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Tag: esxi 6.5

HTML5 Client – the new way of managing vSphere environment?

HTML5 Client – the new way of managing vSphere environment?

Since vSphere 6.5, VMware killed standard Windows vSphere Client. However, it was promised so we should not be suprised (anyway I am still shocked ;)). Fortunatelly, every cloud has a silver lining. I reckon that VMware is aware that the current Web Client is not a perfect solution. That’s why they released completely new HTML5 vSphere Client which seems to be quite useful, intuitive and what’s the most important – it works as it should in therms of response times….

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vSphere 6.5 – Stronger security with NFS 4.1

vSphere 6.5 – Stronger security with NFS 4.1

NFS 4.1 is been supported since vSphere 6.0 and  but now we are looking into providing stronger security. In vSphere 6.5 we have better security  by providing strong cryptographic algorithms with Kerberos (AES). Also, IPV6 is supported but not with Kerberos and that is another area we are looking into along with supporting integrity checks. Aa we know vSphere 6 NFS client also does not support the more advanced encryption type know is AES. So lets take a look at…

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vSphere 6.5 – New scale limits for paths & LUNs

vSphere 6.5 – New scale limits for paths & LUNs

In vSphere 6.5 VMware  doubled  the  current limits and continuously work on reaching new scale around this . Current limits (before 6.5) pose challenge as for example in some cases our customers have 8 paths to a LUN, in this configuration one can have max of 128 LUNs in a cluster. Also, many of the customers tend to have smaller size LUNs to segregate important data for easy backup and restore. This approach can also exhaust current LUN and Path…

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vSphere 6.5 – vSphere HA Orchestrated Restart

vSphere 6.5 – vSphere HA Orchestrated Restart

VMware announced a new feature in vSphere 6.5 called HA Orchestrated Restart. But wait a minute – it was already available in previous version where you were able to set the restart priority for specific VMs or group of VMs. So what’s going on with this “new feature” ? As always, the devil is in the details 🙂 Let’s start from the old behavior. Using VM overrides in previous version of vSphere, we could set one of three available priorities…

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vSphere 6.5 – Automatic UNMAP

vSphere 6.5 – Automatic UNMAP

In vSphere 6.5 VMware are looking into automating the UNMAP process, where VMFS  would track the deleted blocks and will be able to reclaim deleted space from the backend array in back ground. This background operation should make sure that there is a minimal storage I/O impact due to UNMAP operations. Just to remaind – UNMAP is a VAAI primitive using which we can reclaim dead or stranded space on thinly provisioned VMFS volume. Currently this can be initiated by…

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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 – 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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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 Security Enhancements  

vSphere 6.5 Security Enhancements  

  In this article I will try to point most important security enhancements in recently released vSphere 6.5 platform.  As we can hear from “pre GA” sneak peek information VMware will build security in 3 areas: Secure access – logs monitoring and audit Secure infrastructure – hypervisor with minimal footprint = minimal attack surface and cryptographic option to provide SecureBoot Secure data – hypervisor-level encryption for VM data Let’s go deeper  into the  technology – below is a list of…

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