever its available as long the product is still supported. From the blog, it clarify once again that part 1 is true, customers are allow to use the perpetual license even if its out of support as long as they deem fit. " To ensure that customers whose maintenance and support contracts have expired and choose to not continue on one of our subscription offerings are able to use perpetual licenses in a safe and secure fashion, we are announcing free access to zero-day security patches for sup...

A big congratulation to all the vExpert accredited for year 2024 that is  announced ! This year we have a total of 1226 vExperts and you can find them here . Those who didn't make it or miss the application, fear not. The 2nd application period will be in Jun 2024. You will have time to make up if you are missing some activities to proof your worth. I am fortunate enough to be part of list. Also as a vExpert Pro helping with the application was not easy.  Having been assessing the applications with many other Pros, here are some of the do's and don'ts when applying: Don't be lazy and submit your past application details as it is. Assessment for vExpert for the year look at your past contribution to the VMware community over the last 6-12 months. If you are just submitting as it is, your activities will be unlikely be recent at all. Provide evidence of your contribution. Do not just state them. It will be impossible to verify what you say. If it is a blog please provide ...

VMware has been trying to transit to subscription licensing for a long time which what all other software companies have already done. With Broadcom acquisition, the perpetual licensing availability is no longer available as announced  here and a KB on this. There is a good blog article that just got release to show where each product packaging is replaced with. There are just some things I like to highlight. vCenter Server is no longer available as it is no longer selling as a standalone product but it comes free as part of the new subscription licensing. Another item, vCloud Director, which will only be available to Cloud Service Provider (CSP) and not to end user which this article is addressing to. Many might say that why is VMware by Broadcom removing the perpetual licensing. Let's take a moment, it has been a long overdue move that just got accelerated. In fact, if not all, software companies such as Microsoft, Citrix, etc. are all on subscriptions and VMware has been one ...

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 ...