Plain Virtualization

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  

Many of our customers have done vulnerability assessment (VA) on vSphere ESXi and often highlighted out the vulerable items such as SHA1 and TLS 1.0, etc.  Some of it were there but not in used and we could not manually remove them such as SHA1, MD5, etc. While some of them were to support lower version such as TLS 1.1 and 1.0.  With vSphere 8, the security enhancement has made uplift to remove unwanted security bundles and as well to support only secured transport connection via TLS 1.2. On top of that, it also added daemons to now run in their own sandboxes instead of in the hypervisor world needing higher permissions which were unneeded and prone to vulnerability attacks. What is new for security is a timeout for SSH shell when enabled on ESXi host. So administrators, no longer are to leave the SSH shell connected for infinite time or even worse forgetting to disconnect and logout of the endpoint where they are connected to the ESXi shell. Lastly, if your hardware used for ...

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...

The Truth Yes, the news of VMware acquired by Broadcom has come to a realization. We cannot denied the truth since 22nd Nov 2023. Prior the acquisition, if you have made a multi-year purchase before that, you will have whatever you can consume after the acquisition. VMware after the acquisition has release new bundle of all their offerings and end the perpetual licensing offer to the market. The individual products are not make available and cannot be purchase as a standalone. But are offered via two bundle namely; VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). Both of which are all subscription licenses. It also ends all sales and renewal of any perpetual licenses. Honestly, VMware has been trying to end its perpetual license and into subscription for the longest time. With the Broadcom acquisition, VMware has been one of the last major player that has moved to subscription license. Customer who are on VMware, has been enjoying the great pricing with no limit of cores...

VMware has release important patches based on the advisory affecting all the hypervisor including ESXi and desktop hypervisor i.e. Workstation and Fusion which contain vulnerabilities that has a CVSSv3 of 7.1-9.3. Most of the listed are all USB related. Most of this might nto affect ESXi since most do not use USB controller on them but more towards the desktop hypervisors. Patches are released fro ESXi 7 and 8 and Workstation 17 and Fusion 13. And since this is a critical severity, VMware has release patches for out of support ESXi 6.5U3v and 6.7U3u for customers on extended support. This also include VCF 3.x that happens to run such version of ESXi.  I hope everyone should have upgraded as a best practice to at least ESXi 7 to avoid such issue where you are not on support and yet running critical workload. If you are still on ESXi 6.5U3v and ESXi 6.7U3u, I would assume you have extended support to tie you through. Do note that if you manage to get the patches from other source wi...