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!