I’ve been holding off upgrading my lab to vSphere 6.5  because NSX 6.2.x doesn’t support it. With the release of NSX 6.3 and vSphere 6.5a, I can now upgrade.

The sequence of the upgrade is slightly different to the generic one published by VMware because vSphere 6.5 isn’t supported with NSX 6.2. If follows that I need to upgrade NSX to 6.3 (which supports vSphere 6.0u2) before I can upgrade vSphere to 6.5a.

I have recently been able to get vSAN properly up and running in my lab and took a look at the OOTB Dashboards that come with the MPSD ( Management Pack for Storage Devices ).

As I have a hybrid build (I know many have All Flash Arrays) I was interested in how hard my Flash Cache was working so I built a dashboard purely focused on this aspect of the vSAN product.

Equal Cost Multipathing (ECMP), for the vSphere admin, is ability to create routes with an equal cost, which allows multiple paths to the same network to be created and traffic can be distributed over those paths. This is good for a couple of reasons - firstly is availability. If we were to lose a host, and an NSX Edge, the route will time out quicker than NSX Edge High Availability - thus providing higher availability for our network traffic. Then second reason is throughput - each NSX Edge is capable of ~10Gbps throughput, but with ECMP we can have multiple NSX Edges (up to 8) providing 10Gbps each - that’s a significant performance boost.

My vSphere lab is split into two halves - a low power management cluster, powered by 3 Intel NUCs, and a more hefty workload cluster powered by a Dell C6100 chassis with 3 nodes. The workload servers are noisy and power hungry so they tend to be powered off when I am not using them, and since they live in my garage, I power them on and off remotely.

Time to publish the recording for the 12th episode of the vROps Webinar Series. This time we did a what’s new with vRealize Operations 6.4 and the changes made to vRealize Operations 6.4as you will see there has been a lot packed into this recent release!

It has been an awesome 12 months working with Sunny on this project and I am very glad to say we will be back next year (we will skip January and will return in February).

One of the cool new features released with vRealize Automation 7.2 was the integration of VMware Admiral (container management) into the product, and recently VMware made version 1 of vSphere Integrated Containers generally available (GA), so I thought it was time I started playing around with the two.

In this article I’m going to cover deploying VIC to my vSphere environment and then adding that host to the vRA 7.2 container management.

Back in January 2015 I wrote an article on how to modify the Java heap settings for the vCenter Orchestrator client  when working with very large workflows. Since vRealize Orchestrator 7.x has been released, we no longer have an installable client, just a Java WebStart file (.jnlp) that you run, or a package that you can download - but nothing that installs.

Note that none of this is official or supported by VMware as far as I know - it’s the results of my experimentation which has shown some performance improvement by increasing the configured memory pool. Use it at your own risk!

It’s the time of the month when I would like to invite you to join the next episode of our year long vROps Webinar Series . As we move towards the closure of a fantastic year, we would like to take a zoom out view at the vRealize Operations Manager solution with a What’s New Episode. We did a What’s new with vRealize Operations 6.3 a couple of months back, however looking at some awesome changes made to vRealize Operations 6.4 it absolutely makes sense to go over the new goodies.

Time to publish the recording for the 11th episode of the vROps Webinar Series. This time we were joined by Vinith Menon who spoke about getting more from your vROps builds with PowerCLI. Vinith demonstrated the many useful ways of leveraging PowerCLI to manage your vROps environments and also communicate with the vROps API.

Huge thanks to Vinith Menon for presenting this excellent session.

So without further ado, here is the recording for this session:

Another month has gone and Christmas is now looming large! It has been extremely busy but we still want to continue with the momentum of webinar series getting to the business end of the year. This time around we will talk about getting more out of vRealize Operations Manager using PowerCLI.

This session we will be joined by Vinith Menon who will show us all kinds of PowerCLI goodness.