Plain Virtualization

Right before VMworld, VMware has announcement some new releases. Two of which that has lots of new stuff to look forward to is vSphere and vSAN. Here I am going to list down all the resources that you can read or watch to find out more on what is new in both vSphere 7.0 Update 1 and vSAN 7.0 Update 1. vSphere 7.0 Update 1 Check out the announcement  here  and the youtube video  here . AMD SEV-ES Support in vSphere 7 vSphere With Tanzu - Networking with vSphere Distributed Switch vSphere 7 Update 1 – AMD SEV-ES   AMD SEV-ES Support in vSphere 7 ( video ) vSphere Clustering Service (vCLS) (updated) vSphere Lifecycle Manager Improvements (updated) Unprecedented Scalability (updated) As usual, with almost in every release, you see the maximum supported numbers goes up. However, one of the key supported on CPU security is from AMD on SEV-ES. Check out the article  here . vSAN 7.0 Update 1 Check out the announcement  here  and video . Duncan Epping have ...

With the announcement of Horizon 8 which is a major upgrade from 7.12 which has already 12 iteration of updates, this is going to be a lot more than 7.x. We won't be listing all the 12 minor update iteration features, it will be a huge list. Let's jump right in. MultiCloud Support Horizon 8 now support Azure VMware Solution. Google Cloud VMware Engine and VMware Cloud on Dell on top of your own on premise data center. Instant Clone Smart Provisioning The removal of parent VM requirements on every hosts is going to return back lots of resources for customers. For those who does not how Instant Clone works, can refer to this article . With Instant Clone Smart Provisioning, you will be having just one replica from your master image that sit in a shared datastore to be used. Let's wait for an article to be release on that soon. Horizon REST APIs With more support for REST APIs, this will allow deeper integration for automation and orchestration. There just so many things you ca...

Today is the release of the new exam for VMware Certified Professional Data Center Virtualization (VCP DCV) for vSphere 7. You can now head over and make a date to take the exam. Upon passing this exam, you will be granted VCP-DCV 2020 certification. There seems to be a change to this exam pre-requisite.  There is no requirement to take the vSphere foundation exam as there are no vSphere 7.0 foundation exam. So after you attended any of the vSphere 7 required 5 days training, you are good to head over and take the VCP exam. There is a new feature in vSphere 7 also known as vSphere 7 with Tanzu. However, this is not tested in this exam. Maybe, VMware intend to have that as a separate exam since it itself is a big topic of it's own. Or maybe just like the VCP-NV, where CCNP or CCIE certification is exempted. They might use CKA as a exemption and have it as another certification when combined. Let's just wait and see what are the plans VMware have. Head over the certification  pa...

Over the course of last week, I conducted my first co-teaching for vSphere 7.0: Install, Configure and Manage course as a VMware instructor. This is a requirement for me to complete the VMware Certified Instructor. This is one of the five days course that I was made to teach. The course was also new as vSphere 7.0 curriculum was release not long ago after the product GA. I took a week to go through all the modules and getting familiar with the labs. There are a lot to prepare. Since I am new to teaching, I am preparing the unexpected. I was fortunate to have a class of 9 students. I mean real customers in the class. Though I have many years of experience, there are nitty gritty stuff which I have forgotten and didn't take much into consideration during my course of work. The modules deck is all very new and I must go read up most of it since some didn't surface many details during vSphere 7 launch but are covered much more in the course. Simple things like how vSphere HA works ...

  Recently, took an exam at the test center during this Covid lock down time. It definitely my first time wearing a mask to a test center throughout the exam. To share my experience on preparing for the exam and as well on how I felt about the exam format comparing with other exam that I have taken and written. Yes, I am part of the team who developed VCP and VCAP over the last two years. Experience I took the AWS SAA course last year with no experience with AWS. This was really my virgin experience with AWS from interface to using it in the lab. I even sign up for the AWS fundamental class which is one day before the three days course. After which, I also took the exam preparation course for half a day. Do note there are two exams, I took the one that is retiring. The different is the retiring exam has one more section while the new one removed it. So if you are new like myself, it is really good to do all the above courses that I have attended. It really gives me the great unders...

Recently, got a call from a colleague, Calvin Nguyen based in US. This customer encounter the same error that I have posted here previously. And apparently after testing, it requires the two DLL files mentioned the KB in my article. He was using the VMware Thinapp 5.2.5 on Windows XP. But the latest 5.2.7 cannot be installed. A quick check on the release notes shows that VMware Thinapp 5.2.7 has support for Windows 10 build 1909. If you have read, I did the IE 8 Thinapp packing in Windows XP. However, VMware Thinapp 5.2.7 is no longer supported to run on Windows XP. So how are we going to update the Thinapp packages that runs only in Windows XP if we need to update the build to the latest? A quick workaround would be as below, we will use IE8 as an example: Package your IE8 using a VMware Thinapp (in this case 5.2.5) that is supported on Windows XP and place the two DLLs from KB just in case. Follow this KB to use native view (thanks to Calvin) Install VMware Thinapp 5....

Recently, got to know from a customer who have a vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 that went down after a reboot. The services refused to come up. Looking at the error generated, it looks something similar to this KB . However, this was the the similar Error RC code which returns 1 instead of 11. So we went asked the customer what actually happens and the results was they change a new DNS server with new IP but did not update vCenter Server. This is a big impact! Why is this so? If you have deploy a vCenter Server, the requirement for forward and reverse DNS is required as a prerequisites else the vCenter Server Installation wizard will not proceed further. So while the vCenter Sever is still running without been updated on the new DNS, services on the vCenter start to act abnormally. A reboot will completely bring it down as nothing will start without DNS. The only service that will start is the vSphere Client service. There are few ways to change your DNS which I am going to lis...