Tag Archives: VMware

Brisbane VMUG – September 2026

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The September 2026 edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Thursday 24th September at Christie’s, 320 Adelaide Street, Brisbane from 4pm to 5:30pm. It’s sponsored by Canonical and Broadcom and promises to be a great afternoon.

Here’s the agenda:

VCF with Ubuntu (Peter Hauck – Broadcom and James Gill – Canonical)
Secure platform deployment with secure package management for the private cloud.
  • Secure Automated Deployments for Complex Workloads
  • Building custom secure VKS platform based on Ubuntu.
  • Ubuntu fun with Automation
Architecting for Failure: A Deep Dive into VMC on AWS’s Multi-AZ Resiliency (Dan Frith – Broadcom)
Multi-AZ SDDCs promise continuity when an Availability Zone goes dark – but what actually happens in the seconds and minutes after that failure domain disappears?
  • How a Multi-AZ SDDC distributes management and compute across independent failure domains, and how vSAN managed storage replication keeps data consistent across AZs before failure occurs.
  • VMC on AWS instance types
  • Roadmap (Version updates, vSAN enhancements, and more!)

Canonical and Broadcom have gone to great lengths to make sure this will be a fun and informative session. 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 – July 2026

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The July 2026 edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Thursday 23rd July at the NetApp Office, Level 17, Central Plaza II, 66 Eagle Street, Brisbane from 3pm – 6:30pm. It’s sponsored by NetApp, Ingram Micro, and Broadcom and promises to be a great afternoon.

Here’s the agenda:

3pm – VMUG Leader Intro

3.10-4pm – Unlock unrealised value from your VCF deployments with NetApp ONTAP 9.1

Presented by Chris Gondek – Solutions Engineering Manager, Australia and New Zealand, NetApp and Wade Juppenlatz – Technical Business Development Manager, Ingram Micro

Live demonstration of the NetApp Data Infrastructure insights Observability of VMware environments.

  • Showcasing where there are opportunities to right size
  • Where there is over/under utilisation/provisioning
  • Where there is opportunity to reclaim waste
  • Audience Participation / interaction where you can ask your own questions to the NetApp AI chat bot on VMware environments
  • Always popular, you can ask anything that you would want, in natural language like “show me where I save on VMware licensing cost”, etc)
  • Trident for TANZU / VKS
  • Our ONTAP tools for VMware integration / UX demo
  • Broader VMware in cloud and the NetApp Console Canvas
  • Shift Toolkit (Convert/Migrate other HyperVisor environments to VMware)

4-4.30pm – VCF 9.1 Introduction and Updates from Broadcom

Presented by Peter Hauck, Staff Solutions Architect, Broadcom

4.30-5pm – Community Session (tbc)

5pm onwards – Networking, Pizza, vBeers and Giveaways!

You can find out more information and register for the event here.

VMware Cloud on AWS – TMCHAM – Part 16 – Remove External Datastores

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In this edition of Things My Customers Have Asked Me (TMCHAM), I’m going to do a (really) short post on removing external datastores on the VMware-managed VMware Cloud on AWS platform. It might seem like a simple thing, but it can be confusing for customers who haven’t done it before.

 

The Problem

If you’ve used an external datastore (either FSx for NetApp ONTAP or the artist formerly known as VMware Cloud Flex Storage) with your SDDC, you’ll know that management of the connection of the datastores to your SDDC is done via the Cloud Console, and not via vCenter. There might come a time when you want to remove that storage, either because you’ve bought more nodes and want to use vSAN, or you’re possibly shrinking your footprint. Whatever the reason, if you do try to remove the datastore via vCenter (assuming you’ve removed your workloads from the datastore), you’ll get an error about insufficient privileges. At first it might seem like it’s because you have VMs still present on the datastore (and if this is the case, contact Global Support to help you if you can’t find them). It’s more likely, however, that you’re not in the right place to do this activity.

 

The Solution

The solution is simple. In the VMware Cloud Console, go to the Storage tab of the SDDC you want to remove the datastore from, and click on Detach Datastore. And that’s it. It won’t work if you’ve got workloads running there, so make sure you’ve cleaned everything up / moved it somewhere else before you attempt this one.

Brisbane VMUG – May 2026

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The May 2026 edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Wednesday 13th May at Christies Workspaces, Ground Floor, 320 Adelaide St, Brisbane from 12pm – 2pm. It’s sponsored by Broadcom and DriveSavers and promises to be a great afternoon.

Here’s the agenda:

Recovering Critical Virtual Environments when backups fail or are compromised through a Cyber Incident

Adrian Briscoe – Director – DriverSavers Data Recovery

DriveSavers as a last-resort, enterprise-grade recovery partner for VMware environments when backups and native tools fail. It explains how DriveSavers recovers virtual machines, disks, and critical business data across ESXi and vSphere environments, covering common failure scenarios like corruption, ransomware, and storage issues. It highlights flexible recovery methods (remote, onsite, lab) and emphasises strong security, compliance, and proven expertise.

Security and Compliance at the speed of apps

Mark Cheetham – FSI Strategy Director APJ CTO Advisory – Broadcom

In the world of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), agility is the goal—but compliance is the requirement. Too often, security becomes the “Department of No” because manual audits and static policies can’t keep up with automated deployment pipelines.

We will be diving into how VCF 9 and the latest Advanced Cyber Compliance (ACC) services allow you to:

  • Automate Drift Remediation
  • Implement Zero-Trust for AI
  • Shift Security Left

Don’t let your compliance checklist become a bottleneck. Let’s talk about building a private cloud that is secure by design and fast by default.

You can find out more information and register for the event here.

VMware Cloud on AWS – What’s New – April 2026

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What’s New?

A new node type is now available for deployment with VMware Cloud on AWS. The i7i.metal-24xl instance type is now generally available for both new and existing SDDCs and cluster deployments on SDDC version 1.26v2. Exciting? Confusing? Let’s dive in.

Specifications

The key specifications of the i7i.metal-24xl are as follows:

Specification i7i.metal-24xl
Processor 5th Gen Intel Xeon (Emerald Rapids)
Hyperthreaded Cores 96
Physical Cores 48
Memory 768 GiB DDR5 (5600 MT/s)
Local NVMe Storage 6 x 3.75 NVMe SSDs
Usable Capacity* vSAN OSA ~ 13 TB*
vSAN ESA ~ 20 TB*
Network Bandwidth 56.25 Gbps

*Note that the capacity of individual nodes will be dependent upon RAID configurations, FTT settings, and factors such as compression. You can check out the VMC Sizer to work out how much capacity a particular cluster configuration will give you.

Where Can I Deploy It?

The i7i.metal-24xl instance type is available today for purchase and deployment in the following AWS Regions:

Geography AWS Regions
Americas US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), Canada (Central)
Europe Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Milan)
Middle East Middle East (Bahrain)
Asia Pacific Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Melbourne), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad)

Deployment Considerations and Constraints

The i7i.metal-24xl can be deployed in a new SDDC, or deployed as a secondary cluster in an existing SDDC. Note that the i7i instance type is only available for SDDCs running on version 1.26v2. In-place cluster conversions are also supported, with support for converting i3, i4i, and i3en hosts to i7i.metal-24xl. Note that clusters running virtual machines on Virtual Machine Hardware version 21 are not eligible for conversion from i4i to i7i, due to hardware compatibility limitations. Also, if you are converting stretched clusters, these will be converted as OSA stretched clusters, as there is no current support for ESA stretched clusters in VMware Cloud on AWS, nor is there support for converting OSA to ESA in-place.

To better understand your sizing requirements, you can contact your account team to provide a conversion estimate. You can also run the VMC Sizer on your own SDDCs to provide an estimate.

 

Thoughts

The announcement was published on April 1st, but this is no joke. This instance type is a welcome addition to the VMware Cloud on AWS catalogue. Customers looking for a cost-effective replacement for their i3.metal hosts, or a smaller Pilot Light footprint for use with VMware Live Cyber Recovery will be happy, as will customers with processing requirements that want to take advantage of a modern CPU like the Emerald Rapids. The good news is that nothing else changes – your VMware Cloud on AWS service continues as before, managed by Broadcom, and evolving in line with your requirements. You can read the announcement blog post here, and the release notes are here.

VMware – vExpert 2026

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I’m very happy to have been accepted into the vExpert program for 2026. This is my fourteenth year. You can read more about it here. Thanks again to Corey Romero, the vExpert PROs, and the VMware by Broadcom Community and Advocacy Team for making this kind of thing happen. And thanks also to the vExpert community for being such a great community to be part of. Congratulations to you (whether this is your first or fourteenth time). There’s been a lot happening in and around VMware recently, and I’m happy that programs like this can continue to exist.

Brisbane VMUG – March 2026

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The March 2026 edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Wednesday 18th March at Ground Floor, 320 Adelaide St, Brisbane City QLD 4000 from 3pm to 5pm. It’s sponsored by Rubrik and promises to be a great afternoon.

 

Overview

Rubrik – Beyond the Backup: Architecting True Cyber Resiliency in Today’s IT Environment
Michael Huynh – Sales Engineer Rubrik

In the modern threat landscape, the question isn’t if your VMware environment will be targeted by ransomware, but when. While traditional backups were designed for accidental deletions and hardware failures, today’s sophisticated cyber attacks specifically target the backup infrastructure itself to ensure you have no choice but to pay.

This session dives into why “backup” is no longer enough and why Cyber Resiliency is the new gold standard. We will explore how Rubrik integrates with VMware to move beyond simple data protection into a proactive defense posture.

Key takeaways include:

  • Immutable Architecture: How to ensure your data is natively immutable and logically air-gapped from the production vSphere cluster.
  • Zero Trust Data Security: Implementing granular RBAC and Multi-Person Authentication (MPA) to prevent rogue admins or compromised credentials from wiping your environment.
  • Threat Hunting & Blast Radius: Using AI-driven insights to identify exactly which VMs were hit, when the encryption began, and how to avoid “re-infecting” your environment during recovery.
  • Orchestrated Recovery: Moving from “recovery in days” to “recovery in minutes” using automated workflows that restore entire VMware vApps and clusters at scale.

VMware by Broadcom – Extending the life of your server fleet with VCF 9
Mark Foley – Staff Solution Engineer VMware

There is a little over 18 months to go until end of support for vSphere 8, with the upcoming release of VCF 9.1 many organisations are now getting serious about planning for the adoption of VCF9. The availability and cost of compatible hardware has become one of the largest barriers to VCF 9 adoption, in this session we’ll walk through some recent (and upcoming!) changes from Broadcom that may allow you to roll out VCF 9 on your existing hardware.

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 #106

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Random short take #106. Looking for old news? I’ve got just the thing. Let’s get random.

VMware Cloud on AWS – What’s New – January 2026

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I posted last month about what’s new in VMware Cloud on AWS, particularly as it related to the host usage API and changes to the VMC Sizer tool. It’s a new calendar year, but the team hasn’t stopped, delivering some new updates via a soon to be rolled out VMware Cloud on AWS software bundle. More detail can be found in the VMware Cloud on AWS Release Notes located here, and there’s a great blog post from the team here.

 

What’s New?

The default version for all new SDDC deployments is now 1.26, and it will be rolled out across the fleet in the next little while. A key component of this release is vSphere 8.0 Update 3. This a long-term support release of vSphere, and delivers improved performance and reliability. Notable, also, is the NSX version – in this update it goes to 4.2.3.1. I’ve linked to it before, but check out the timeless classic “Correlating VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC Versions With Their vSphere Components” for more information. So, an update is great, but what do you really get? Let’s dig in.

Support for vSAN Express Storage Architecture

This is the big one – support for vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) is now generally available for VMware Cloud on AWS. Note that “vSAN ESA is supported only for i4i.metal host types on newly deployed single availability zone SDDCs and for new secondary i4i.metal clusters on existing SDDCs that have been upgraded to 1.26”. So, no brownfield support, but there’s still scope to do some pretty cool stuff.

New vSAN ESA features include:

  • Native snapshots for faster backups;
  • A storage pool architecture that reduces fault domains and improves data availability; and
  • For smaller customers, supports for a RAID-5 storage policy starting from 3 hosts gives customers more storage capacity on smaller clusters.

Bring Your Own Keys (BYOK): VMC Now Includes VM Encryption

VMware Cloud on AWS now supports customer-managed VM Encryption through an external KMIP-compliant Key Management Systems (KMS). What does that mean? You can now use your own keys for workload VM encryption – while the VMC control plane continues to use the AWS KMS (managed by Broadcom) for vSAN encryption.

VM Hardware Version 21

VM Hardware Version 21 is pretty cool, offering support for:

  • 256 Disks per VM – Massive storage capacity through 64 disks across 4 vNVMe adapters;
  • NVMe 1.3 – Enhanced performance for Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022 deployments.
  • NVMe for Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) – High-performance shared storage for mission-critical clustered applications.
  • Latest Guest OS Support – Compatibility with RHEL 10, Oracle Linux 10, Debian 13, and FreeBSD 15.

The blog post has an excellent comparison of Version 20 and Version 21.

VMware Tools 12.5.4

VMware Tools 12.5.4 offers improved driver compatibility, enhanced VM performance, and provides better integration with the underlying VMC infrastructure.

 

Thoughts

Software updates aren’t always headlining news, but support for ESA on VMC (finally) is news that’s sure to make quite a few customers happy. I’ve no doubt they’re sick of hearing how cool it is from their on-premises counterparts and are keen to be part of the action. The updates to VMware Tools and VM Hardware version support are also minor, but important updates to the platform.

VMware Cloud on AWS – TMCHAM – Part 15 – Hosts and Subscriptions

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In this edition of Things My Customers Have Asked Me (TMCHAM), I’m going to do a short post on hosts and subscriptions on the VMware-managed VMware Cloud on AWS platform. It might seem like a simple thing, but it can be confusing for customers who are new to the service.

 

Definitions

Subscriptions

A subscription entitles you to run a host (or hosts) of a particular type (I3en.metal or I4i.metal) in a particular Region. The SKU of the subscription you purchase determines what you can run. For example, if you’d like to run I4i.metal hosts in the Sydney Region, you would need to purchase the VMC-AWS-I4-APE product. One of these entitles you to one host, and so on. The minimum term is 12 months, and these can be co-termed for longer periods to coincide with other product subscriptions. It’s important to understand that particular hosts aren’t tied to particular subscriptions. The subscription is at an Organization level, and its availability is based on a Region and Host type. So if you had 12 I4i subscriptions, and 6 I4i hosts deployed in the Sydney Region, and six in the Singapore Region, you’d be good to go. What you couldn’t do is use those I4i subscriptions to cover your deployment of I3en hosts in Ireland, for example. For that you’d need the VMC-AWS-I3EN-CCR SKU.

Note also, and this is pretty important, “[I]f you have hosts in excess of your purchased subscriptions, whether through EDRS storage scale-outs or due to expired subscriptions, your access to the VMware Cloud on AWS service and your SDDCs may be paused until the overconsumption is resolved. After 48 hours of excess usage, you will lose access to your SDDC(s) and workloads until you purchase sufficient subscriptions, and soon after that, your SDDC(s) will be irrevocably deleted”.

What’s In The Box?

So what do you get with VMware Cloud on AWS subscriptions? You get access to the following components on a per host basis:

  • A Software-Defined Data Centre (SDDC), consisting of:
    • AWS EC2 bare metal servers (I3en or I4i)
    • VMware vSphere
    • VMware vCenter Server
    • VMware NSX
    • VMware vDefend Gateway and Distributed Firewall (formerly NSX) – note that vDefend Advanced Threat Protection is sold separately.
    • VMware vSAN
    • VMware HCX
  • Self-service provisioning of SDDCs from the VMware Cloud Console at vmc.broadcom.com.
  • Maintenance, patching, and upgrades of the SDDC, performed by VMware by Broadcom

Note that License Portability is not supported with VMware Cloud on AWS.

 

Thoughts

The key thing to remember with subscriptions is that you need to buy subscriptions that match the host type and Region you’ll be deploying into. And you’ll need at least two to get started.