Hot VMware Topics – March 2016

It’s time for the March edition of our Hot VMware Topics post! We’ve had a number of large developments this past month, and there is a lot to discuss. Most likely the largest announcements stem from the release of vSphere 6.0 Update 2 and it’s associated technologies, but we have a number of good un-associated posts to talk about as well. Regardless, this should be some good reading and catch-up for anyone that hasn’t been able to keep track of all the happenings in the VMware world of the last month! We hope you enjoy!

1. VMware Virtual SAN Automated Deployments with PowerCLI

I’ve been doing a lot of work with PowerCLI as of late, so when I came across this article, I was instantly interested. This post comes from Rawlinson Rivera over at the Punching Clouds blog, and has some excellent information in it. VSAN, as technologies go, is already quite simple to setup, but what if we wanted to automate that deployment? What if you needed to deploy the same configuration multiple times at multiple different locations? This post will show you how, and even supplies a nice script to get you started.

2. Migrating from Hybrid to All-Flash VSAN

As the cost of flash storage continues to drop, we’re seeing more and more organization adopt the all-flash approach with storage. While setting this up from scratch can be quite simple, it can become quite difficult with some storage solutions to migrate to an all-flash state. This is NOT the case with VSAN. The above article comes from Duncan Epping, and he provides a simple-to-follow list of tasks to complete when you’re ready to migrate your Hybrid VSAN implementation to All-Flash. This is a good one to put in the bookmarks if your organization is currently looking at all-flash VSAN configurations. Enjoy!

3. VMware ESXi 6.0 Update 2 Release Notes

While 6.0 Update 2 was announced earlier in the month, it appears that the official release notes documentation was just updated a coupel of days ago (as of the time of this writing). There is a lot to be excited about in this new update release of vSphere. Some personal favorites of mine are the VMware Host Client, and VSAN 6.2. Another thing to be excited about with this release is the fact that there was no hardware removed from the vSphere compatibility list, which is always a plus! This is worth a good read during lunch if you haven’t had a chance to catch up on all the various enhancements and changes introduced in this release.

4. vSphere HTML5 Web Client Fling – Getting Started

With the vSphere web client now able to manage stand alone hosts, as announced with vSphere 6.0 Update 2, a lot of admins have been discussing the current web client’s Flash requirement and the fact that it can be something of a security risk, considering Flash’s history. Well this issue is being reviewed and will likely be removed at some point because VMware has a new web client that is now based on the HTML5 standard instead of flash and it is currently available as part of the Fling program. For those that aren’t familiar with the Fling program, think of it as a beta program. It’s a place where you can get some of the most bleeding edge software to test inside of your environment and provide feedback if wanted. Needless to say, you shouldn’t deploy anything from here into production, but it’s worth a good look to see whats coming in future releases.

5. Can the Host Client Replace the Fat Client? – Full ESXi Configuration Walkthrough

The announcement of the vSphere host client in vSphere 6.0 Update 2 made a lot of vSphere admins quite happy. One of the last remaining hurdles to get over when using the new web client is the fact that it couldn’t be used to manage stand-alone hosts. With this latest release, that is no longer the case. With that said, Florian from the virten.net blog has put together a very nice article on whether the new host client is capable of completing the configuration of a new ESXi host from the ground up.

6. Virtually Speaking Podcast Episode 7 – VSAN Customer Use Cases

So, while this article *technically* has an April 2nd publishing date on it, I liked it so much I wanted to make sure it got published along with the rest of March’s links. This one is brought to you once again by Duncan Epping and the folks from the Virtually Speaking Podcast, and it features a discussion about VSAN and it’s various use cases, so it really makes for an interesting hour of listening during lunch some day.

7. Upgrade to vRealize Log Insight 3.3

It seems like there is always a software upgrade to apply somewhere, and vSphere technologies are no exception. Recently vRealize Log Insight version 3.3 was released with a number of new improvments including new parsers, in-production cluster checks and more. In this article Anne Jan Elsinga from the VMGuru blog discusses what is new, and then provides instructions on how the upgrade is completed and managed. Another good one here to put in the bookmarks for when you’re ready for it.

8. VM Snapshot – How to Change the Default VMware Snapshot Location in ESXi 6

When I put these lists together, I always like to include at least one how to on some basic vSphere administration type stuff. Not every administrator is going to need every function/feature right away, and something always comes up eventually that you may not necessarily know how to do. My choice for this category this month comes from Mohammed Raffic via the VMware Arena blog. Changing the default snapshot location may seem like a simple thing, but just like anything else, if you don’t know how to do it, you don’t know how. This article will walk you through the needed steps on how to complete this task.

Wrap-Up

Well, that wraps it up for us this month. Hopefully this has been a useful list for you and has helped you to get caught up on all the current stuff in the VMware universe. If you came across an article that you think should be a part of this list, be sure to let us know in the comments section below.

Thanks for reading!

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