For a while I ran a podcast which was essentially a round-up of news within the world of virtualization. That often touch upon other vendors, so when I signed up with VMware I handed off vNews to Stu McHugh and Steve Bruck, because I thought it was important to keep vNew “independent” and free of any suggestion of “vendor bias”. Now I’m on the other side of the fence. For some reason people keep on asking me what life is like “over on the darkside”. I even get it from fellow VMware employees which is somewhat ironic.
Anyway, in my 12 short weeks at VMware its occured me that myself and fellow VMwarEmployed bloggers don’t really do enough to promote each others works. As for myself I limit my self-promotion of blogging activity to three tweets (GMT, Eastern, Pacific) and one google+ update per blogpost. After that feels like I’m “flood” the social networks too much.
It would be TOO much for to watch all the bloggers on a weekly basis and highlight interesting stuff. There’s just too many bloggers, and too much good stuff. But I feel I can at least subscribe to my collegues blogs, add them to my Vienna feeds and try to draw your attention to their output. In the early days of the WWW, you used to get weblog “rings” where at the bottom of a post there’s be a link to someone else blogpost who was in the ring. I’m not sure if that would work for all us. So I’m going to digest instead.
vSphere Patch adds support for VMware View 5.1
For me the BIG news this week was a patch being released. Normally, this stuff passes me by because I tend to only do ESX updates between releases (5.0, 5.1) and major updates (U1, U2 and so on). This particular patch (http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2035268) adds support for VMware View 5.1 for the recently release vSphere5.1. Oddly enough I was asked at yesterdays “Virtual Machine User Group” in Leeds when this issue would be addressed. I knew were working on a patch bundle for vSphere to address some SSO issues, but I didn’t know this was in the works. It’s really good news because AFAIK I thought the next release of View would address this – in fact I jokingly said we’d be forced to call it View 5.1.1 to keep the numbering insycn. I’ve download the patch today and applied it to all my host. I was also pleased to see my vCenter Server Appliance was automagically updated last night as well. I think my decision to ditch the Windows edition of vCenter is already paying dividends. Previously, I would have to have download 2GB .iso and run setup.exe remembering all my username/passwords for the database parts.
As I’m in a lab environment I’m more than happy for updates that can be totally automated to do so – that’s not something I would recommend in production environments where a more controlled upgrade/patch process for vCenter/vSphere Hosts is more appropriate. Anyway, I download the patch, and manually put each host into maintanance mode and applied it using esxcli like so:
esxcli software vib update -d /vmfs/volumes/software/vmware/vcloudsuite5.1/ESXi510-201210001.zip
So here’s my weekly round-up… (guy’s you want to cut & paste in your own blog then feel free… otherwise just ignore me… there’s nothing new there, right 😉 )
Duncan Epping:
The State of vSphere Clustering by @virtualirfan
Database clustering support for vCloud Director added in version 5.1!
VMworld #NotSupported lightning talk slides – Hacking SRM
Simon Long:
