Happy 2024

 Hi all

It's been over 18 months since I last posted, work and life got in the way.

Happy 2024, I hope this year is a great one, my aim is to write more blogs related to the cloud and virtualisation, and as VMware has changed hands, and is now VMware by Broadcom, I hope to blog more about the new company moving forward.

All the best to you and you family over the next 366 days.

Best wishes 

Bryan

Free ebook - Cloud Operating model for Dummies

 Another free ebook from VMware

This 66 page book by Mandy Storbakken, Martijn Baecke, and Ellie Ruano covers:

"Whether you’re just starting out on your cloud journey or well on your way, there’s considerable value in ensuring you have a cloud operating model to take you forward. This book can be your guide.

It’s loaded with information that will bring you up to speed on the whats, hows, and whys of cloud operations and management.

Armed with that knowledge, you can maximize your existing and future cloud investments — whether they’re private, public, hybrid, edge, or multi-cloud."

To download visit VMware Documents

Enabling SSH and ESXi Shell via the VMware vSphere Client and DCUI

 This week I've been preparing for an Optimise and Troubleshooting Fast Track course and in this course we use the the command line a lot.

There's a number of different ways to enable SSH and the ESXi Shell.

One way is via the vSphere client

Launch the client

Hosts and Clusters View, select host, select configure tab and then Services and start the ESXi Shell and SSH

Another method is from the ESI hosts Direct Console User Interface DCUI

Login to the DCUI via the F2 key, go to Troubleshooting options and enable the services.

VMworld 2021 Imagine That - Raghu Raghuram General session overview

 

This years VMworld, was again a virtual event, and the theme of this year’s VMworld was multi-cloud.

In his general session Raghu Raghuram – CEO VMware laid out his vision for the future of multi-cloud technology, providing a view into the innovations VMware is driving at the intersection of clouds and apps. He explored how leading organizations are challenging the status quo to move fast, gain competitive advantage and stay secure.

VMware have moved quickly from an on-premises virtualisation company to a leader in multi-cloud, as companies transition from mono-cloud, one public cloud to a true multi-cloud technology, VMware are there to ease the transition.

Companies now have choice, don’t pick one cloud, pick the cloud/clouds that best suit your applications and business needs.

The two main drivers for multi-cloud are.

•   “I want to innovate using ‘best of the best’ services from different clouds.”
•  “I want to avoid lock in to one cloud, and have the freedom to move apps when needed.”

VMware’s analysis shows that:

•  464 Average number of applications used in a typical enterprise company
• 75% of businesses now use 2 or more public clouds
•  40% moving to 3 or more public clouds, sovereign clouds, or service providers

The challenge becomes, “how do I manage, secure, and utilise this diverse set of technologies/clouds?”

We are therefore presented with some options, do we prioritise developer autonomy or DevSecOPs efficiency, do we prioritise Enterprise apps on any cloud, or full control with cost savings, and finally, do we prioritise anywhere access for employees, or world class security?

VMware believe we should have it all.

VMware move to Chapter 3

·         Chapter 1 – Virtualisation Leader

·         Chapter 2 – Private cloud leader with Software Defined Datacentre

·         Chapter 3 – Multi-Cloud and application leader

In the session, Raghu introduced VMware Cross-Cloud Services – more information in upcoming posts

• ·        Application Platform – Tanzu Application Platform
• ·         Cloud Infrastructure – Project Artic
• ·         Cloud Management – Project Ensemble
• ·         Security and Networking – Service Mesh and Kubernetes Security
• ·         Anywhere Workspace and Edge – VMware Edge Compute Stack

Watch out for more information on these new products coming from VMware

Finding out which VMs have VMtools installed (not PowerCLI)

 

We’ve been talking about snapshots this week, and as part of the discussions we thought about the question:

How do we list VMs with VMware Tools installed?

My answer, use PowerCLI.

However, some great suggestions came back.

Use life cycle manger. We select the Cluster > Updates > VMware Tools

The Tools Status column then shows as

• Upgrade Available
• Guest Managed
• Not Installed
• Unknown 
• Up to Date

The other suggestion, enable the column in the VMware vSphere Client.

By default, we don’t see the column for VMware Tools

Select one of the columns and then select the down arrow, and select View/Hide Columns and then select the VMtools Options, and now you have the view showing VMtools on the VMs

Limiting the Number of VMware Virtual Machine Snapshots

 Snapshots have their uses; we can use them to repeatably return back to a virtual machines previous state.

When we take a snapshot we capture the virtual machines hard disk, hardware and optionally the memory state.

Within VMware, we create three state files

·         Disk files                          -Delta.VMDK VMFS5 less than 2TB virtual disk

·         Hardware state                 .vmsn

·         Memory State                  .vmem

These snapshots then allow us to revert back to a previous state if something goes wrong, for example a software update fails

However, VMware has some best practices for using Snapshots.

• Do not use snapshots as backups
• Do not use a single snapshot for more than 72 hours
• When using a third-party backup software, ensure that snapshots are deleted after a successful backup.
• Maximum of 32 snapshots are supported in a chain. However, for a better performance use only 2 to 3 snapshots.

The last point is quite interesting, the more snapshots we take, the slower, potentially the VM will run, but most importantly, the VM will take up a lot of additional disk space, as the snapshot disk file increases in size.

VMware however, have a setting we can add to the VMs .vmx file, we set the maximum number of snapshots for a virtual machine by editing the snapshot.maxSnapshots = n variable of the configuration file. 

Once we are in the vSphere Client, right click and edit your VM settings, select VM options and then select Advanced, then locate Configuaration Parameters, and select EDIT CONFIGURATION

Then select ADD CONFIGURATION PARAMS

Then type for max of 2 snapshots, and click OK

Snapshot.maxSnapshots              2

 

 Now we can only take a maximum of 2 snapshots against this machine.

 

Managing User Accounts VMware vSphere: Best Practices

 

One of the recommendations for managing vSphere is to add your ESXi hosts to Active Directory and authentication to the client by using an AD account.

VMware give us some best practices for managing user accounts

On an ESXi host, the root user account is the most powerful user account on the system. The user root can access all files and all commands. Securing this account is the most important step that you can take to secure an ESXi host.

Whenever possible, use the vSphere Client to log in to the vCenter Server system and manage your ESXi hosts. In some unusual circumstances, for example, when the vCenter Server system is down, you use VMware Host Client to connect directly to the ESXi host.

Although you can log in to your ESXi host through the vSphere CLI or through vSphere ESXi Shell, these access methods should be reserved for troubleshooting or configuration that cannot be accomplished by using VMware Host Client.

 
If a host must be managed directly, avoid creating local users on the host. If possible, join the host to a Windows domain and log in with domain credentials instead.

To add an ESXi host to Active Directory, authenticate to your ESXi host via the host client and highlight Manage, select the Security& Users tab, then select Authentication, and then select Join Domain and fill in relevant information for your domain.

 

When we add the ESXi hosts to Active Directory, by default anyone who is a member of the AD group ESX Admins automatically have root privileges on ESXi hosts.

If we split AD and VMware into different IT departments, this could mean that our AD administrators could also manage our ESXi hosts by creating a group called ESX Admins and adding themselves to that group.

However, we can modify this functionality. We achieve this through the advanced configuration on an ESXi host

Login to the vSphere Host Client, once authenticated go to your ESXi host and highlight Manage, select Advanced settings and then search for admins

You’ll be presented with three options and they are:

Config.HostAgent.plugins.hostsvc.esxAdminsGroup       This option specifies the Active Directory group name that is automatically granted Administrator privileges on the ESXi host.

Config.HostAgent.plugins.hostsvc.esxAdminsGroupAutoAdd     This option controls whether the group specified by “esxAdminsGroup” is automatically granted administrator permission, values are True or False

Config.HostAgent.plugins.hostsvc.esxAdminsGroupUpdateInterval        This option specifies the interval between checks for whether the group specified by “esxAdminsGroup’ has appeared in Active Directory, value is in minutes.