VMware
Another VMworld, another vSphere announcement. As all new releases, vSphere 6.7u1 comes with a bunch of new features and capabilities — yay, finally feature complete HTML5 client!
VMware has just announced vSAN v6.6, with over 20 new features. While new and shiny features are nice I’d like to highlight a couple that I think might be undervalued from release feature-set perspective, but highly valuable in day to day operations of a vSAN environment, otherwise known as Day 2 operations.
The VMware Cross vCenter VM Mobility - CLI was recently updated so I decided to try it out. In short, this little Java based application allows you to easily move or clone VMs between disparate vCenter environments.
Now that the seasons have changed, it’s time to look at 2017 and start planning the year. First up, when is VMworld 2017, and perhaps most importantly where? There has been a lot of speculation about this, and the perhaps strongest rumour was that it was moving to Berlin.
VMworld Europe 2016 in Barcelona is a couple of weeks old now, and most of the dust has settled. Besides the general announcements around vSphere 6.5 and surrounding products, the next big thing might just be Cross-Cloud Architecture and of course VMware Cloud on AWS. The announcements around vSAN 6.5 (yes, it is now vSAN and not Virtual SAN/VSAN anymore), are also very interesting. Perhaps it’s time I revisit my earlier VMware VSAN; More than meets the eye post and update it for vSAN 6.5?
VMworld Europe is just a couple of weeks away now, and I can’t wait to spend a week in sunny Barcelona. Last year my trip got cancelled in the last minute, but that will not be the case this year.
As usual I’m looking forward to a bunch of sessions, and general announcements, but for me the value of attending VMworld is in the networking with other people. Sessions and keynotes can be reviewed later, interacting with others can not.
For some time now I’ve been advocating the usage of VCSA instead of the traditional Microsoft Windows based vCenter. It has feature parity with the Windows version now, it’s easier to deploy, gets right-sized out of the box and eliminates the need for an external Microsoft SQL server.
One of the questions I often face when talking about the appliance,_ is how do we handle backups?_ Most customers are comfortable with backup up Windows servers and Microsoft SQL, but quite a few have reservations when it comes to the integrated vPostgres database that the VCSA employs. One common misconception is that a VCSA backup is only crash-consistent. Thankfully vPostgres takes care of this on it’s own, by using what it calls Continuous Archiving and Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR).