Plain Virtualization

With the release of NSX 4.2 together with the General Availability of VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2, there are some important points to take note of. With NSX 4.2, overlay support for bare metal servers are no longer available. Moving forward, NSX will only support for virtual machine which is running on vSphere. The NSX Network introspection for Security will be deprecated in 4.x and will no longer be support after. NSX Manager APIs and NSX Advanced UIs will deprecated in this version. Just to name a few. But one major change in this release is an entitlement change in regards to NSX Native Load Balancer (NLB) or NSX Load Balancer. Entitlement Change for the NSX Load Balancer In a future major release of NSX, VMware intends to change the entitlement of the built-in NSX load balancer (a.k.a. NSX-T Load Balancer). This load balancer will only support load balancing for Aria Automation, IaaS Control Plane (Supervisor Cluster), and load balancing of VCF infrastructure components. VMwar...

This is definitely one of the good news that the vSphere 7.x End of General Support (EoGS) has been extended to 2nd Oct 2025 instead of the original Apr 2025. You can find this in the lifecycle website  https://support.broadcom.com/group/ecx/productlifecycle . Yes the website is not as good as the previously lifecycle.vmware.com as the dropdown does not work and you have to search ESXi in their search field instead. This definitely is more welcoming as many customers are running short of time to upgrade to vSphere 8 and given that new hardware are often required, there is some gap in the timing. At least now Broadcom has extend the General Support. That means we have 6 months more time to quickly plan for it.

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...