vCenter 8.0 Update 1 was released on April 18th, and I quickly jumped to upgrading my existing home lab vCenter, but ran into an issue that prevented the upgrade from completing, namely the error message Invalid Type, expected String, instead got NoneType.

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Back in February 2021, I published a post named Is Your VMware vCenter Publicly Available?
It is now February 2023, and here we are again. A new widespread ransomware attack dubbed ESXiArgs is targeting publicly available ESXi hosts, using a vulnerability that was patched two years ago (CVE-2021-21947).

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Some unofficial dates and details for VMware Explore 2023 has come to light, and by the looks of things the rumors of moving the US version from San Francisco to Las Vegas are true. It also seems like the EMEA conference will yet again be held in Barcelona.

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I knew one thing was going to change when I transitioned from being an operations engineer and became a consultant: the fact that I had rarely done any kind of certification.

Trying to figure out what certification I should start with was a daunting prospect, but luckily, I could ask Christian Mohn, and we decided I should start with VCP-DCV for vSphere 7.x (VCP for short). It’s described by VMware as “The VCP-DCV 2022 certification validates candidate skills to implement, manage, and troubleshoot a vSphere infrastructure, using best practices to provide a powerful, flexible, and secure foundation for business agility that can accelerate the transformation to cloud computing.”, and sounds like a good place to start to showcase that you are generally skilled when it comes to working with VMware.

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The CloudBytes Podcast recently released Season 3 of their series of podcasts. The main topic this season is core components of cybersecurity, and I was lucky enough to be asked to be a guest on no less than two of the episodes.

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I’ve been a member of VMUG for years now and I’ve always looked up to the people organizing it. I got asked to hold a short presentation for Norway VMUG in November and I was so honored. Then the nerves started! What should I talk about? Could I be interesting? Am I good enough? Impostor syndrome was doing a number on me, but I was adamant that I would get over this. I had always secretly wanted to speak at VMUG and now was my chance.

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VMware has released security advisory VMSA-2022-0030 which includes several vulnerabilities: CVE-2022-31696, CVE-2022-31697, CVE-2022-31698, CVE-2022-31699. Among these CVE-2022-31697 caught my eye as a potential issue in many environments.

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VMware has just released a new KB90343: What You Can (and Cannot) Change in a vSAN ESA ReadyNode™. For those looking to utilize the new vSAN 8 Express Storage Architecture (ESA) this is a great resource that outlines what components in a vSAN ESA ReadyNode™ can be changed and it also includes a very handy vSAN ESA ReadyNode™ FAQ.

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Weirdly I have worked mainly with VMware products for years now without having the pleasure to go to VMware Explore. This year that was about to change and I was so excited! I was heading from the cold weather of Norway to sunny Barcelona to attend VMware Explore Europe and I could hardly wait.

I have written down a little recap of my trip, with some tips and tricks for other people that might have not gone to Explore before.

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Ever since vSAN 8 was announced, I’ve been waiting to try out the new Express Storage Architecture in my HomeLab, especially since the internal storage in my hosts is NVMe only. Yesterday the last piece of the puzzle was released, namely the new USB Network Native Driver v1.11 for ESXi 8 which I needed before reinstalling my hosts in order to get vSAN traffic isolation.

Once the hosts were installed and configured, it was time to enable vSAN and try out the new Express Storage Architecture. vSAN ESA is configured in the same way as the traditional OSA version, you just select that you want ESA at configuration time.

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