VCenter
Now that vSphere 6.7 Update 1 has been released, I jumped at upgrading one of my lab environments from 6.5 Update 2 (which was not a supported upgrade path until 6.7 Update 1), and I pretty much immediately ran into issues.
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.
I’ve been a big proponent of the VMware vCenter Appliance for a long time, I even did a talk called VCS to VCSA Converter or How a Fling Can Be Good for You! on migrating to the VCSA at the Nordic VMUG last year.
The VCSA has gone through a few iterations and versions by now, coinciding with the vSphere releases.
My vCenter Web Client Customization
William Lam has a repository of vCenter Web Client customizations hosted over on GitHub, and I decided to add one of my own.
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).
I almost choked on my coffee this morning when I saw William Lam announcing a new VMware Fling called ESXi Embedded Host Client. Finally the day when we can get a local vSphere Web Client on a standalone host is here, and it’s not a moment too soon. This feature has been missing since ESX 3 and it’s VMware Infrastructure Web Access. For now, this is a Fling (which means unsupported and so on), but I really hope that this ends up being built-in to ESXi very soon – even on the free vSphere Hypervisor.