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VMware Cloud on AWS reInvent sessions posted

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In case you missed the big news this week at Amazon's reInvent conference, Pat Gelsinger (CEO of VMware) and Andy Jassy (CEO of AWS) announced together on stage VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts and VMware Cloud Foundation for EC2. For more details regarding the announcements, check out these two blog posts:

VMware had a number of VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) sessions at reInvent and most of them have already been posted online. Below is the current list and I will update it as new sessions are posted.

Given the amount of excitement and interests from customers on both VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts and VMware Cloud Foundation for EC2, session (ENT215) was repeated at reInvent to give some more information about the two solutions. In addition, you can also check out these two theCube interviews from each of our executives talking about both offerings.

ENT215 - Top Strategic Priorities You Can Tackle with VMware Cloud on AWS

CMP305 - VMware Cloud on AWS: Deep Dive

CMP360 - Supercharge VMware Cloud on AWS Environments with Native AWS Services

DAT375 - Deep Dive on Amazon RDS on VMware

ENT313 - Running Production Workloads in VMware Cloud on AWS

GPSTEC307 - Networking, Storage, and Data Protection Deep Dive with VMware Cloud on AWS

NET321 - Connectivity Options for VMware Cloud on AWS Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC)

Supermicro E300-9D (SYS-E300-9D-8CN8TP) is a nice ESXi & vSAN kit

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Supermicro kits such as the E200-8D is a very popular platform amongst the VMware community and with powerful Xeon-based CPUs and support for up to 128GB of memory, it is perfect for running a killer vSphere/vSAN setup!

Earlier this Fall, Supermicro released a "big daddy" version to the E200-8D, dubbed E300-9D and specifically, I want to focus on the 8-Core model (SYS-E300-9D-8CNTP) as this system actually listed on the VMware HCL for ESXi! The E300-9D can support up to half a terabyte of memory and with the 8-Core model, you have access to 16 threads. The E200-8D is also a supported platform by VMware, you can find the VMware HCL listing here.


I was very fortunate to get my hands on a loaner E300-9D (8-Core) unit, thanks to Eric and his team at MITXPC, a local bay area shop specializing in embedded solutions. In fact, they even provided a nice vGhetto promo discount code for my readers awhile back, so definitely check it out if you are in the market for a new lab. As an aside, when doing a quick search online, they also seem to be the only ones actually selling the E300-9D (8-Core) system which you can find here and in general, they seem to be priced fairly competitively. This is not an endorsement for MITXPC, but recommend folks to compare all prices when shopping online, especially as today is Black Friday in the US and Cyber Monday is just a few days away.

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Can a VM in the VMC Compute Network access the SDDC Management Network?

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Similiar to an on-premises vSphere deployment, VMware Cloud on AWS follows good security practices by isolating and preventing access to the SDDC Management Network including Virtual Machines running in the Compute Network. With that said, the SDDC can be configured to enable access to the SDDC Management Network for either all or subset of workloads running in the Compute Network.

I have seen this request come up a few times, usually around proof of concepts, lack of on-premises infrastructure or wanting to run completely isolated within VMC for Dev/Test purposes. Below are the step by step instruction on setting this up for both an NSX-V and NSX-T based SDDC. Once enabled, customers can access the vCenter vSphere UI from within the specified Virtual Machine(s) including using tools like OVFTool or PowerCLI for importing new or existing workloads.

Note: Please refer to this blog post here to determine if you are running an NSX-V or NSX-T based SDDC.

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Heads Up – Apple Mac Pro 6,1 fails to boot after upgrading to ESXi 6.7 Update 1

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We had a number of customers report that after upgrading their Apple Mac Pro 6,1 to the latest ESXi 6.7 Update 1 release, the system failed to boot and the following error was seen on the console:

Shutting down firmware services...
Mutiboot buffer is too small.
Unrecoverable error

A few customers made the observation that this was in result of a newer version of the Apple Firmware that was included in the Mac Pro 6,1 systems which seemed to have cause this problem. In addition, this also impacts brand new installations of ESXi 6.7 Update 1 on new Mac Pro 6,1 that includes a newer version of the Firmware. At this time, is it NOT recommended to upgrade to ESXi 6.7 Update 1 if you are running the Mac Pro 6,1. A request has already been made to the VMware HCL team to remove Mac Pro 6,1 for ESXi 6.7 Update 1 and hopefully should be reflected by later this evening.

Note: This issue can also affect the Apple Mac Mini, which is not an officially supported platform for ESXi.

In the mean time, VMware has published KB 59660 which provides a workaround that may help customers who have upgraded their Mac Pro 6,1 to ESXi 6.7 Update 1 to rollback to the previously installed version of ESXi. Please refer to the KB for more details and you can subscribe to the article for future updates regarding this issue.

ESXi on the new 2018 Apple Mac Mini

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Thanks to the Green Mini Host (Apple Mac Mini hosting and collocation provider) who were the first to publicly confirm that latest release of ESXi (6.7 Update 1) works on the recently announced 2018 Apple Mac Mini.

For vSphere/vSAN Home Lab enthusiasts, the price of the new Mac Mini, especially when it is fully loaded is probably a tough sale. However, for customers developing on MacOS including iOS development, CI/CD, build farms, gaming, etc. which benefit from running on vSphere. For these customers, support for ESXi on the new Mac Mini is extremely interesting, especially with the updated hardware giving these systems a significant boost in performance even when comparing to the current Mac Pro 6,1 and iMac Pro models. In fact, I had number of folks ping me after Apple introduced it during their keynote asking if ESXi would work on the Mini's.

Disclaimer: Apple Mac Mini (both old and new) hardware are NOT officially supported by VMware. The only officially supported Apple hardware platform is the Mac Pro 6,1 or Mac Pro 5,1. For more details, please refer to VMware's Hardware Compatibility List.

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Direct playback & download URLs for all VMworld 2018 Europe Sessions

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It has been less than 24 hours since VMworld Europe 2018 has concluded and the awesome VMworld team has already published most of the VMworld 2018 Europe session recordings! Similar to past years, I have put together a nice summary page that contains all the session recordings links separated out by the different  categories which you can find by visiting http://vmwa.re/vmworld2018.

As of writing this, there are a total of 389 sessions with369 published with recordings. I have also posted some initial viewing statistics on the top 20 VMworld Europe sessions, huge congrats to the Chris and Daniel's ESXi on ARM session, I think it is going to be hard to beat this session (which I still need to watch myself :)). I will check back in a week or so in case more videos and/or PPT decks are posted. Please enjoy, especially for those that were not able to attend VMworld this year.

Note: For those wanting to directly download the actual video files from github repo (browser or through automation), you will get an access denied. It turns out the client performing the download must include a referer within the request (which is automatically done for you when you click open the link in my github but not the case using wget/cURL or other tools. Below are a few examples on how to include the referer for automated downloads which has changed from VMworld US.

Here is wget example:

wget --referer https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/26950 https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/vmworld-europe-2018/CTO3509BE.mp4

Here is cURL example:

curl --referer https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/26950 https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/vmworld-europe-2018/CTO3509BE.mp4 -O CTO3509BE.mp4

Here is PowerCLI example:

$headers = @{"referer" = "https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/26950"}
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/vmworld-europe-2018/CTO3509BE.mp4 -Headers $headers -Outfile CTO3509BE.mp4

In addition, I have also published eu.txt file which contains the name of the session + download URL which can then be used by this quick PowerShell script called downloadSessions.ps1 to automatically download. You can edit the us.txt file to only include sessions you want downloaded (make sure its copied from the original file) since it contains "#" symbol as a delimiter for the title and the download URL.