Introduction With the release of Cohesity version 6.2, there is support to protect Exchange Online Office365 mailboxes natively within the product. Protecting data in a SaaS platform is always an interesting discussion. At the end of the day, there is a shared responsibility model at play here, and as the customer and/or consumer, there are still some very valid reasons you’d want to ensure you are protecting business critical data such as exchange online mailboxes.

This approached very quickly, and next week one of the hottest VMware events in ANZ will be held in Sydney and Melbourne - the VMUG UserCon events! VMUG UserCons are a free one day event held once a year featuring a small vendor expo area, lots of educational sessions throughout the day, excellent opening and closing keynotes and of course the opportunity to mingle with industry peers, catch up with old friends and make a few new friends.

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(?

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.

Overview A few weeks ago VMware released vSphere 6.7U1, and in that release comes a tool that has been desired by many customers and partners, which is the vCenter Converge Tool, or in other words, a tool to convert an external vCenter and PSC architecture in to an embedded deployment. In the last few releases of vCenter Server, VMware have supported replication of the PSC functionality between embedded deployment models, including Enhanced Linked Mode (named Embedded Linked Mode for an embedded deployment).

Disclaimer: Vembu are a sponsor of Virtual Tassie and this post is a sponsored blog post. This post has been written in my own words but may contain some material supplied by Vembu for an upcoming release or announcement. Vembu have been hard at work behind the scenes on a new version of their BDR suite and version 4.0 is due for release soon. As a quick recap, the BDR Suite is a range of products available from Vembu to help businesses with data protection and disaster recovery of their workloads.

Update 27th October 2018: I was meant to provide this update last weekend, but it has been a hectic week. Within a few hours of posting this issue, a few people at VMware reached out to me to understand more about my configuration, asked me to upload the logs and a few of the smart guys and gals at VMware had been able to reproduce the issue. As it turns out, the key in the APPLMGMT_PASSWORD vecs store is used when a file based backup of the VCSA is scheduled.

Runecast were the last company I had the pleasure of being a delegate for at the Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2018. I’ve written about Runecast on this blog before, and I really like who they are and what they do. Runecast is a proactive VMware management solution, delivered as a pre-packaged appliance, that aims to provide you with issue prevention, security compliance and log analytics for your VMware environment before any major outages occur.

DISCLAIMER: During VMworld 2018 US (Las Vegas), I was invited as a delegate to the Tech Field Day Extra (TFDx) event. I was not compensated in any way, my conference pass was complimentary as I was a speaker at the event and other expenses were covered by my employer, Parallo. I’m not required to write this blog post, I chose to do so of my own accord. This blog post is aimed to summarise the presentation that I was present for and also to provide some additional information about the company or solution presented on, which is all based on my opinion.

Next week the “ANZ” vForum event will be held once again in Sydney, Australia. The conference is returning to Sydney’s Luna Park where is was held 4 years ago in 2014 (from memory to celebrate a 10 year milestone of sorts), and that event was also my first vForum. vForum is also returning as a two day event after the format was changed last year to a one day event. I’m honestly not sure what the feedback was around it being a one day event, but VMware adjusting it back to two days speaks for itself.