cloudmaniac.net - Romain Decker

Although a recurrent request, the use of Open VM Tools on guest or workload virtual machines has never been validated with NSX Distributed Firewall. It got quite unnoticed, but a small sentence in the NSX for vSphere 6.3.2 Release Notes changed the game: **Starting in NSX 6.3.2, Open VM Tools is supported with Distributed Firewall.** In NSX, VMware Tools are required to translate vCenter objects into IP. Indeed, the underlying NSX distributed firewall rules configured within the kernel are IP-based, despite being abstracted as objects at the configuration layer so it is a requirement to run VMware tools in all virtual machines so their addresses are reported into vCenter. ...

edit (2021/03/19): I removed some links to Pierre’s blog as it doesn’t exist anymore. There are people playing with VMware products, others creating scripts or helping the community; you also have a completely different kind of people who are creating tools in their free time, such as my friend Pierre. :) After developing a vROps notification plugin that allows to send REST request automatically when an alarm is triggered in vROps, or a VMware Certificate Toolkit, Pierre released yesterday the VMware Tools Client beta that allows you to interact with a VM without network connectivity. ...

VMware vRealize Automation 7.3 was released yesterday; although this is a dot release, it integrates many new features and improvements covering: Out-of-the-box support for t-shirt sizing Policy-based optimization of virtual machine placement Lifecycle with new APIs available for installation and upgrade REST APIs High availability (automated failover of PostgreSQL and IaaS manager services, etc.) New health service New integrations (Puppet, Admiral) Deeper integration for Azure (drag-and-drop Azure software components in the blueprint designer) ...

…or should I say Dell EMC UnityVSA? :) EMC released the new midrange storage array Unity at EMC World last year. Available in 3 different options (Unity All Flash, Unity Hybrid Flash and UnityVSA), the Unity product line was built as a replacement for VNX and VNXe use cases. Unity features multiple integration points with virtualization technologies that are used in datacenters today such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. Many of these powerful integration points are embedded in to the system and are designed with the end-user experience in mind. ...

People might wonder what you get with a VMUG subscription. Beyond discounts on VMware training classes or certification exams, VMUG Advantage included EVALExperience for the past 2 years. For those who missed my earlier post, EVALExperience gives you access to 365-day evaluation licenses for a selection of VMware solutions, for personal use in a non-production environment. The great news is that NSX Enterprise Edition licenses are now also included if you subscribe to VMUG Advantage. ...