Author: Michael Schroeder

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VMware Explore 2022 – Join us on-site in Barcelona

Early bird registration for VMware Explore Europe is open. From November 7-10, 2022, the Fira Gran Via in Barcelona will once again open its doors.

As you may have heard, there is a name change. VMworld will now be called VMware Explore. Hopefully that’s the only change, because VMworld has been the epicenter of the vCommunity for years and the bond that holds the community together at its core.

Live again at last

I am very happy that for the first time since 2019, this event can be held on-site again. The pandemic forced us to suspend events like VMworld for two years and replace them with virtual events. It was good to have this possibility of virtual events and the organizers tried their best to provide the community with information. But after two years and hundreds of virtual events, we’ve all grown a little weary of virtual events. This is why the term “zoom fatigue” was born. There’s a big difference between attending a session live and watching a recording.

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Project Arctic – Delivering Benefits of the Cloud to On-Prem Workloads

In the last few years we’ve seen a clear trend to adopt cloud strategies on customer side. Some already pusue a multi cloud strategy to get the most benefit from different offerings. But we may not forget, that infrastructure on-premises – the so called private cloud – is still the most common kind of virtual infrastructure. This is no surprise because on-premises infrastructure has without doubt some advantages. It’s not alone aspects of data privacy, data security and data sovereignty. There are also performance aspects such as low latency that keep customers from migration special workloads to the (public) cloud.

On the other hand there are some advantages of cloud offerings too. Such as flexible consumption, minimal maintenance, built in resilience, developer agility and the possibility to manage from anywhere.

To bridge the gap between on-premises needs and cloud based offerings, VMware has announced Project Arctic during VMworld 2021. Delivering benefits of the cloud to on-premises workloads.

Introducing vSphere+ and vSAN+

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VMware NSX Legacy Load Balancing is Going Away – Migrate to Avi

VMware will be sunsetting the NSX native load balancers. Customers should be migrating to the currently supported NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi) which simplifies operations today while getting you ready for your multi-cloud and container strategies tomorrow. Avi works across all environments beyond the NSX framework, expanding use cases to public cloud, containers and app security while adding capabilities for GSLB, WAF and analytics. A migration tool will be available to make the migration of your existing configuration to the current technology easy and painless.

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SD- and USB-Bootmedia changes with vSphere.Next

With vSphere 7 Update 3 came bad news for all users who use USB flash media or SD cards as ESXi boot device. I have described the changes in the partitioning of the boot device in the article “ESXi Bootmedia – New features in v7 und legacy issues from the past v6.x“.

The discontinuation of support for SD cards and USB boot media put many customers in the uncomfortable position of having to replace their boot media on existing servers. VMware has responded by resuming support for SD cards and USB media under certain criteria.

The problem with these media remains. The wear of these storages was worked around by swapping out write-intensive areas. Since update 7.0 U3c, the setup detects an installation on SD/USB devices and tries to swap critical areas of the OSData partition to more stable media. This for instance includes VM-Tools and Scratch. Starting with the upcoming vSphere.Next release, the entire OSData partition will be swapped out to more robust data storage. However, the question arises here why, when resilient storage media is available, it is not used completely as a boot device right away.

VMware has published details about the changed strategy concerning boot media in KB 85685.