Category Archives: VMware

VMware provides now an “Migration” feature in a new release of vRealize Automation 8

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Hello the VMware community. VMware has released yesterday a small but important update to vRA 8.

So what’s new?

Well, in the very first release of vRA 8, it wasn’t possible yet to migrate from vRA 7.x , due to the major changes in the architecture. it was just a matter of time before VMware brings up the functionality.

But from now on, you can migrate your existing vRA 7.5 or 7.6 environnent to 8.0.1. VMware also says that a migration is possible by creating a brand new vRA 8 platform and then migrate all the configuration from an existing vRA 7.x environment.

I can imagine that a lot of people was waiting for this feature which is quite important and especially when it comes to a major release of a product. So guys let’s go to our homelabs or test environment and do some migrations.

VMware also developed a new migration assessment tool to collect “offline” data from your vRA, vRO or external vRO source environment. Then you can upload the collected data during the assessment phase of your new installation.

The new features below are part of vRA 8.0.1 as well:

  • Git Integrations
  • Blueprint Properties Editor
  • API enhancements for Networking and Deployments
  • Extensibility VA and ABX resiliency enhancements
  • vRO based catalog services now support array/number as inputs parameters
  • Custom forms enhancements

You can download the new release of vRA 8 below.

vRealize Automation 8.0.1 download

And here is the official release note where you’ll find more details about that new release, bugs fixes, known issues and so on.

vRA 8.0.1 Release Note

I’ll try soon to publish a new post describing the whole migration process, so stay put!

VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts Beta announced

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Last week at AWS re:Invent, AWS and VMware made an interesting announcement. The launch of the beta program of VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts.

Some lucky customers will be able to participate to the beta program before a general availability somewhere in 2020.

So what was VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts about again?

If you remember, VMware and AWS unveiled last year a new offering: “VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts”, to allow customers to take benefit of VMware Cloud on AWS, but on premise into their data center.

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vRealize Automation 8.0 – Installation

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vRealize Automation 8 was released last week and I wanted to share with you how to do the installation of that new version.

Like I stated in a previous blog post, vRA 8 comes in a brand new platform built on a container-based architecture running on Photon OS 2.0.

As you know, no more Windows machines is required but the vRA 8 appliance includes all the services such as Cloud Assembly, Service Broker, Code Stream, and vRealize Orchestrator that leverage the main product.

There are some prerequisites before installing vRA 8. You will have first to deploy the Lifecycle Manager and then the Identity Manager. Know that you can also migrate earlier version of LCM and IDM if you have older version running in your environment. However it is not possible to install each component by deploying their respective OVA files.

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vRealize Automation 8.0 announced at VMworld

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That was unexepected and many of you may have not heard about it, but it is here. vRealize Automation 8 was announced at VMworld 2019 US.

New Architecture

vRealize Automation 8.0 Architecture

vRealize Automation 8 comes with a new and modern platform built on a container-based architecture that offers more scalability and performance than in previous versions.

No more Windows Server machine is required for the installation. Yes, you read right! Administrators and Engineers working on vRA 6 and 7 would be more than happy to hear that, as previous installations were a real pain and especially with vRA 6.

Only one VM can now run all vRA services but the infrastructure can also be extented to support a three nodes configuration if more scaling and high availability is required.

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Google welcomes VMware to its Cloud Platform

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It’s official! VMware and Google Cloud team up to deliver a new Cloud platform to customers.

This new partnership will allow VMware to extend once more its muti-cloud portfolio and run VMware Cloud Fondation into Google Cloud.

So what’s up with that new offering?

Google will leverage on their platform the full VMware stack that include of course vSphere, but also vSAN and NSX-T, and Google Cloud will be in charge of the support. It is worth to mention that this solution is developped by CloudSimple, the same company that brought us VMware on Microsoft Azure.

The new solution will be available in late 2019, no region has been mentioned yet for the launch but my guess is it will be the US as usual.

This is becoming really interesting because if you remember well, VMware first teamed up in 2017 with AWS to reveal the WMware Cloud on AWS offering, then was announced a partnership with IBM and more recently at the last DellTechnology World was revealed the VMware Cloud on Microsoft Azure solution.

Now VMware’s customers have again the opportunity to expand their on premise infrastructure to a hybride cloud with the provider of their choice and take benefit of their public cloud services.

Now the question is, which one will be the best fit for you and your workloads ? 2020 is gonna be for VMware a year full of multi-cloud awesomeness!

VMware vExpert 2019

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I’m really proud and honored to become a vExpert this year and more especially because this is my very first time!

Many of you may know what is the vExpert program but for those who are not aware of it, here’s a description that you could also find on the official vExpert website.

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My experience on implementing VMware Datastores into VPLEX

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The purpose of this operation was to encapsulate existing datastores into VPLEX to take benefit of the synchronous and high availability features of VPLEX Metro between 2 sites.

Unfortunately I got into trouble with an issue that I really didn’t expect and anticipate. This is why I thought important to give you my experience on this and hopefully help anyone planning to do the same. But before going any further, let me give you some info regarding the customer environement and VPLEX.

Résultat de recherche d'images pour "vplex"

VPLEX is a virtual storage system that stands between your storage arrays and your hosts. It virtualizes all arrays connected to it and then presents as one storage system your volumes to hosts.

So basically, you attach any compatible storage to VPLEX and then the magic goes, all your hosts will see just one array with the volumes you’d like to present. I won’t go into details on how to configure VPLEX as this is out of scope in this article.

One of the strength of VPLEX is that it’s a great storage system and perhaps the best allowing to have a real active-active infrastructure and migrate VMs easyly between multiple sites. But is good also for migration of multiple storage arrays.

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VMware released vSphere 6.5 Update 3

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VMware just released vSphere Update 3 that includes mainly security fixes and enhancements.

So what’s new with ESXi 6.5 U3

The ESXi 6.5 Update 3 release includes the following list of new features.

  • The ixgben driver adds queue pairing to optimize CPU efficiency.
  • With ESXi 6.5 Update 3 you can track license usage, refresh switch topology and see improvements in the search and Developer Center in the vSphere Client.
  • ESXi 6.5 Update 3 provides legacy support for AMD Zen 2 servers.
  • Multiple driver updates: ESXi 6.5 Update 3 provides updates to the lsi-msgpt2, lsi-msgpt35, lsi-mr3, lpfc/brcmfcoe, qlnativefc, smartpqi, nvme, nenic, ixgben, i40en and bnxtnet drivers.
  • ESXi 6.5 Update 3 provides support for Windows Server Failover Clustering and Windows Server 2019.
  • ESXi 6.5 Update 3 adds the com.vmware.etherswitch.ipfixbehavior property to distributed virtual switches to enable you to choose how to track your inbound and outbound traffic, and utilization. With a value of 1, the com.vmware.etherswitch.ipfixbehavior property enables sampling in both ingress and egress directions. With a value of 0, you enable sampling in egress direction only, which is also the default setting.

To see the full release note it’s here : https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.5/rn/vsphere-esxi-65u3-release-notes.html

And what’s up with vCenter 6.5 U3

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