DR service for VMware datacenters uses AWS Cloud

VMware Site Recovery brings VMware enterprise-class Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) Disaster Recovery as a Service to the AWS Cloud. It enables customers to protect and recover applications without the requirement for a dedicated secondary site. It is delivered, sold, supported, maintained and managed by VMware as an on-demand service. 

IT teams manage their cloud-based resources with familiar VMware tools—without the difficulties of learning new skills or utilizing new tools.

Auto-discovery of on-premises infrastructure by connecting directly to VMware's vSphere server virtualization platform; a simplified policy engine that provides recovery points and recovery times ranging between one and 24 hours; and failback that brings only modified application data back to a primary site from an AWS disaster recovery site.

VMware Site Recovery is an add-on feature to VMware Cloud on AWS, powered by VMware Cloud Foundation.  VMware Cloud on AWS integrates VMware’s flagship compute, storage, and network virtualization products—VMware vSphere, VMware vSAN TM , and VMware NSX—along with VMware vCenter Server  management. It optimizes them to run on elastic, bare-metal AWS infrastructure. With the same architecture and operational experience on-premises and in the cloud, IT teams can now get instant business value via the AWS and VMware hybrid cloud experience.

VMware Site Recovery extends VMware Cloud on AWS to provide a managed disaster recovery, disaster avoidance and non-disruptive testing capabilities to VMware customers without the need for a secondary site, or complex configuration.

VMware Site Recovery works in conjunction with VMware Site Recovery Manager 8.0 and VMware vSphere Replication 8.0 to automate the process of recovering, testing, re-protecting, and failing-back virtual machine workloads.

VMware Site Recovery utilizes VMware Site Recovery Manager servers to coordinate the operations of the VMware SDDC. This is so that as virtual machines at the protected site are shut down, copies of these virtual machines at the recovery site startup. By using the data replicated from the protected site these virtual machines assume responsibility for providing the same services.

VMware Site Recovery can be used between a customer’s datacenter and an SDDC deployed on VMware Cloud on AWS or it can be used between two SDDCs deployed to different AWS availability zones or regions. The second option allows VMware Site Recovery to provide a fully VMware managed and maintained Disaster Recovery solution.

Features and Benefits of VMware Site Recovery

• Provides familiar features and functionality with enhanced workflows to reduce time to protection and risk
• An easy to use disaster recovery/secondary site that is supported and maintained by VMware. This lowers capital costs and makes it easier to protect more virtual machines faster.
• Application-agnostic protection eliminates the need for app-specific point solutions
• Automated orchestration of site failover and failback with a single-click reduces recovery times
• Frequent, non-disruptive testing of recovery plans ensures highly predictable recovery objectives
• Enhanced, easy to use, consolidated protection workflow simplifies replicating and protecting virtual machines
• Centralized management of recovery plans from the vSphere Web Client replaces manual runbooks
• vSphere Replication integration delivers VM-centric, replication that eliminates dependence on a particular type of storage
• Flexible versioning allows for easier upgrades and ongoing management

VMware Site Recovery is deployed in a paired configuration, for example, protected/customer site and recovery/VMware Cloud on AWS site. This document will use the two terms interchangeably because either the customer site or VMware Cloud on AWS site can be either the protected or recovery sites.

VMware Site Recovery utilizes VMware Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication. For the VMware Cloud on AWS instance, this software is automatically installed and configured by VMware when the add-on is enabled. For the customer site, VMware Site Recovery Manager is installed on a Microsoft Windows server and vSphere Replication is deployed as an appliance, both by the customer. VMware Site Recovery requires a VMware vCenter Server at the customer site as well. The customer site vCenter can be running either VMware vCenter Server version 6.0 U3 or 6.5. There must be one or more vSphere hosts running version 5.0 or higher at the customer site. VMware Site Recovery utilizes vSphere Replication for transferring data between sites.

VMware Site Recovery and VMware vCenter Server as well as the workloads they are protecting require infrastructure services like DNS, DHCP and Active Directory. These must be in place at both the protected and recovery sites.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!

Christmas gift: vSAN Essentials book available for free

Christmas is coming so Cormac and I figured we would do something special for everyone, after a long debate we decided to make the vSAN Essentials book available for free. Note that this is the “Essential Virtual SAN” book which was published by VMware Press / Pearson and is based on the 6.2 version of vSAN. The book however is still very relevant today, and of course we are considering doing an update of the content to either the latest release, or maybe even to an upcoming release. You can read the book online (which is what we recommend), but you can also download it as PDF, EPUB or MOBI format. 

Free vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive E-Book

The VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive is a guide to building consistent high-performing ESXi hosts. Written for administrators, architects, consultants, aspiring VCDX-es and people eager to learn more about the elements that control the behavior of CPU, memory, storage and network resources.

This book explains the concepts and mechanisms behind the physical resource components and the VMkernel resource schedulers, enabling you to:

• Optimize your workload for current and future Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) systems.

• Discover how vSphere Balanced Power Management takes advantage of the CPU Turbo Boost functionality, and why High Performance does not.

• Tune VMkernel components to optimize performance for VXLAN network traffic and NFV environments.

We are proud to announce that you can download the e-book version (PDF only) for free at rubrik.com. Just sign up and download your full e-book copy here.

VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware Cloud on AWS brings VMware enterprise-class Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) software to the AWS Cloud. It enables customers to run production applications across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments based on VMware vSphere, with optimized access to AWS services. It is delivered, sold, and supported by VMware as an on-demand service. IT teams manage their cloud-based resources with familiar VMware tools—without the difficulties of learning new skills or utilizing new tools.

The VMware Cloud on AWS solution enables customers to have the flexibility to treat their private cloud and public cloud as equal partners and to easily transfer workloads between them—for example, to move applications from DevTest to production or burst capacity. Users can leverage the global AWS footprint while getting the benefits of elastically scalable SDDC clusters, a single bill from VMware for its tightly integrated software plus AWS infrastructure, and on-demand or subscription services.

VMware Cloud on AWS - Getting Started

Get hands-on with the proposed UI design for VMC on AWS, meet with the design team to provide feedback. Help us choose among design alternatives for the best getting-started experience, creating SDDCs, and configuring networking and hybrid link mode.

VMware Cloud on AWS – Advanced Topics


Explore design alternatives and provide feedback on advanced topics to the VMware Cloud on AWS design team. Topics may include networking, workload migration, hybrid linked mode, logging, and maintenance for the patch and upgrade.

VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.5.1

VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.5.1 is an exciting released for VMware. vsphere 6.5.1 released added a number of cool features that make it easier to use SRM and vsphere Replication.

Site Recovery Manager 6.5.1

• VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.5.1 is compatible with VMware vSphere 6.5 Update 1.
• Supports upgrade migration path from vCenter Server Virtual Appliance 6.0 Update 3 to vCenter Server Virtual Appliance 6.5 Update 1 by delivering a direct upgrade path from Site Recovery Manager 6.1.2 to Site Recovery Manager 6.5.1.
• Site Recovery Manager 6.5.1 now supports the following external databases:
• Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Service Pack 2
• Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1
• Site Recovery Manager 6.5.1 now supports the following guest operating systems:
• Windows Server 2016
• CentOS 6.9
• RHEL 7.3.5
• Ubuntu 17.04 non Long Term Support (LTS) 

Vmware SRM 6.5.1 Release note

Vsphere Replication 6.5.1

• vSphere Replication 6.5.1 is compatible with VMware vSphere 6.5 Update 1.
• Supports upgrade migration path from vCenter Server Virtual Appliance 6.0 Update 3 to vCenter Server Virtual Appliance 6.5 Update 1 by delivering a direct upgrade path from vSphere Replication 6.1.2 to vSphere Replication 6.5.1.
• vSphere Replication 6.5.1 now supports the following external databases:
• Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Service Pack 2
• Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1
• vSphere Replication 6.5.1 now supports the following guest operating systems:
• Windows Server 2016
• CentOS 6.9
• RHEL 7.3.5
• Ubuntu 17.04 non Long Term Support (LTS)

VMware vSphere Replication 6.5.1 Release Note

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!

New Certification - VMware vSAN 2017 Specialist

The VMware vSAN 2017 Specialist badge holder is a technical professional who understands the vSAN 6.6 architecture and its complete feature set, knows how to conduct a vSAN design and deployment exercise, can implement a live vSAN hyper-converged infrastructure environment based on certified hardware/software components and best practices, and can administer/operate a vSAN cluster properly.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!

New Certification - VMware vRealize Operations 2017 Specialist

The VMware vRealize Operations 2017 Specialist is a technical professional who plans, manages and helps scale software-defined data center (SDDC) and multi-cloud environments through unified monitoring, automated performance management, cloud planning and capacity optimization. The badge holder helps organizations streamline and automate IT operations from applications to infrastructure across physical, virtual and cloud environments. 

This badge and associated requirements cover vRealize Operations 6.2 through vRealize Operations 6.5


I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!

Unsupported & Supported Functionality for the vsphere web client 6.5

Unsupported Functionality


The following table documents the vSphere Web Client workflow functionality not currently supported in the vSphere Client.

Supported Functionality

The following table documents the vSphere Web Client workflow functionality added in releases after VMware vSphere 6.5.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!

vSphere 6.5 Update 1 Released

vSphere 6.5 Update 1 is now available and it has some great enhancements. While we have seen 5 patch releases so far, 6.5 Update 1 rolls all of those updates together as well as includes some long awaited functionality.

General Updates and Enhancements

vSphere 6.5 Update 1 allows customers who are currently on vSphere 6.0 Update 3 to upgrade to vSphere 6.5 Update 1. All of the security and bug fixes that were part of 6.0 U3 are now included in 6.5 U1 whereas before, upgrading from 6.0 U3 to 6.5 prior to U1 would have put customers in a more risky position due to the timing of the releases. That concern is a thing of the past now, though, and we anticipate even more customers will begin their upgrade journeys.

It is important to note that customers who are still on vSphere 5.5 will need to be on at least vSphere 5.5 U3b in order to upgrade to vSphere 6.5 U1. This may mean a two-step process for some customers to get to vSphere 6.5 U1 but this is necessary in order to ensure the best possible outcome for the upgrade.

vCenter Server 

vSphere 6.5 Update 1 we’re increasing some of the maximums configuration.

• Maximum vCenter Servers per vSphere Domain: 15 (increased from 10)
• Maximum ESXi Hosts per vSphere Domain: 5000 (increased from 4000)
• Maximum Powered On VMs per vSphere Domain: 50,000 (increased from 30,000)
• Maximum Registered VMs per vSphere Domain: 70,000 (increased from 50,000)

With the increasing use of hybrid and private clouds, the increase in capacity comes at a crucial time.

vSphere Client

vSphere Client can be accessed via https://<vcenterfqdn>/ui and it is completely built on HTML5, requires no plugins, and it lightning fast. If you’ve been following along with the Fling version, the version in vSphere 6.5 Update 1 is roughly equivalent (actually a bit newer) than the bits in v3.15 of the Fling. You can view the items that we’re still working on getting into the vSphere Client.

vSAN 6.6.1

• vSphere Update Manager (VUM) Integration: The manual process of checking the VMware Compatibility Guide to ensure the upgraded version was supported with the specific hardware has been automated with a completely new Update Manager workflow.
• Performance Diagnostics: The vSAN Cloud Analytics capabilities have been improved with a proactive Performance Diagnostics feature that analyzes the performance of a given vSAN cluster against previously executed benchmarks.
• vSAN Licensing for ROBO and VDI: VDI and ROBO licensing editions are expanded with an Enterprise model that allows encryption and stretched clusters.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!

VMware Announces General Availability of vSphere 6.5 Update 1

VMware is excited to announce the general availability of vSphere 6.5 Update 1. This is the first major update to the well-received vSphere 6.5.With this update release, VMware builds upon the already robust industry-leading virtualization platform and further improves the IT experience for its customers. Many customers,have already benefited from upgrading to vSphere 6.5 to help address the challenges of digital transformation. For customers who have yet to upgrade, vSphere 6.5 Update 1 serves as a validation milestone signaling to them product stability and that now the right time to upgrade.

vSphere 6.5 focuses on 4 areas of innovation directly targeted at the challenges customers face as they digitally transform their businesses.

Simplified customer experience – Re-architected vCenter Server Appliance, streamlined HTML5-based GUI, and simple rest-based APIs for automation.

Comprehensive Built in Security – Policy-driven security at scale to secure data, infrastructure, and access.

Universal App Platform – A single platform to support any application, anywhere.

Proactive Data Center Management – Predictive analytics to address potential issues before they become serious problem.

vSphere 6.5 Update 1 further refines vSphere 6.5 while also adding key additional support and enhancements including:

vSphere Client Now Supports 90% of General Workflows

The HTML5-based vSphere Client now can support up to 90% of general workflows.  This is welcomed news as VMware pushes towards 100% parity between the various clients.

vCenter Server Foundation Now Support 4 Hosts

In discussions with customers with smaller environments, VMware has received feedback that 3 host environments were too small in many cases.  If VMware vCenter Server Foundation could just support 1 additional host that would make all the difference.  This is why with vSphere 6.5 Update 1 VMware is now increasing the number of hosts that vCenter Server Foundation will support from 3 host to 4.

vSphere Support and Interoperability Across Ecosystems

VMware prides itself on having one of the broadest ecosystems across any industry.  As with any new product, at initial release, some partners were not ready with compatible versions of their products.  Many of these incompatibilities are now a thing of the past, as we have worked with our partners to test and ensure interoperability.  Furthermore, the ecosystem is also expanding as we forge new alliances to add vendor support for things such as Security Key Management and Proactive HA, to name a few.

vSphere 6.5 General Support Has Been Extended

VMware understands that upgrading infrastructure can be a lengthy process.   One consideration for whether or not to upgrade is how long the new product will be supported.  VMware wants to make the customer’s decision to upgrade easier by extending general support for vSphere 6.5 for a full 5 years.  This means that support for vSphere 6.5 will now end November 15, 2021.

Upgrade from vSphere 6.0 Update 3 Now Supported

Customers who are on vSphere 6.0 Update 3 now have a supported upgrade path to vSphere 6.5.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!

vSphere 6.5 update 1 Release Note

Release notes:

vCenter Server 6.5 Update 1

ESXi 6.5 Update 1

Vmware SRM 6.5.1 Release note

VMware vSphere Replication 6.5.1

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!

vSAN 6.6.1 with VUM Integration

This is a timeless idea that could not be more true when it comes to software design.  It’s one of the reasons why so many IT organizations are looking to replace complex infrastructures requiring the expertise of storage, networking and compute professionals with HCI solutions like VMware vSAN. This concept of simplicity being the “ultimate sophistication” was the first thing I thought of when I learned about the integration of VMware vSphere Update Manager (VUM) in vSAN 6.6.1.

Today’s IT admins understand the complexity of keeping infrastructures up to date. This has traditionally been a manual task with multiple sources of truth to get to the right update/upgrade, patch, driver levels; a complex, manual task with high risk of human error.

vSphere Update Manager (VUM) performs zero-downtime patching and upgrading of VMware ESXi clusters and is a very popular update tool for many VMware environments. VMware engineers decided to integrate VUM into vSAN with one goal in mind: Simplicity. As a result, vSAN patch and version management is not only a process now fully integrated in vSAN but the VUM process itself has been drastically simplified.

VUM High Level Architecture

vSAN 6.6.1 and later provides a seamless automated update process to ensure a vSAN cluster is up to date with the best available release to keep your hardware in a supported state. vSAN version recommendations are automatically generated using information from the VMware Compatibility Guide, the vSAN Release Catalog, and awareness of the underlying hardware configuration. This also includes the necessary drivers and patch updates for the recommended release in its system baseline. vSAN build recommendations will make sure that the clusters will remain at the current hardware compatibility status or better. In cases, where the existing cluster is not on HCL, vSAN will recommend users upgrade to the latest release. The key point here is that this vSAN baseline will only be updated to the highest level of compatibility based on your environment, making the upgrade process a much more predictable experience.

Configuring vSphere Update Manager

The first step is to add your my.vmware.com credentials to the vSAN Build Recommendation Engine. After successful login vSAN will generate a baseline group of recommended updates for each vSAN cluster. vSAN system baselines are listed in the Baselines pane of the Baselines and Groups tab.

vSAN Build Recommendation

For hosts running 6.0 Update 1 and earlier, use the Ruby vSphere Console to enter the My VMware credentials. To enter My VMware credentials from RVC, run the following command: vsan.login_iso_depot -u <username> -p <password>

vSAN Build Recommendations in vSphere Update Manager

vSAN build recommendations are provided through vSAN system baselines for Update Manager. In Figure 3 the 7 hosts in my vSAN cluster are running 6.0 Update 2. After checking the VMware Compatibility Guide and the vSAN Release Catalog, using the vSAN baseline, Update Manager determined there is a recommended update available.  As a result, all 7 hosts are non-compliant. The next step is to remediate.

Note: vSAN baselines are read-only and managed by vSAN.  They exist alongside user created baselines. Users can continue to create and remediate their own baselines as they wish. All baselines can either be remediated on a per-host or a per-cluster basis.

Updating a vSAN Cluster

To update the vSAN cluster, simply use the remediate feature of Update Manager. The Remediate wizard offers several options to customize the upgrade:

• Select the desired hosts as the target of your remediation.
• Schedule the upgrade to run immediately or at a later date and time.
• Specify Maintenance Mode options (i.e. VM power state, removable media handling and ESXi patch settings)
• Specify cluster remediation options. When remediating a cluster, you should temporarily disable certain cluster features. Update Manager will automatically re-enable the features after remediation.

After selecting the desired options, Update Manager will perform a rolling upgrade of each host, non-disruptively migrating your VMs to other hosts during the upgrade. While the host is offline vSAN marks all components on the host as absent. To ensure availability, if for some reason, the patched host does not come back online within 60 minutes (default CLOM timer delay), vSAN will start rebuilding these components on other hosts just like it would in any other host-offline situation. Upon completion of the upgrade you will notice each host is now placed in the Compliant tab.

Before using Update Manager in vSAN 6.6.1 be sure to verify the following:

• If running a Windows-based vCenter Server, verify Update Manager is installed and configured.
• vSAN requires Internet access to update release metadata, to check the VMware Compatibility Guide, and to download ISO images from My VMware.
• vSAN requires valid My VMware (my.vmware.com) credentials to download ISO images for upgrades.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!

VMware vSAN 6.6

VMware vSAN 6.6 is the industry-leading software powering Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions. vSAN is optimized for VMware vSphere virtual machines and natively integrated with vSphere . Since drives internal to the vSphere hosts are used to create a vSAN datastore, there is no dependency on expensive, difficult to manage, external shared storage.

vSAN already integration with vSphere and the VMware ecosystem makes it the ideal storage platform for business-critical applications, disaster recovery sites, remote office and branch office (ROBO) implementations, test and development environments, management clusters, security zones, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Today, customers of all industries and sizes trust vSAN to run their most important applications.

All-flash configurations provide the highest levels of performance with very low latencies for demanding business-critical applications. Space efficiency features such as inline deduplication and compression minimize capacity consumption, which reduces capital expenditures. Per-virtual machine (VM) storage policy-based management lowers operational expenditures by enabling administrators to manage performance, availability, and capacity consumption with ease and precision. This means no more LUN management.

Many deployment options are available for vSAN. These options range from single, 2-node clusters for small implementations to multiple clusters each with as many as 64 nodes—all centrally managed by vCenter Server. Stretched clusters can easily be configured to enable cross-site protection with no downtime for disaster avoidance and rapid, automated recovery from entire site failure.

vSAN 6.6, the sixth generation of vSAN, is designed to help customers modernize their infrastructure by addressing three key IT needs: higher security, lower costs, and faster performance. For example, vSAN 6.6 further lowers total cost of ownership by providing more resilient, economical stretched clusters that are easy to deploy and maintain.

New Features

• vSAN Encryption
• Stretched Cluster with Local Site Protection
• Removal of Multicast Support Unicast Networking (Cloud-friendly Networking with Unicast)
• ESXi Host Client (HTML-5) management and monitoring functionality
• Enhanced rebalancing
• Enhanced repairs
• Enhanced resync
• Resync throttling
• Maintenance Pre-Check
• Stretched Cluster Witness Replacement UI
• API enhancements
• vSAN Easy Install
• Enhanced Health Monitoring

The industry’s first native HCI encryption solution and a highly available control plane is delivered in vSAN 6.6 to help customers evolve without risk without sacrificing flash storage efficiencies. Operational costs are reduced with 1-click firmware and driver updates, as well as, proactive cloud-connected health checks for real-time support.

vSAN has been enhanced with up to 50% greater flash performance enabling customers to scale to tomorrow’s IT demands. vSAN storage services are integrated with the Photon Platform with full API management to support container technologies and take advantage of DevOps efficiency.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!

VMware vRealize Automation 7.3

vRealize Automation 7.3, the next iteration of VMware’s industry-leading cloud automation platform. While this is a an incremental “dot” release on the outside, it packs a punch in feature/functionality on the inside.

This release continues the trend of delivering awesome innovations, improved user experience and greater / deeper integration into the ecosystem its managing. Below is a summary of many of the new features and capabilities that are packed into vRA 7.3.

Enhanced API’s for Deploying, Upgrading and Migrating vRA - A new set of APIs to programmatically install, upgrade, and migrate the platform itself.

REST API Improvements – Customers can now deploy, configure, manage and consume vRealize Automation using a variety of programatic interfaces thanks to vRA’s ever-evolving REST API. VMware has released several new resources to help promote the use of these APIs, including the vRealize Automation Programing Guide, an updated Postman collection that includes several of the most commonly used API’s, and many additions to VMware{code}.

Audit Logging Framework – Tracking and analyzing user activity and security events is a critical enterprise requirement. vRA’s new Audit Logging Framework provides system-wide logging and auditing capabilities to gain additional visibility into your vRA environment. The VAMI-accessible Audit Log Integration option adds seamless integration with vRealize Log Insight and other syslog solutions, enables logging of essential services across IaaS and .net (windows) services, can be used to audit workflow subscriptions, IaaS services and more. The new service can be enabled in the VAMI or via API.

Integrated Health Service – The Health Service (vRPT) has now been integrated into vRealize Automation admin interface.

Parameterized Blueprints – This new feature leverages Size and Image policies to create consistent sizing policies (e.g. Small, Medium, Large, etc) intended to reduce blueprint sprawl.

Intelligent Workload Placement (WLP) – vRealize Automation can now use data in vRealize Operations (version 6.6) to provide analytics-based capacity management on vSphere. This includes the initial placement of a new instance, optimised according to performance goals, a ‘Balance’ policy used to maintain maximum headroom in case of spikes and a ‘Consolidate’ policy to leave space for large workloads.

Container Management – vRealize Automation now natively supports VMware Integrated Containers (VIC), allowing admins to add/manage VCH instances in vRA with a feature set similar traditional Docker hosts. vRA 7.3 also adds support for Docker volumes, allowing authors to create / attach volumes to containers and deploy volumes with container apps.

Config Automation Framework – vRA 7.3 adds native integration with Puppet, allowing actions such registering Puppet Master as an endpoint, drag-and-dropping Puppet nodes, dynamically querying Puppet Master, environment, and roles.

Azure Public Cloud Service Design Enhancements – A number of enhancements to the new Azure Endpoint like the ability to select, drag-and-drop software components on Azure machines in the blueprint designer, specify software properties on the blueprint designer and on the request form plus a set of pre-populated forms and dropdowns.

The control of NSX Endpoints is now extended to:

NSX on-demand NAT

• Port forwarding rules can be configured at design time
• Rules can be ordered
• Rules can be added, removed, and reordered after you create them

NSX Security Group and Tag Management

• Able to add existing NSX security groups or tags to a running application
• Able to disassociate NSX security groups and tags from applications

High Availability Automated for NSX Edge Services

• Edge high-availability mode in the blueprint provides high availability for all edge services to an application when it is deployed
• Configurable per blueprint based on application availability needs
• Use custom properties to determine high availability at request time
• Adds high availability for load balancing, NAT, firewall, and so on

NSX Edge Size Selection

• Able to specify deployment size for NSX Edge Services Gateway (ESG)
• Configurable per-blueprint based on application needs or scale
• Uses custom properties for size selection at request time

Beta Launch of docs.vmware.com

Today we are pleased to announce the beta launch of the docs.vmware.com site. This portal unifies the product documentation for all products, versions, and languages into a single site so you can find the information that you are looking for more quickly. VMware products offer a wide range of business solutions from desktop virtualization to support your hybrid cloud. We’ve heard your feedback that finding the right information can be difficult. Our search was out of date, the look and feel was not modern, the content was siloed, and the docs were not available on mobile devices. To address these problems, we decided to create a new site from scratch. The design of this site is meant to enable you to better filter content, find relevant answers, and create custom views of information that you can access on any device.

Filter to Find What You Need

With tens of thousands of pages of information, you need help reducing the scope of content to the products that you care about. Use the filters to limit your search to particular products, versions, or information types.

Let us know if you want to get involved in helping us evolve our docs. Expect to hear more about the docs.vmware.com site as we prepare for the official launch.

Find “Zombie” VMDK files

Today’s post is titled find “Zombie” vmdk files , I was recently working with a customer whose task was to find out multiple snapshots that are not displayed in the snapshot manager.

I tried a lot of time to skip this problem with consolidation of the Virtual Machine but in this scenario this solution seems that doesn’t work.

The reason behind this task was that many of the virtual Machine where snapshot remove from virtual machine and the customer was not sure on how to clear up the “Zombi” vmdk files.

In order to remove safely the snapshots that you see in your vCenter you have to dig a little from the esxi hosts , my choice ran it RVTools and export the vCenter report.

vHealth tab that showed all Zombie VMDK’s “zombie” VMs and also listed VM’s that where named differently from their corresponding folder.

VMware vSphere Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO) Editions

I was recently working with RFP for one of the Existing customer, this project is for remote site ESXi refresh. I found there is lot of inconsistency with ESXi version. All are running with Enterprise puls and found more than 70 + sites running with less than 15 VMs.

There are various ways that we can go ahead and refresh these ESXi hosts. I found another alternate solution with cost savings called vSphere ROBO ( Remote office Branch office ) licenses which is more cost effective and licenses are provided by VMWARE with virtual machine based pack.

VSphere ROBO is 25 VM’s pack , this is applicable for sites with maximum 25 VMs only and can also be shared between sites.

Customers can purchase these editions in packs of 25 Virtual Machines (VMs). A maximum of 1 pack can be deployed per remote site or branch office. Customers can choose to distribute a pack of 25 Virtual Machines across sites (e.g., 5 VMs in Site 1, 5 VM in Site 2 etc.).

Customers can centrally manage their ROBO hosts using VMWare vCenter server Standard or locally using vCenter server foundation.

VSphere ROBO is available in Standard and advanced version. Here, I will list the key features and components.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!