2018

This one will be a quick post, but I wanted to alert people to a new minor but useful feature that’s included in the vCenter 6.7 appliance, which is the ability to schedule backups natively within the appliance management interface. If you wanted to schedule an appliance based backup in 6.5, you would have to schedule a task to do so. Thankfully this was made easier by Brian Graf’s script, but now we have a way to build this in to the appliance configuration with no reliance on an external script. ...

[toc] Introduction Starting from VMworld US 2017, VMware announced their plans to support PSC replication and Enhanced Linked Mode with the vCenter Embedded deployment model, simplifying overall deployment and management requirements for a multi-vCenter environment. This feature is now included in the release of vSphere 6.7. In this post, I go over a little history for common deployment models, as well as what the new “vCenter Embedded Linked Mode” brings to the table. I also compare a couple of topologies between vSphere 6.0/6.5 and vSphere 6.7 to show the savings in the amount of nodes and in some cases, the complexity, that can be saved by using this new deployment topology. ...

It’s back, finally! A new feature with vCenter 6.7 is the ability to repoint a vCenter Server to another Platform Services Controller node, that resides in an entirely different vSphere SSO domain. This functionality is huge for domain consolidation, and also domain splitting (which admittedly is a less required use case from what I’ve seen, but something that still can be a useful use case). Edit: As per a comment from Rupak, I believe this feature is only available on the vCenter Server Appliance and is not available for the Windows deployment of vCenter 6.7. With that said, hopefully if you are running vCenter 6.7 you are now running the appliance, as you have likely had several chances to migrate to the VCSA either using the migration tool, or manually (albeit with plenty of scripts to assist with the move of config and workloads). ...

Well, it’s that time of the year again. The VMware User Group (VMUG) UserCon’s are on again this week in Sydney (Tuesday 20th March) and Melbourne (Thursday 22nd March), Australia. VMUG UserCon is a free day long event filled with a few keynotes, breakout sessions, networking and checking out the exhibit hall. I’ve personally only attended one UserCon, which I wrote about here, but I was really impressed at the organisation and presence from VMware, sponsors and community members. It really is one of the stand out events of the year for me, and I’m glad to be attending the Melbourne UserCon again this year, thanks to my employer. ...

On Friday the 9th of March (morning of Saturday the 10th in Australia), VMware announced the results of the vExpert 2018 award, which is given to those who have performed various VMware advocacy related activities in the 2017 calendar year. I’m happy to say that VMware has deemed me worthy to be a vExpert again, which will mean this is my second year in the program. It’s a great program to be a part of with several perks, one of the most valuable (yet sometimes time consuming!) being the vExpert Slack channel where you see and can be a part of excellent conversations. ...

So that title is a mouthful, but I came across an issue for a customer today where network mappings within SRM were not functioning correctly when attempting to configure protection for virtual machines. To cover this off quickly, the environment is running vSphere 6.0U3 and SRM 6.1.2. The scenario was that we’d previously (a few months ago) configured all of the mappings in SRM (Network, resource, folder, etc). We then created a new protection group, and created a recovery plan for this particular protection group. This was back when the datastore actually had no virtual machines, so at that point in time there was no VM protections to action, as it was preparing for an upcoming project. ...

Yep, it’s that time of year where it seems sensible to reflect on what’s happened, and maybe set some goals for the year to come. With that said, don’t forget to keep reflecting during the year, and ground yourself to see where you are at, what you want to work on and readjust yourself if you aren’t going in the direction you hoped for. Or maybe a change in direction wasn’t what you planned, but is naturally the course you have taken due to a series of events. ...