Tim VCI

A new Hands on Lab has just been released from VMware - vSphere 7 with Kubernetes. As always, they are free to do once you have created your VMware HOL account (also free). https://www.vmwarelearningplatform.com/HOL/catalogs/lab/7811

I've been having some fun getting macOS11 (also referred to as macOS 10.16 during install) Big Sur beta 1 running in a VM within VMware Fusion. If you've not met Fusion before, it's VMware's hypervisor for the Apple Mac. It's a really useful tool for a lot of people right now as Apple has given developers access to the first beta code this week and Fusion allows us to test the new release running in a VM. As usual, running unsupported, pre release software sometimes brings up challenges... Downloaded the macOS 11 beta installer from Apple. It's about 10GB so may take a little while. Then I obtained a USB stick (16GB minimum) and formatted it with Disk Utility leaving the default name of Untitled. Then, using Terminal, I ran the following command to create the installer and make the media bootable... sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ 10.15\ Beta.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume

These are 2 of the best books I recommend to my students in the courses I teach... vSphere Host Resources Deep Dive (6.5) By Frank Denneman and Niels Hagoort, If you want to have a really deep understanding about how an ESXi host handles resource management then this is the book for you. It also goes into a lot of depth about processor architecture and topics such as vNUMA. Even though it is based on ESXi 6.5, there is still a ton on incredibly useful information within. Download this book here... https://www.rubrik.com/en/lp/white-papers/19/host-resources-deep-dive-ebook.html vSphere Clustering Deep Dive (6.7) By Duncan Epping, Frank Denneman and Niels Hagoort. This book goes really deep into how vSphere HA works and how to create a robust HA cluster along with explaining how to get the best out of DRS, network resource pools and resources allocation settings. There is never enough time to go through all the minute detail in class but you'll find it here in this book. Download thi

VMware have announced an offer of 6 months free access to their Learning Zone Premium Subscription. You can register for this anytime between now and November 6, 2020. If you've not heard of the VMware Learning Zone, then it is VMware's online digital training, delivered by top VMware experts and certified instructors. If you are looking at taking a VMware certification exam then the exam prep courses are brilliant - I found them particularly useful when studying for the last exam I had to take. Here's a link with further information and how to sign up... VLZ Premium Subscription 6 Month Promotion FAQ

Have you joined VMUG yet? If not, why not? VMUG stands for VMware Users Group and it's free to join. It's run by VMware enthusiast volunteers and there are VMUG events run all over the world. https://www.vmug.com/home In the UK, we have a number of communities you can join - London VMUG, North East VMUG, North West VMUG, Southwest VMUG and finally Yorkshire VMUG. Each community generally runs one or more sessions a year and then towards the end of the year there is the UK VMUG UserCon which I have been to for the last 2 years. This years event is on Nov 26th and I am already planning on attending. Last year, I bumped into 4 students who I had taught in the previous year - I wonder how many I will bump into this time? For anyone who runs their own home lab then the VMUG Advantage membership (normally $200 / year but the code ADVNOW currently gives a 10% discount) is well worth paying for as you'll get the EvalExperience

One of the most impressive bits of technology that was announced at VMworld last year was the Bitfusion Tech Preview. It seems that AI and ML (Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning) are being talked about more and more these days and along with these new technologies comes new challenges. New GPUs needed to run these new workloads are required but they are not particularly cheap especially when installed in all the hosts where you want your workloads to run. So essentially, Bitfusion allows GPUs on dedicated hosts to be dynamically assigned to VMs / Containers as and when needed and then removed after they are no longer required. This reminds me so much of how virtualisation solved the problem of inefficient hardware utilisation when ESX was introduced all those years ago.  Anyway here is a really great explanation about what the problem is and how Bitfusion will solve it here... W

vSphere 7 hands on labs have been released along with the labs for vCloud Foundation 4.0 I often mention in my classes that one of the best ways to gain further experience with VMware products especially if you don't have a home lab is to create a free VMware HOL account. There are over a 100 labs available from beginner through to expect level with topics ranging from an introduction to virtualisation to VMware on AWS hybrid cloud and on to software defined networking and software defined storage. An introduction to HOL can be found here... Link to the new labs below... VMware vSphere - What's New VMware Cloud Foundation - What's New

VMworld registrations open on the 23rd June. For those early birds, that means midnight tonight (UK time) although I believe it will be available even earlier due to the time zone differences in the Asia / Pacific region. This year, the event will be 'virtual' so the good news is that it will be far easier for more of us to attend. If you haven't already, I'd strongly advise that you create a free VMworld account as that will give you access to pretty much most of the recordings from the previous VMworld events.  See you there! https://www.vmworld.com/en/index.html

Welcome to my new virtualisation blog where I can share with you information I find interesting and useful. So far I have learnt how to modify Blogger, link my domain name to my blog and, if you can see this, publish a post!