vToolBelt – October 2018
Hello! Time has flown and it’s time for another vToolBelt! I am adding a 
new feature called Product Watch. This will call out any VMware Products that are headed into End of General Support within the next 6 months. The other big topic is the release of vSphere 6.7 Update 1. Read on for details!
Product Watch
The following products are nearing the End of General Support. You can find the full list on the VMware Lifecycle Product Matrix.
| AirWatch Console 9.1 – 10/26/18 9.2 – 3/21/19 |
Identity Manager 2.9 – 10/26/18 3.0, 3.1 – 3/21/19 |
| Fusion 10 – 3/26/18 | App Volumes 2.12 – 12/6/18 |
| vRealize Automation 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 – 12/17/18 |
vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3 – 3/15/19 7.4, 7.5 – 4/12/19 |
| vRealize Network Insight 3.7, 3.8 – 2/22/19 3.9 – 3/20/19 |
vROPs for Horizon 6.4 – 12/8/18 6.5 – 3/21/19 |
| vRealize Orchestrator 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 – 12/17/18 |
vSphere Data Protection 5.5, 5.8 – 11/14/18 |
| Workstation 14 – 3/26/19 |
Notes from the Field
vSphere 6.7 Update 1 is out! – While there are may new features in this release, arguably the two most anticipated new items are the HTML 5 vSphere client full functionality and the ability to upgrade from vSphere 6.5 U2. I am sure you will want to read the release notes (and you should ;-). William Lam has put together a nice page that centralizes all of the links you will need to start planning your upgrade. @vmiss wrote a detailed Everything You Need to Know upgrading to 6.7U1 article.
As always, consider the following before you upgrade:
- Read the release notes
- Check the Hardware Compatibility List for your hardware and firmware
- A helpful blogger has created a list of I/O Devices that are not certified for upgrading to 6.7
- Check with third-party software vendors to make sure they support this version of vCenter & vSphere
- Test the upgrade if possible. I know not everyone has a “test environment”. In environments that have a lot of inter-related products this can save you time and pain.
- You can update the vCenter Server Appliance directly from the VAMI (virtual appliance management interface). I had to enable a customer URL for my appliance to get it’s update.
A few other upgrade notes:
- For those of you running the vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS), did you know you have to upgrade the vDS as well?
- PowerCLI 11 is out! Read the release notes to see what is new and then upgrade your installs. If you haven’t started using PowerShell to manage VMware yet, here is a great into to PowerCLI – the PowerShell modules that allow you to interface and manage with vSphere.
- With all of this upgrading, you may be re-arranging your datastores quite a bit. Take a moment to review the proper way to remove a Datastore in vSphere.
- There are number of changes to vSAN 6.7 U1. Quickstart functionality is introduced to help you deploy faster.
- vRealize Automation 7.5 is out. You may be interested in a guide to Upgrade vRA to 7.5. There is also a project to develop a validation tool to check the security level of your deployment.
Education
- The VMware Learning Zone has a large number of free technical training resources that you should really check out. Another good free training resource are VMware Education fundamentals courses. These are on-line, on-demain intro-level courses you can take for free from VMware Education. Just like this VMware Cloud Foundation fundamentals course.
Quick Bits
- Site Recovery Manager 8.1 is out. One of the new features is a Configuration Import/Export capability that makes it easier to back up and restore the SRM configuration. If you haven’t checked out SRM for your Disaster Recovery process, you can learn how it simplifies DR in your environment.
- One good thing to have when building out your DR plan (or just managing a sizable environment) is documentation. vDocumentation is a community-created set of PowerCLI scripts that can document your live environment The project was started by a VMware TAM in Pennsylvania!
- if you are using vRealize Automation to spin up VMs for your environments, you may want to be able to identify and shutdown any idle VMs so they don’t waste resources. Check out this article which describes how to create a custom policy to do just that!
- One of the coolest new features in vRealize Operations 7.0 is the ability to share a dashboard with a URL. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to embed those dashboards in other pages?
- Learn how IlliniCloud (a k-12 cooperative) uses NSX to secure Student Data.
- Interested in Kubernetes? Heptio has made the O’Reilly book “Managing Kubertes” freely available as a Digital Download.
With the weather begining to get chilly (at least in Ohio), you might find yourself curled up in a blanket or in front of a fire. You might spend 40 minutes watching a review of the history of Spanning Tree.
I hope you found this useful. Have a good month!