Well, a few weeks have gone by since I made my little announcement. I’m happy to say things are going well on the creative front, and I’ve been toying with the idea of recording some songs and putting them on her for your delight and delectation. This post is about my computer life. As promised I’ve started contributing to the VMUG Wiki project. I must admit the first couple of attempts were disaster. I had technical problems as my home lab has been down for months, and the process of updating the vSphere5 content to vSphere6 content is actually – sorry to say this – tedious.
Anyway, last week and the week before – I got over my technical problems and started to find an approach for updating the content that feels quicker, and therefore less tedious. What floats my boat is writing new content about something that has changed significantly, rather than playing a ‘spot the difference” game with software that if you blinked you’d miss any changes. Anyway, someone had to do this job, and as I have time on my hands now, it might as well be me.
So I’m pleased to report we have a new chapter on the VMUG Wiki (probably the first in months!) called thrillingly “Installing VMware ESX 6“. Yes, I know there’s a broken image in the content. I’m working to resolve that – we have a more serious problem with images in Wiki generally – as MediaWiki sometimes fails to create “thumbnails” correctly. I’m working with the VMUG folks to try and resolve that.
For those like me who have been in this game for a while – there are no surprises here. Indeed some of the content is so similar I haven’t bother to swap graphics around when the only difference in the UI is the bloody build number! However, there were one or two new things that caught my eye.
Firstly, “Lockdown Mode” (that highly popular feature of ESX 😉 ) has a new option or mode called “strict”. I understand this prohibs the use of the DCUI to turn it off. So the only way to turn off “Lockdown Mode” is if the host is manageable via vCenter. That makes vCenter the only method by which the host can be managed. I guess this removes a ‘backdoor’ method caused by the root account being compromised. In my experience customers (except govt/military types) rarely use this feature – in fact many people lower security by enabling SSH which is normally disabled.
Secondly, the other thing I noticed is if you attach two vmnic to vSwitch0 they marked as being Active/Active. Previously, ESX marked one as being Active (vmnic0) and the other being Passive (vmnic1 for example). I consider this an ‘improvement’ but I imagine most experience VMware shops pretty much have the network setup nailed down by now and automated – and never use this method anyway.
Thirdly, I notice the TCP configuration has changed slightly for DNS (this might have changed a while ago, and I hadn’t noticed). You can now set a IPv6 DNS address (whoopee!), But the ‘odd’ thing is the option to set a secondary DNS for IPv4 seems to have disappeared. I assumed you could use comma separated values in the box – but it doesn’t seem to accept that. I dunno if that’s “by design” or bug…. If someone in the ESX team is reading this and knows their onions I’d be interest to know what the rationale is behind this… so I can feel less stupid and educate the community.
Finally, I am working on Chapter 2: Installing vCenter. That’s proved to be a bit more interesting given that there’s the new “Platform Service Controller” (great sexy name there!) and new Postgres support for the Windows version of vCenter. I increasingly find setting up the Windows vCenter a total ball-ache. That’s not because of VMware, but because of the bloody Windows dependencies that must met first. I mean why does anyone bother with the Windows vCenter for new deployments (lights touch paper and walks away!