18 Mar 2018
By Yendis Lambert

Azure backup and restore improvements

Microsoft,
Today, Microsoft announced the support for backup of large disk VMs and set of improvements aimed at reducing the time taken for backup and restore. These set of improvements and large disk support is based on a new VM backup stack and are available for both managed and unmanaged disks. You can seamlessly upgrade to this new stack without any impact to your on-going backup jobs and there is no change to how you setup backup or restore. This announcement combines multiple feature improvements: Large disk support – Now you can backup VMs with disk sizes up to 4TB(4095GB), both managed and unmanaged.…
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17 Mar 2018
By Yendis Lambert

Azure Just-in-Time VM Access

Microsoft,
Azure Security Center provides several threat prevention mechanisms to help you reduce surface areas susceptible to attack. One of those mechanisms is Just-in-Time (JIT) VM Access. Today Microsoft announced the general availability of Just-in-Time VM Access, which reduces your exposure to network volumetric attacks by enabling you to deny persistent access while providing controlled access to VMs when needed. When you enable JIT for your VMs, you can create a policy that determines the ports to be protected, how long ports remain open, and approved IP addresses from where these ports can be accessed. The policy helps you stay in…
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10 Mar 2018
By Yendis Lambert

VMware vExpert 2018

Misc
The vExpert announcement was released overnight by VMware and I’m honoured and pleased to say I have been awarded the accolade for the sixth year running. I would like the thank Cory (@vCommunityGuy) and the team at VMware for all their hard work vetting the individuals that apply. Looking forward to working with many vExperts and attending the many VMware events throughout 2018.
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27 Feb 2018
By Yendis Lambert

RVTools version 3.10 is now available for download

Tools, VMware,
RVTools is a windows .NET 4.6.1 application which uses the VI SDK to display information about your virtual environments. Interacting with VirtualCenter ESX Server 6.5.       RVTools is able to list information about VMs, CPU, Memory, Disks, Partitions, Network, Floppy drives, CD drives, Snapshots, VMware tools, Resource pools, Clusters, ESX hosts, HBAs, Nics, Switches, Ports, Distributed Switches, Distributed Ports, Service consoles, VM Kernels, Datastores, multipath info, license info and health checks. With RVTools you can disconnect the cd-rom or floppy drives from the virtual machines and update the VMware Tools installed inside each virtual machine to the latest version.
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18 Nov 2017
By Yendis Lambert

VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Deep Dive – Free ebook

VMware, ,
The VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive is a guide to building consistent high-performing ESXi hosts. A book that people can’t put down. Written for administrators, architects, consultants, aspiring VCDX-es and people eager to learn more about the elements that control the behaviour of CPU, memory, storage and network resources. This book shows that we can fundamentally and materially improve the systems we’re building. We can make the currently running ones consistently faster by deeply understanding and optimising our systems. The reality is that specifics of the infrastructure matter. Details matter. Especially for distributed platforms which abstract resource layers,…
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25 Aug 2017
By Yendis Lambert

VMware Labs – DRS Dump Insight

VMware, ,
DRS Dump Insight is a service portal where users can upload drmdump files and it provides a summary of the DRS run, with a breakup of all the possible moves along with the changes in ESX hosts resource consumption before and after DRS run. Users can get answers to questions like: Why did DRS make a certain recommendation? Why is DRS not making any recommendations to balance my cluster? What recommendations did DRS drop due to cost/benefit analysis? Can I get all the recommendations made by DRS? Once the drmdump file is uploaded, the portal provides a summary of all…
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20 Jul 2017
By Yendis Lambert

New VMware vSphere 6.5 performance

VMware, ,
Underlying each release of VMware vSphere are many performance and scalability improvements. The VMware vSphere 6.5 platform continues to provide industry-leading performance and features to ensure the successful virtualization and management of your entire software-defined datacenter. This paper describes new performance enhancements and features included in vSphere 6.5.  Based on these performance, scalability, and feature improvements in vSphere 6.5, VMware continues to demonstrate industry-leading performance
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14 Jul 2017
By Yendis Lambert

Nested Virtualization in Azure

Microsoft,
Today Microsoft announced that you can now enable nested virtualisation using the Dv3 and Ev3 VM sizes. Microsoft will continue to expand support to more VM sizes in the coming months. For software and hardware prerequisites, configuration steps and limitations for nested virtualisation please see the document here. In this blog Microsoft discuss a couple of interesting use cases and provide a short video demo for enabling a nested VM. Now not only you can create a Hyper-V container with Docker (see instructions here), but also by running nested virtualisation, you can create a VM inside a VM. Such nested environment provides…
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11 Jun 2017
By Yendis Lambert

Azure VPN Gateways New SKU

Microsoft, ,
A VPN gateway is a type of virtual network gateway that sends encrypted traffic across a public connection to an on-premises location. You can also use VPN gateways to send encrypted traffic between Azure virtual networks over the Microsoft network.  To send encrypted network traffic between your Azure virtual network and your on-premises site, you must create a VPN gateway for your virtual network. Microsoft have recently released a new set of gateway SKU's which provides an increase in aggregate throughput, you can see the increase in throughput and new SKU below. If you haven't got the luxury of Express…
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