This week (12-06/15-06), I attended a VMware training (thanks to my employer ITQ). The training is only available for VMware partners and is called “NSX LiveFire”. It was held at the VMware office in Sofia City, Bulgaria. The training is a technical training given by VMware employees. This time by the following three instructors Bal Birdy, Luca Camarda and Nikodim Nikodimov.
Category: VMware
VMware is a virtualization and cloud computing software vendor based in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1998, VMware is now a subsidiary of Dell Technologies. VMware bases its virtualization technologies on its bare-metal hypervisor ESX/ESXi in x86 architecture.
vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) v1.1
This week VMware released vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) version 1.1. Below are the product highlights and a small introduction to the new product.
Information about VMware Integrated Containers
vSphere Integrated Containers comprises three components:
- VMware vSphere Integrated Containers Engine, a container runtime for vSphere that allows developers who are familiar with Docker to develop in containers and deploy them alongside traditional VM-based workloads on vSphere clusters. vSphere administrators can manage these workloads by using vSphere in a way that is familiar.
- VMware vSphere Integrated Containers Registry, an enterprise-class container registry server that stores and distributes container images. vSphere Integrated Containers Registry extends the Docker Distribution open source project by adding the functionalities that an enterprise requires, such as security, identity and management.
- VMware vSphere Integrated Containers Management Portal, a container management portal that provides a UI for DevOps teams to provision and manage containers, including retrieving stats and info about container instances. Cloud administrators can manage container hosts and apply governance to their usage, including capacity quotas and approval workflows. When integrated with vRealize Automation, more advanced capabilities become available, such as deployment blueprints and enterprise-grade Containers-as-a-Service.
With these capabilities, vSphere Integrated Containers enables VMware customers to deliver a production-ready container solution to their developers and DevOps teams. By leveraging their existing SDDC, customers can run container-based applications alongside existing virtual machine based workloads in production without having to build out a separate, specialized container infrastructure stack. As an added benefit for customers and partners, vSphere Integrated Containers is modular. So, for example, if your organization already has a container registry in production, you can use that registry with vSphere Integrated Containers Engine and vSphere Integrated Containers Management Portal.
New features:
- A unified OVA installer for all three components
- Upgrade from version 1.0
- Official support for vSphere Integrated Containers Management Portal
- A unified UI for vSphere Integrated Containers Registry and vSphere Integrated Containers Management Portal
- A plug-in for the HTML5 vSphere Client
- Support for Docker Client 1.13 and Docker API version 1.25
- Support for using Notary with vSphere Integrated Containers Registry
- Support for additional Docker commands. For the list of Docker commands that this release supports, see Supported Docker Commands in Developing Container Applications with vSphere Integrated Containers.
For more information read the links below.
Links:
Photon Platform 1.2 is available
Photon Platform version 1.2 has been released this week. Keep in mind the support for VMware ESXi 6.0 has been dropped for Photon Platform version 1.2.
What’s new:
- Support for Kubernetes 1.6
- Simpler Cluster Management
- Static and Dynamic Persistent Volumes
- Master and Worker Node High Availability
- Pod Networking and Enhancements
- AD/LDAP and Security
- Quota Based Dynamic Resource Allocation
- SDK and API
For more information read the links below.
Links:
NLVMUG 2017
On March 16 2017, I attended the NLVMUG 2017 in the Netherlands. Frank Denneman from VMware presented the opening keynote about “VMware Cloud on AWS”. The NLVMUG is a one-day event and displayed 65 sessions, a remarkably high number. The NLVMUG is one of the largest/is the largest VMUG in the world.
This week the NLVMUG organization published the presentations and recorded sessions online. The information is for everyone available and free of charge.
Links:
– NLVMUG website
– NLVMUG YouTube channel
VMware Product Vulnerability (CVE-2017-5638)
A security vulnerability has been discovered in some VMware products (CVE-2017-5638). It’s a critical vulnerability which allows remote code execution (RCE) on Apache Struts 2.
The vulnerability affects the following VMware products:
– DaaS 6.X / 7.X
– Hyperic 5.X
– vCenter 5.5 / 6.0 / 6.5
– vROPS 6.X
Changing Guest Time Synchronization Setting From Within-Guest OS
I recently got a question about enabling and disabling the quest time synchronization for virtual machines. The customer asked about a solution to change the settings from within the operating system instead of the VMware vSphere Client or vSphere Web Client. Normally you would change the virtual machine time synchronization settings by hand with the vSphere Client/Web Client/HTML5 or with a PowerCLI script, but after some searching, it appears, there is a solution provided by VMware.
Read more
PowerCLI Datastore Selection without Storage DRS (SDRS)
When deploying some virtual machines in a test environment I ran into the following problem. In most cases, I make use of a VMware vCenter Storage DRS cluster, in this case when deploying a virtual machine the best-suited datastore is selected for the virtual machines. The only problem is not all customers are entitled to use Storage DRS, because Storage DRS requires a vSphere Enterprise Plus license.
So I needed to create a workaround to select a datastore with enough space. The default PowerCLI behavior is selecting the first datastore detected on a alphabetic order.
So when you are deploying let’s say twenty virtual machines all those virtual machines will be put on the first datastore, so that isn’t going to work well in most cases.
PowerCLI Code
To solve the problem I created the following PowerCLI code. The code selects a cluster and lists all the datastore available. The datastore with the most space available is selected for the virtual machine that is being deployed.
In the PowerCLI code, I just create a very simple virtual machine but you probably get the point. The magic is the $DS line that selects the datastore.
Requirements:
The PowerShell code is tested with the following VMware software components on Microsoft Windows:
- PowerCLI 6.5 Update 1
- VMware vCenter Server 6.0
### Variables
$CLUSTER = "Production" # A Cluster Name
$FOLDER = "Deployed VMs" # A Virtual Machine folder name located in the vCenter inventory
### Select datastores available and sort them on free space (select the one with most space free)
$DS = Get-Cluster -Name $CLUSTER | Get-Datastore | Select Name, FreeSpaceGB | Sort-Object FreeSpaceGB -Descending | Select -first 1
### Create a virtual machine called VM01
New-VM -Name VM01 -ResourcePool $CLUSTER -Datastore $DS.Name -Location $FOLDER -MemoryGB 1 -CD -DiskGB 5Article update:
- 2018-07-30 – Added feature image.
- 2018-11-17 – Updated article to support the new standards of the website.
VMware VCAP6-DCV Deployment Certification
On 1 February 2017, I passed the VMware VCAP6-DCV Deployment exam (3V0-623). This was my first VMware VCAP exam that I ever did. I prepped for about two months in my Home Lab environment and a couple of times I used the VMware Hands-on Labs. The main goal wat to exercise all the objectives listed in the exam blueprint.
So what exactly is the VCAP6-DCV Deployment exam? VMware describes it as following:
This exam tests your skills and abilities in implementation of a vSphere 6.x solution, including deployment, administration, optimization and troubleshooting.
Lab environment:
In my home lab environment I deployed the following components to complete all the exam blueprint objectives:
- 2x – VMware vCenter 6.0 (Windows and VCSA)
- 1x – Windows Machine with Update Manager (VUM)
- 6x – VMware ESXi 6.0 (for vSAN and traditional storage testing)
- 2x – Site Recovery Manager (SRM)
- 2x – vSphere Replication
- 1x – VMware vSphere Data Protection (VDP)
- 1x – Dell Unity VSA for iSCSI, NFS and Virtual Volumes.
The hardware I used can be found on the following page Home Lab. The environment was using nested ESXi hosts to accommodate the required amount of ESXi hosts.
Personal experience:
The exam is a Lab based exam, so this is completely different than a VMware VCP exam. The exam itself is not the most difficult one out their… at least for someone who is working on a day-to-day base with VMware vSphere. The most difficult part is the time management. You have got twenty-seven objectives to complete and you have 205 minutes to complete them, of course, you just need to score 300 points. That can be a bit tricky because if you get stuck you need to go to the following objective.
There are two unofficial study guides available on the internet. These are based on the VMware Blueprint and they helped me a lot. Both guides are detailed and full of information.
Links:
Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 1 Released
With the release of Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 in November, there was an announcement made about the vSphere 6.5 support.
“Yesterday, with impeccable timing, VMware announced the general availability of vSphere 6.5. As always, we started work on the full integration of vSphere 6.5 since its beta, however, we now need adequate time to integrate the final VDDK code and then perform full regressive testing against the final vSphere 6.5 code to ensure the reliability of our advanced vSphere integrations. Therefore, full support for vSphere 6.5 in Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 will be delivered as a part of Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 1. And while an exact support timeline will depend on the results of our testing, historically we deliver support for new vSphere releases approximately two months after the final code availability.” Source: https://www.veeam.com/blog/new-veeam-availability-suite-9-5-is-available-today.html
On 20 January, Veeam has finally released update 1 for the Backup & Replication software (download link below).
Platform support:
- Dell EMC Data Domain OS 6.0 support, including synthetic full backup performances optimizations, backup retention and health check reliability improvements
- HPE 3PAR 3.2.2 MU3 support, including multiple API interaction improvements for added reliability and performance
- HPE StoreOnce 3.15.1 support, bringing Instant VM Recovery to Catalyst-based backup repositories
- Veeam Agent for Linux 1.0 support
- Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 2.0 Public Beta (build 2.0.0.594) support
- VMware vSAN 6.5 support
- VMware vSphere 6.5 support
- Encrypted VMs support
- VMFS6 support
- Virtual hardware version 13 support
- NBD compression
- New guest interaction API support
- New VM tag API support
Download link: https://www.veeam.com/kb2222