ESX6.0 end of life approaching

For those of you still running ESXi6.0, be aware that it goes end of life on 12th March 2020. If you haven’t already started making upgrade plans, you should.

Desktop Recoverability and Security with NSX

Hi all,

In the wake of the many ongoing cyber attacks targeted at end users, i thought i’d put something together to help people make their environments more resilient and more recoverable.

Here is a lightboard version

Installation and Configuration of vCenter 6.5

For many years, almost everyone installed vCenter on Windows. This was mainly due to the increased scale of the Windows platform over the appliance. Nobody wanted to install the inferior appliance version unless it was in a lab. But over the last few years the gap has closed and now they are on par with each other. So when you take into account Windows and SQL licensing costs, and the single platform for support to fix in case of issues it’s a bit of a bit of a no brainer now to switch to the appliance version. You’ll be glad to hear that there is even a tool in the latest version to help you migrate over from Windows to appliance.

Upgrading to ESXi 6.5 from the command line

When rebuilding ESXi hosts, people tend to just go for the easiest option which is to wipe the disk array and completely reinstall the operating system. However, doing an in place upgrade from the command line is really simple. Here’s how it’s done:

vSphere ESXi 6.5

ESXi 6.5 is the latest update by VMware to its bare metal hypervisor. I know from experience that despite there being many updates in the versions, the installation has remained largely the same, so I was keen to see if 6.5 kept up the tradition. 

vRealize Business for Cloud 7.0.1 – Installation and configuration

vRealize Business has been around for a while, but i tend to find that people either don’t really know much about it, or those who have bought it as part of vCloud Suite rarely implement it, and thats a real shame because with very little time and effort you can get some really useful information out of it. So, i’m going to attempt to show you in this article how to deploy it and configure it.

vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 upgrade

Nowadays the VCSA or vCenter Server Appliance is finally on a par with its Windows equivilent and so moving over to the appliance is a bit of a no brainer. Firstly its a hardened Linux appliance so you dont need to worry so much about pesky Microsoft patches. It’s also got its own Postgres database so theres no longer a requirement for a SQL license.

vSphere ESXI 6.0 Installation and Configuration

ESXi has come a long way over the last few years in terms of features and functionality, but one of the other things VMware has done has been to dramatically simplify the hypervisor installer. ESXi v6 is by far the easiest version i’ve ever installed. Here are the steps:

Upgrading vRealize Operations Manager 6.0

If you thought that deploying vROPS was easy, you’ll love how simple it is to upgrade. What’s more it involved minimal risk and only a small amount of downtime. Here’s how to do it.

Deploying Log Insight 3.0

Log Insight is VMware’s log management and analytics product. It can collect unstructured log data from many different sources from VMware products, to Cisco and EMC. What’s more it works hand in hand with vRealize Operations to combine symptoms from vROPS and LogInsight and deliver effective monitoring. The server itself is a virtual appliance and is dead easy to install. Here’s how.