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Month: November 2016

vSphere 6.5 – VMFS6 & 512e HDD support

vSphere 6.5 – VMFS6 & 512e HDD support

vSphere 6.5 introduces a new VMFS 6 – but why we need new version You ask? –answer: to support new hdd type, and this  point  us to current storage market situation . Well because with  512bytes sector size HDD’s  vendors are hitting drive capacity limits. They can not go beyond a certain size without compromising the resilience and reliability (not the best option in case of our data).             To provide large capacity drives, Storage Industry is moving forward to Advance…

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vSphere 6.5 – Secure Boot (ESXi and VMs)

vSphere 6.5 – Secure Boot (ESXi and VMs)

When new feature Secure Boot is enabled, the UEFI firmware validates the digitally signed kernel of an operating system against the digital certificate stored in the UEF firmware. For ESXi 6.5 this capability is further leveraged by the ESXi kernel, adding cryptographic assurance of ESXi components. ESXi is already made up of digitally signed packages, called VIB’s. (vSphere Installation Bundle) These packages are never broken open. At boot time the ESXi file system maps to the content of those packages….

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vSphere 6.5 Installation – Part 4 – vCenter Server Appliance Upgrade

vSphere 6.5 Installation – Part 4 – vCenter Server Appliance Upgrade

In the previous parts I described the process of instalation new components of vSphere 6.5. In this article I’ll show you how the upgrade process looks like. It’s pretty straightforwar providing your DNS is working correctly 😉 During the upgrade process new appliance is deployed with temporary IP address to exchange the original appliance in the final step. This approach gives you the easy way to rollback, because you can turn off the new appliance and power on the original…

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vSphere 6.5 – Encrypted vMotion

vSphere 6.5 – Encrypted vMotion

Another  good news is that You can encrypt the vMotion of any VM, encrypted or not – encrypted VM’s will always use encrypted vMotion : Disabled – do not use encrypted vMotion Opportunistic – use encrypted vMotion if source and destination hosts support it. Required -Allow only encrypted vMotion. Note !!!  Mixed cluster and you have a requirement of encrypted vMotion, then setting to “Required” will not let you vMotion to a host that doesn’t support it. (only vSphee ESXi 6.5…

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vSphere 6.5 – Network-aware DRS

vSphere 6.5 – Network-aware DRS

VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler is a well known VMware feature which is one of the most helpful escpecially in bigger environments. It’s used to balance the load (CPU and Memory) between ESXi hosts in cluster. However, in previous releases it has an imperfection. Let’s imagine a fallowing situation shown below: Assume you have three host in the cluster with 6 VM’s powered on. If you power on  another VM it will be placed on the first host by DRS. Although host…

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vSphere 6.5 – Backup and Restore encrypted VMs

vSphere 6.5 – Backup and Restore encrypted VMs

New encryption gives many possibilities but also make some impact to other tasks in our environment. Let’s consider backup implications – backup and restore of encrypted disks is possible with NBD and HotAdd transport, but SAN mode does not support encrypted virtual machine backup. No API change is involved – ESXi hosts encrypt by attaching an IO Filter. To back up encrypted virtual machines using HotAdd, the backup proxy must have been encrypted as well. The backup process requires “Cryptographer.DirectAccess”…

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What’s New in vSphere 6.5 – ProactiveHA

What’s New in vSphere 6.5 – ProactiveHA

Proactive HA is a new feature Available in vSphere 6.5 released recently. It’s a kind of feature which will even better help you to protect you environment in case of hardware failure. Currently all of the hardware components are redundant including power supplies, fans, network cards etc. However the most possible cause of whole server failure occurs while one of these theoretically redundant components fails. To better imagine that let’s think about power supply fail. There is still the second one…

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vSphere 6.5 – VM Encryption

vSphere 6.5 – VM Encryption

  Next new security  functionality in vSphere 6.5 – encryption is implemented via Storage Policies. If You add to the vm an encryption storage policy it will encrypt the disk. Key features: No modification within the Guest. VM Agnostic Guest OS DataStore HW Version Policy driven Encrypts both VMDK and VM files No access to encryption keys by the Guest Full support of vMotion Diagram below shows how it works:   Register a VM on a host and configure the (new…

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vSphere 6.5 – enhanced logging

vSphere 6.5 – enhanced logging

  vSphere 6.5 introduces audit logging, before vSphere 6.5  logs were more focused on finding root causes of a problem – not releate deep  to IT operations or security use cases. For example, if a virtual machine was reconfigured from one storage adapter to another in logs we would find only “Virtual Machine <name> reconfigured”.  But now logs which are coming from vCenter via Syslog will contain data from vCenter Events. These logs will clearly show “Before” and “After” setting…

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vSphere 6.5 Installation – Part 3 – vCenter Server on Windows

vSphere 6.5 Installation – Part 3 – vCenter Server on Windows

This is the third part of the series in which I’m describing the process of installation vSphere 6.5 components. In this part I’ll go throught the process of installation vCenter Server on MS Windows Server 2012 R2. The others parts are: vSphere 6.5 Installation – Part 1 – External PSC vSphere 6.5 Installation – Part 2 – vCenter Server Appliance Now let’s check how the Windows installation looks like in the latest vSphere version. Prerequisities:  ISO for vCenter Server installation….

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