February

Day 2 of Cloud Field Day kicked off at Dell’s offices here in Santa Clara, which is a very nice Executive Briefing Center. It’s been a while since I’ve seen some Dell hardware, unfortunately I wasn’t able to get behind the glass to give these guys a hug. Dell started their presentation with Prateesh Sharma laying the groundwork for multi-cloud, and the important of a universal storage layer for companies who are trying to manage and operate across multiple environments. ...

You’ve likely heard stories and whispers of “on-prem” being sexy again, not that it ever wasn’t, right? But public cloud had a lot of promises, some of which it lives up to, some of which it doesn’t, and some of which it does but it’s just painfully expensive. If you’re considering a refresh of your on-prem solution, or are looking to move some or all workloads back to a solution you manage, its a great opportunity to revisit your requirements, and look at implementing an actual private cloud, rather than just a virtualisation platform which oh so many of us have seen and managed. ...

Cloud Field Day #19 kicked off with NeuroBlade, and I’m glad I had a coffee before hand, as data analytics is not my expertise, but I learned a lot in the session thanks to NeuroBlade and other delegates. “Revolutionizing Big Data Analytis with NeuroBlade’s SQL Processing Unit” NeuroBlade were founded in 2018, have over 120 employees, and $100m+ in capital funding. A key line they used during their funding round is they “Want to be the NVIDIA of Data Analytics”. ...

Most kubernetes clusters are running at 30% or less utilisation, which means there’s a lot of resource wastage out there in the wild, which translates to dollars being spent for no value. Platform9 want to help you save some money by tweaking the way you run your EKS clusters, and this same pattern could make its way to other managed kubernetes solutions in the future. Platform9 were founded in 2013 with a relatively clear mission: Democratize cloud computing. To use a quote they shared with us during their Cloud Field Day 19 presentation: ...

It’s that time of the year again where we have a new NSX release on our hands, specifically NSX-T 2.4. I’m still really new to NSX-T, and I can tell I have a lot to learn, but I’m hoping 2.4 is the release I’m able to really start to sink my teeth in with. If you’ve been in and around the NSX product, you’ll be aware there are two main flavours of NSX; NSX-V (now called NSX for vSphere, I think, or maybe NSX for Data Center(?)) and NSX-T. NSX-V was built around VMware vSphere and has a reliance on vCenter Server. NSX-T is the big brother with many more capabilities, has been build with understanding and support for modern technologies such as containers and multi-cloud, and does not have a reliance on any of the core VMware platform, but of course it does interoperate really well with core VMware technologies. It has been known for a while, but maybe not verbalised, that the effort and development from VMware is heavily focused on NSX-T. ...

Yeah - I know, I know. It’s February 2019 already and I’m only just wrapping up the 2018 calendar year! Better late than never, right? Similar to last year, the Christmas and New Year’s break (end of December) seems like a good time for everyone to take a step back and reflect on the year that has been, and I certainly did the same. I also believe it is important to have similar reflections throughout the year as well to keep a track of your goals and evaluate if your goals have changed, and adjust with those changes. ...

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. ...

Early this morning VMware released the results for the VMware vExpert 2017 programme. Before even seeing the post, I woke up to a couple of slack messages with congrats (I’m currently on holiday and also on the Gold Coast, 1 hour behind my normal time zone!). I checked out the official post (link below) and sure enough my name is listed there, along with 1400 odd other people! From what I’ve seen there were around 100 new members in 2017. Congratulations to all new and renewed members. I’m the 4th vExpert working for ViFX, a big congratulations to my vExpert colleagues Bayu Wibowo, Nick Bowie and Steven Kang. ...

Introduction The VMware vCenter Support Assistant is a free plugin made available by VMware in the form of a virtual appliance. After deploying the appliance, it can be registered to vSphere SSO and you can authorise one or more vCenter Servers to Support Assistant. Support Assistant provides the following benefits: Reactive support. You can use the Support Assistant plugin in the vSphere Web Client to easily create new service requests (SRs), as it is essentially a front end to the MyVMware portal. The big benefit of lodging the SR through Support Assistant is that you get the chance to automatically gather logs for different entities in your environment and these logs are automatically generated and uploaded to VMware as a background task. You can also manage existing SRs through support assistant to add comments, upload files or generate more logs ...

I manage an Exchange 2013 deployment at work which is configured in Hybrid with Office365. Recently we had to change our SSL certificate that was being used for both TLS for the hybrid connection and also for our client facing DNS names. Due to changes with our 3rd party SSL certificate provider, this was a new SSL certificate installation rather than a renewal. I generated the certificate and installed it onto all of the Exchange servers on-premises and during our change window, made the changes to bind the services to the new certificate and then ran the Hybrid connection wizard to update the certificate used in our On-Prem send connector to Office365 and also to the receive connector in our Office365 tenant. I’d confirmed the change was OK and sent some test emails back and forth over the hybrid connection, all looked good. ...