VMware
VMUG Denmark put on the (northern European?) VMUG event of the year on the 20th and 21st of September; Tech X 300. It was held at the beautiful Nordisk Film Biografer Palads cinema in Copenhagen, which offers great rooms for the presentations, along with huge screens. I think the largest one was over 12 meters wide!
There is nothing really big and revolutionary in the core vSAN 8 U2 announcement, besides vSAN Max that is. It is nice to see that native file services in vSAN ESA are now in feature parity with vSAN OSA, and that the configuration of 2-Node and Stretched Clusters as been simplified. Other than that, everything else seems to be performance improvements, simplified management and scalability improvements but no stand-out new features in the core offering iself.
The clear stand-out new offering in vSAN 8 U2 is the new Disaggregated Storage offering called vSAN Max. Broken down to its core, this is vSAN HCI Mesh on steroids, with some new and very shiny sprinkles on top. vSAN Max, with its new license model, is a dedicated storage cluster, built on vSAN ESA. A vSAN Max cluster only provides storage resources, and does not run traditional VM workloads. This storage cluster can be consumed by other vSphere clusters, either as a primary storage option or in addition to the storage those cluster already consume from other sources.
Like with vSAN 8 U2, there are really no new stand-out features in the vSphere 8 U2 announcement. It is an evolutionary release, with a number of welcome improvements both to hardware support and sane defaults for security and hardening, but no eyepopping new features.
This september, VMUG Denmark is hosting TechX 300: The ultimate technical summit for enthusiasts seeking a deep dive into VMware solutions, and I am lucky enough to have been selected as a speaker! My talk is called Down the Rabbit Hole with VMware Aria Automation Config (SaltStack), which should be a lot of fun. Expect live demos!
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.
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).
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.
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.
With vSphere 8 comes vSAN 8, and with it a slew of improvements and even a brand new architecture option! This new optional next generation architecture is built into vSAN 8, and going forward customers can choose which architecture to deploy; vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) or vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA).