Category Archives: VMware

Brisbane VMUG – October 2018

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The October 2018 edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Tuesday 23rd October at Toobirds Bistro and Bar (127 Creek Street, Brisbane) from 4:30 – 6:30pm. It’s sponsored by Coevolve and promises to be a top afternoon.

Here’s the agenda:

  • VMUG Introduction
  • VMware Presentation by Michael Francis – Project Dimension & VMC on AWS Technical Demonstration
  • Coevolve Presentation – How to securely transform your network using NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud and Zscaler.
  • Coevolve Demonstration – to show how easy it is to:
    • Build a new branch site on the fly
    • Apply consistent policies across your network; and
    • Integrate NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud with the Zscaler security platform
  • Q&A
  • Light Refreshments.

Coevolve have gone to great lengths to make sure this will be a fun and informative session and I’m really looking forward to it. You can find out more information and register for the event here. I hope to see you there. Also, if you’re interested in sponsoring one of these events, please get in touch with Brisbane VMUG by email (brisbane@vmug.com) and I can help make it happen.

Heading to vFORUM 2018 in Sydney?

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Will you be at vFORUM Sydney this year? Have you considered signing up to deliver a vBrownBag session?

VBrownBag will be at vForum Sydney and are looking for contributors for:

  1. TechTalks: 12-minute technical presentation using at the vBrownBag theatrette.
  2. Interviews: 10-15 minutes of informal conversations

Examples of topics could be:

  • Talking about a project you implemented or led, a problem you solved, something you excelled or innovated, how you implemented / integrated a new solution, etc.
  • Talking about a defining career moment or how you progressed in your career.
  • In general anyone who can offer expertise to the VMware user community.

Audience will be designers, builders, and operators of IT solutions – content should be educational and aimed at a technical audience.

All sessions will be video recorded and published on the vBrownBag channels that have thousands of downloads and views locally and globally.

Complete this form if you would like to get involved.

Dell EMC News From VMworld US 2018

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I’m not at VMworld US this year, but I had the opportunity to be briefed by Sam Grocott (Dell EMC Cloud Strategy) on some of Dell EMC‘s key announcements during the event, and thought I’d share some of my rough notes and links here. You can read the press release here.

TL;DR?

It is a multi-cloud world. Multi-cloud requires workload mobility. The market requires a consistent experience between on-premises and off-premises. Dell EMC are doing some more stuff around that.

 

Cloud Platforms

Dell EMC offer a number of engineered systems to run both IaaS and cloud native applications.

VxRail

Starting with vSphere 6.7, Dell EMC are saying they’re delivering “near” synchronous software releases between VMware and VxRail. In this case that translates to a less than 30 Day delta between releases. There’s also support for:

VxRack SDDC with VMware Cloud Foundation

  • Support for latest VCF releases – VCF 2.3.2, and future proof for next generation VMware cloud technologies
  • Alignment with VxRail hardware options – P, E, V series VxRail models, now including Storage Dense S-series
  • Configuration flexibility

 

Cloud-enabled Infrastructure

Focus is on the data

  • Cloud data mobility;
  • Cloud data protection;
  • Cloud data services; and
  • Cloud control.

Cloud Data Protection

  • DD Cloud DR – keep copies of VM data from on-premises DD to public cloud and orchestrate failover of workloads to the cloud
  • Data Protection Suite – use cloud storage for backup and retention
  • Cloud Snapshot Manager – Backup and recovery for public cloud workloads (Now MS Azure)
  • Data Domain virtual edition running in the cloud

DD VE 4.0 Enhancements

  • KVM support added for DD VE on-premises
  • In-cloud capacity expanded to 96TB (was 16TB)
  • Can run in AWS, Azure and VMware Cloud

Cloud Data Services

Dell EMC have already announced services such as:

And now you can get Dell EMC UnityVSA Cloud Edition.

UnityVSA Cloud Edition

[image courtesy of Dell EMC]

  • Up to 256TB file systems
  • VMware Cloud on AWS

CloudIQ

  • No cost, SaaS offering
  • Predictive analytics – intelligently project capacity and performance
  • Anomaly detection – leverage ML to pinpoint deviations
  • Proactive health – identify risks before they impact the environment

Enhancements include:

Data Domain Cloud Tier

There are some other Data Domain related enhancements, including new AWS support (meaning you can have a single vendor for Long Term Retention).

ECS

ECS enhancements have also been announced, with a 50%+ increase in storage capacity and compute.

 

Thoughts

As would be expected from a company with a large portfolio of products, there’s quite a bit happening on the product enhancement front. Dell EMC are starting to get that they need to be on-board with those pesky cloud types, and they’re also doing a decent job of ensuring their private cloud customers have something to play with as well.

I’m always a little surprised by vendors offering “Cloud Editions” of key products, as it feels a lot like they’re bolting on something to the public cloud when the focus could perhaps be on helping customers get to a cloud-native position sooner. That said, there are good economic reasons to take this approach. By that I mean that there’s always going to be someone who thinks they can just lift and shift their workload to the public cloud, rather than re-factoring their applications. Dell EMC are providing a number of ways to make this a fairly safe undertaking, and products like Unity Cloud Edition provide some nice features such as increased resilience that would be otherwise lacking if the enterprise customer simply dumped its VMs in AWS as-is. I still have hope that we’ll stop doing this as an industry in the near future and embrace some smarter ways of working. But while enterprises are happy enough to spend their money on doing things like they always have, I can’t criticise Dell EMC for wanting a piece of the pie.

Brisbane VMUG – BNEVMUG at The Movies – August 2018

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The August 2018 edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting is a purely social event, with a members-only screening of Mission: Impossible – Fallout. It will be held on Friday 3rd August at the Elizabeth Picture Theatre in Elizabeth Street. This special social event is sponsored by VMware. There’ll be pizza and refreshments from 5:00 pm with the screening starting at 6:00 pm. Parking at the Wintergarden will be validated by the cinema. Be sure to reserve your seat now as seats are limited and available on a first come, first served basis. You can find out more information and register for the event here. I hope to see you there. Also, if you’re interested in sponsoring one of these events, please get in touch with me and I can help make it happen.

Brisbane VMUG – May 2018

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The May edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Tuesday 29th May at Toobirds Bistro and Bar (127 Creek Street, Brisbane) from 4 – 6:00pm. It’s sponsored by Lenovo and promises to be a top afternoon.

Here’s the agenda:

Lenovo have gone to great lengths to make sure this will be a fun and informative session and I’m really looking forward to hearing about their work with vSAN. You can find out more information and register for the event here. I hope to see you there. Also, if you’re interested in sponsoring one of these events, please get in touch with me and I can help make it happen.

Random Short Take #5

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So it’s been over six months since I did one of these, and it’s clear that I’m literally rubbish at doing them regularly.

VMware – vSphere Basics – Re-package An OVA

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This is a quick and easy one. I came across a virtual appliance the other day that had an expired certificate.

When you click Next you’ll get an error saying the package is signed with an invalid certificate.

It’s a relatively easy fix (or at least workaround) and I followed Stephen Wagner‘s guidance here. In short, grab a copy of the VMware OVF Tool from here. You then run the following command:

ovftool.exe --skipManifestCheck c:\tmp\old.ova c:\tmp\new.ova

You’ll then be able to deploy the appliance without it barfing. Remember, though, that this is a bit of a rough workaround, and you should really contact the appliance vendor in the first instance as they’ll likely be keen to fix the issue. In my case I was able to continue with my testing while the vendor went ahead and fixed things on their side.

VMware – vExpert 2018

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I’m very happy to have been listed as a vExpert for 2018. This is the sixth time that they’ve forgotten to delete my name from the list (literally never getting tired of that joke). Read about it here, and more news about this year’s programme is coming shortly. Thanks again to Corey Romero and the rest of the VMware Social Media & Community Team for making this kind of thing happen. And thanks also to the vExpert community for being, well, such a great community to be part of.

VMware – vSphere Basics – Create a Custom Role

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I’ve been evaluating a data protection solution in the lab recently and wanted to create a custom role in vCenter for the solution to use. It’s a basic thing, but if you don’t do it often it might not be that obvious where to click. The VMware documentation site has more information on creating a custom role as well. Why would you do this? In the same way it’s a bad idea to give every service Domain Administrator privileges, it’s also a bad idea to give your data protection solutions elevated privileges in your environment. If you’re into that kind of thing, read this guidance on roles and permissions too. In this example, I created a “CohesityTest” user as a domain user in Active Directory. I then wanted to assign that user to a custom role in vCenter and assign it certain privileges. In this example I’m using vCenter 6.5 with the Web Client. The process is as follows.

Go to the Home screen in vCenter and click on “Administration”.

In this example, I’ve already created a Role called Cohesity (following the instructions above) and assigned privileges to that Role.

Click on “Global Permissions” and the click on the green plus sign.

I want to add a user to a role. Click on “Add”.

The user I want to add is a domain user, so I use the drop down box to select the domain the user resides in.

Typing “coh” into the search field yields the only user with those letters in their name.

Once the user is selected, you can click on “Add” and then “OK”.

Make sure the user has the appropriate Role assigned. In this example, I’m assigning the CohesityTest user to the Cohesity Role and propagating these changes to child objects. Click “OK”. And then you’re done.

To check your role has the correct privileges, click on “Roles”, “Role Name”, and then “Privileges” and you can expand the items to check the correct privileges are assigned.

Once I’d done this I went back and re-added the vCenter to the Cohesity environment using the CohesityTest user and I was good to go.

Brisbane VMUG – February 2018

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The February edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Thursday 8th February at the Dell EMC office (Level 11, 345 Queen Street) from 4 – 6pm. The first meeting of the year is sponsored by Dell EMC and promises to be a top afternoon.

Here’s the agenda:

  • VMUG Intro
  • VMware Ready System – Infrastructure as a Service built on Dell EMC VxRack SDDC hyper-converged infrastructure
  • Pivotal Ready System – Platform as a Service / Container as a Service built on Dell EMC VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure
  • Q&A
  • Pizza and refreshments.

Dell EMC have gone to great lengths to make sure this will be a fun and informative session and I’m really looking forward to hearing about their fully integrated hybrid cloud offering aligned across Dell Technologies. You can find out more information and register for the event here. I hope to see you there. Also, if you’re interested in sponsoring one of these events, please get in touch with me and I can help make it happen.