William Lam

VMworld US 2018 sessions on VMware Cloud on AWS

07/21/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

VMworld US 2018 is just around the corner and hopefully most of you have started. I was just browsing the session catalog this morning see what sessions were available for VMware Cloud on AWS and I have always found the VMworld search results less than ideal as I prefer to be able to see all results on a single page without having to continue to load. I decided to write some automation to extract all VMware Cloud on AWS sessions and make them available on a single page.

In total, there are 93 sessions (spread across Sunday - Thursday) and there is literally something for everyone including intro type sessions, partner/3rd party solutions, different solution verticals, technical deep dives, customer panels and even some upcoming slick Tech Previews that we are working on! If you still have some open slots on your schedule, have a look at the list below and sign up.

I have also created a short URL, in case you want to share this list with others: http://vmwa.re/vmcvmworld2018

Sunday

Dear IT, You Gotta Modernize Your Data Center. Let vSphere Help. [VIN1622QU] (1:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.) (13:00 - 13:30)
Understanding the TCO Benefits of VMware Cloud on AWS [HYP2817QU] (1:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.) (13:00 - 13:30)
How to Deliver the VMware Cloud Story and Vision [PAR7002BU] (2:00 p.m. - 2:50 p.m.) (14:00 - 14:50)
New Architectures for Big Data/Machine Learning on VMware Cloud on AWS [VAP1593QU] (2:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.) (14:00 - 14:30)
New Tools and Information for Partners Selling VMware Cloud on AWS [PAR7004BU] (3:00 p.m. - 3:50 p.m.) (15:00 - 15:50)
Software-Defined, Hybrid, and Distributed: Welcome to the VMware Cloud [HYP3024QU] (3:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.) (15:00 - 15:30)
SAP in the Clouds [VAP2294QU] (4:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.) (16:00 - 16:30)
Site Recovery Manager and Multiple Sites: The What, How, and Why [HCI2827QU] (4:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.) (16:00 - 16:30)

Automatically retrieve CVE CVSS score for all ESXi security bulletins

07/20/2018 by William Lam 9 Comments

I always enjoying learning new things, especially when it is outside of my immediate domain expertise and if I can thrown in some Automation to help solve a solution, it is a win for everyone. I bring this up because, yesterday I had noticed an interesting question from one of our field folks where their customer is looking to implement a process for applying ESXi security patches to help determine compliance timeline (e.g. when a specific security update will be applied to infrastructure).

To do this, the customer would like to use the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score which ranges from 0-10, 0 being low and 10 being high. The CVSS score is part of the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) which is also referenced for every ESXi security patch (bulletin) that is published by VMware. The question that came up was how easily it would be to determine the CVSS score for a given ESXi security patch. First, I will outline the "manual" process and once that is understood, I will demonstrate an automated solution which customers can take advantage of to easily retrieve this information for all ESXi security patches.

Resource Pools, Folders & VMC now supported with Cross vCenter vMotion Utility Fling

07/18/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

Many of you are already familiar with the Cross vCenter vMotion Utility, which was released as a Fling last year. In fact, a number of you have even shared your VM migration numbers, many of which are quite impressive (e.g. 5-10K VMs). Not only are the number of production VMs significant, but I also learned the duration of customer migration projects, such as datacenter evacuation, was able to complete significantly faster with the help of this tool.

Although v2.1 was just recently released, Vishal, the lead developer is constantly looking for ways to improve the tool. Most recently, we had a few customers ask for supporting additional placement targets such as vSphere VM Folders and Resource Pools. Customers often use VM Folders for organization purposes but also as a way to manage permissions and of course resource management with the use of Resource Pools (not for organization purposes ;)). These two stand alone feature are quite useful on their own, but they are also a building block to allow us to support migrating workloads to and from VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) which we have received requests for as well. VMC has a restrictive permission model and customer workloads must be placed in a specific VM Folder and Resource Pool, both of which was not initially supported with the Cross vCenter vMotion Utility.

With the latest v2.2. release, customers will now have the ability to optionally specify a target Resource Pool and/or VM Folder by enabling an Advanced settings option at the upper right hand corner of the tool as shown in the screenshot below.

Below is a screenshot of vMotion'ing 3 running PhotonOS VMs from onPrem environment to my VMC's SDDC. The Fling supports both hot and cold relocate, however for vMotion to work you will need to ensure that your source vCenter Server (including ESXi hosts) are running vSphere 6.7 and the VM is configured with the new Per-VM EVC (requires vHW 14) which can be configured in the vSphere H5 Client.

Give the latest Fling a try and let us know what you think, if you have any feedback or request, feel free to leave a comment on the Fling page.

Automating VM Template management using Content Library in VMC

07/17/2018 by William Lam 1 Comment

Today, the vSphere Content Library only supports a single deployable VM type using the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard. Although customers are familiar with both OVF and OVA (archive of OVF and VMDKs), support for vCenter VM Template is still one of the most highly requested feature for Content Library. This should come as no surprise since many of our customers have built operational procedures and automation workflows for managing VM deployments over the years and simply switching to another format has a significant impact to their existing workflows.

I know the Content Library team has been heads down working on a number of enhancements to Content Library and it looks like one of these improvements has recently made its way out onto VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) which I had just noticed while working in my SDDC.

In VMC, when you right click on a VM and select "Clone as Template to Library", there will be a new option to capture a VM as a VM Template (VMTX) within a Content Library!

New SDDC Certificate Replacement Fling

07/11/2018 by William Lam 7 Comments

Certificate lifecycle management is not something anyone looks forward to, it is time consuming and usually not automated. However, it is a necessity for many of our customers. The process gets even more challenging when needing replace certificates across multiple VMware products, not only careful orchestration but also properly reestablishing trust between product just adds another layer of operational complexity. Within the Integrated System Business Unit (ISBU) at VMware, which produces both the VMware Validated Design (VVD) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the team has been working on a way to simplify certificate management, not only for individual products (working with product teams) but also holistically at the VMware SDDC level.

This initially started with the development of a tool called Certificate Generation Utility (CertGen), which helps customers generate new certificates for various products within the VMware SDDC. Although it was developed for the VVD, any VMware customer who consumed products within the VVD, could also leverage this tool. We all know certificate generation can be a pain, but it is not as challenging or as complex as the actual certificate replacement process itself which is also fully documented by the VVD team here.

This is where the new Fling comes in, the SDDC Certificate Tool, which automates the manual steps outlined by the VVD and helps customers easily replace certificates that they have created (CertGen or another process) and automatically orchestrates this across the different products within the SDDC. The tool is command-line driven and uses a JSON configuration file which can contain all or a subset of the VMware SDDC products, which is great for supporting different environments and allows for easy source control. Extensive pre-checks are also built into the tool to validate the certificates themselves (e.g. expiry, chain validation, etc) also also preventing miss-match of information (e.g. SAN entries, number of nodes, etc) which then get compared against your actual environment before any changes are applied. The JSON also contains a section referred to as Service Accounts, which is merely other VMware product accounts that the tool supports to reestablish trust after replacing the certificate for given product.

My list of Microsoft Visual Code Studio Extensions

07/03/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

I have been a huge fan of Microsoft Visual Code Studio since it was introduced to me about a year ago and has been my default editor of choice (outside of vi for quick edits and even Code has a vi extension which I had used for awhile but it had some quirks). Last week I had shared on Twitter a screenshot of all the extensions I personally use, since this was something I get asked about from time to time.

I received a lot of positive feedback and I even learned about a few new extensions from a few folks. I figure I would provide the list of plugins I use as text which can then easily be searched directly in Code or via the Visual Studio Marketplace. Code itself supports a number of command-line options, including extension management and so I used the following command to generate the list of extensions I am currently using: