VMDSC 1.1.0

Last week (4/25/2022) we released an exciting new update to the Virtual Machine Desired State Configuration (VMDSC) VMware Fling (https://flings.vmware.com/virtual-machine-desired-state-configuration). This update includes several fixes and enhancements including a new feature that has been requested many times by customers since the Fling was originally released; the ability to specify Cores per Socket in addition to…Continue Reading “Configure VM Cores per Socket with Virtual Machine Desired State Configuration (VMDSC) 1.1.0”

CNR Air-Gapped Installation

Introduction I know, I know… I haven’t blogged in a long time, but it has been an “interesting” year to say the least. I recently made a move from the VMware Technical Account Manager (TAM) role to the Modern Application Platform Business Unit (MAPBU) as a Customer Experience Architect. The new title is a mouthful…Continue Reading “Tanzu Cloud Native Runtimes Air-Gapped Installation”

vSAN ROBO - ESXi - Front

Introduction I recently presented at a VMUG event where I outlined the entire process of designing, deploying, configuring, and managing a Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO) vSAN environment with one of my customers.  I figured since I put in all the work to present this for a small VMUG audience, I might as well throw it on…Continue Reading “vSAN ROBO Project – Design & Config”

VM Powered Off Duration

Update: 10/25/2019Good news! Mr. Brandon Gordon reached out and informed me of a way to accomplish everything I have outlined below with a simple out-of-the-box feature available in vRealize Operations 7.5 and newer. The VM Property “Summary|Runtime|Power State” can be added to a View and transformed to a ‘relative timestamp’ value to show the number…Continue Reading “Tracking VM Powered Off Duration with vRealize Operations”

Exchange Dashboard

I have heard many customers ask the question “Can vRealize Operations be configured to provide our application teams access so that they can see dashboards/metrics for only the objects they are responsible for?”. Of course the answer is “YES”; however, there is not a lot of out-of-the-box workflows to accomplish this and the process is…Continue Reading “Configuring vRealize Operations (vROps) for Application Teams”

Days Hours Mins Secs

One of my customers had a rather interesting use case for a vRealize Operations (vROps) Dashboard where they needed to provide Virtual Machine visibility to the Windows patching team to ensure the Guest OSes were indeed getting rebooted after applying updates.  This is the same customer use case I reached out to John Dias (@johnddias)…Continue Reading “vRealize Operations VM Uptime in Days, Hours, Minutes, Seconds”

vRSLCM vROps Upgrade Pre-Validation Error

Quick post that outlines a real life scenario I just encountered.  I was helping a customer upgrade their vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) environment from v6.7 to v7.0 today.  We wanted to automate the upgrade and leverage the vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM).  We came across a rather non-descriptive error when running the pre-upgrade validation. The…Continue Reading “vROps Upgrade Failure – ‘Cannot Run Command’”

vRSLCMSANCertiConfig

If you have not heard by now, vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM) v2.0 was just released (Release Notes) and it includes a whole lot of great new features.  While playing with it in my lab and performing a fresh install of the vRealize products I decided to leverage a SAN certificate across all my vRealize…Continue Reading “vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager SAN Certificate Configuration”

Resource Pools

About a year ago I had a customer ask me if grouping VMs in Resource Pools could impact performance and after seeing Frank Denneman‘s recent blog (The public Shaming of Resource Pool-as-a-Folder User) I figured I would write up a quick explanation.  I generally recommend my customers stay away from resource pools if at all…Continue Reading “Performance Impacts from Grouping VMs in Resource Pools”

vRealize Log Insight for vCenter Server

****UPDATE**** VMware has recently announced the End of Availability (EOA) of vRealize Log Insight for vCenter. This means that the next version of vRealize Log Insight (yet to be released) will not accept a vCenter Server Standard license key to provide a 25-OSI pack entitlement. Version 4.6.x and older will continue to provide this functionality….Continue Reading “If you own vCenter Server, then you own THIS too…”