vToolbelt – August 2019

08.04.201908.05.2019/vToolBelt

I’ve been on Summer Hiatus; but summer break is one of those good things that must eventually come to an end. I hope that everyone has found some time to get away and re-charge your batteries during the busy summer season.

Upcoming Events

Central Ohio VMUG – 8/6/19
COVMUG is doing a hands-on lab with Docker & Kubernetes. Bring your laptop for this 8a-2p meeting where you will get hands on keyboard lab time with containers. Go to VMUG.COM and register

Ohio SLED VMUG – 8/13/19
The Ohio SLED VMUG meeting will have presentations on Day 2 Operations by the OARnet TAMS (Matt Lydy for Gov and Arron King for EDU). There will also be a group discussion on IT Careers in SLED. Register at VMUG.COM

Product Watch

The following products are nearing the End of General Support. You can find the full list on the VMware Lifecycle Product Matrix.

AirWatch Console 9.3 – 9/14/19	App Volumes 2.13 – 10/13/19
Identity Manager 3.2 – 9/14/19	NST-T 2.0, 2.1 – 9/7/19 2.2 – 9/18/19
ThinApp 4.7.3 – 10/31/19	User Environment Manager 9.3 – 1/4/19
vCenter Converter Standalone 6.2 – 12/14/19	vRealize Automation 7.3 – 12/17/19
Log Insight 4.6 – 8/23/19	vRealize Network Insight 3.9 – 12/20/19
vRealize Operations Manger 6.6 – 8/23/19	Workspace ONE UEM Console 9.4 – 11/2/19 9.5 – 1/2/20

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Ohio SLED VMUG Meeting – August 13

08.03.201908.05.2019/VMUG

Make plans to attend the SLED VMUG on August 13, 2019 for a meeting focused on what makes VMUG awesome – its members.

Topics

Introduction to Trace3 – Ben St. John & Sean Voice
Day 2 Operations Tips and Tricks – Arron King & Matt Lydy
Career Panel Discussion – Ohio SLED IT Community

When

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

8:30am-12pm

Where

Tree of Life

5000 Arlington Centre Blvd

Columbus, OH 43220

How to attend

Go to VMUG.COM and register

Central Ohio VMUG Meeting – August 6 2019 – Docker & Kubernetes

07.24.201908.01.2019/VMUG

The next Central Ohio VMUG (COVMUG) will be held on August 6, 2019. The focus of this meeting will be Docker & Kubernetes in a VMware environment. If this interests you, block off your calendar and register today for this hands-on event!

Don’t forget to bring your laptop and your VMware MyLearn account. During this meeting you will:

Be very hands-on
Learn basic Docker and Kubernetes fundamentals
Use that knowledge in hands-on labs
Deploy, operate, and troubleshoot applications in those Docker & Kubernetes environments

Note: This is a six-hour event and lunch will be provided.

When

Tuesday, August 6, 2019

8am-2pm

Where

Tree of Life

5000 Arlington Centre Blvd

Columbus, OH 43220

How to attend

Go to VMUG.COM and register

Bring your laptop, power cord and your VMware MyLearn account

Adding Async VMware Tools versions to Update Manager

06.14.201906.18.2019/Update Manager, VMware Tools, vSphere

Why aren’t VMware Tools at the right version on patched hosts?

A customer called with a question about updating VMware Tools as part of a recent security patch (https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2019-0009.html). The patch resolves an address out-of-bounds vulnerability in VMware Tools that was present in certain versions of the software (10.2.x and 10.3.x prior to 10.3.10). He wanted to install the new version; but the VMware Tools installations on his VMs indicated they were current; but still were running an affected version. His hosts were patched and up-to-date. He knew he could manually update VMware Tools on each of his VMs; but was hoping there was an easier way – and there is!

The status of VMware Tools on a virtual machine is relative to the the host. Typically VMware Tools updates are delivered through an ESXi patch. In this case, the VMware Tools 10.3.10 release hasn’t been rolled into an ESXi patch yet. It will be shortly. The amount of testing that goes into an ESXi patch requires a good amount of time. When VMware patches VMware Tools like they did in the case of this vulnerability, they release it to customers so they can deploy the fix sooner if they choose. VMware calls this an Async release.

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Cleveland VMUG – June 2019 Meeting

06.07.201906.07.2019/VMUG

The next meeting of the Cleveland VMUG will be held on June 26th from 5-8pm.

Topics will include:

VMware Cloud on AWS
Securing Your Assets in the Cloud by Trend Micro
Overview of the changes in vSphere 6.7 Update 2

Meeting Location:

Beachwood Public Library
25501 Shaker Boulevard
Beachwood, OH 44122

You can register at VMUG.COM

Cincinnati VMUG – June 2019 meeting

05.17.201905.17.2019/VMUG

The next meeting of the Cincinnati VMware User Group will be June 18, 2019.

The focus of the meeting will be:

vSAN
Hybrid Cloud
AWS

Hytrust is sponsoring the event

It will be held at

University of Cincinnati Teachers-Dyer Complex
2610 McMicken Circle
Cincinnati, OH 45221

You can register at VMUG.COM

vToolbelt – April 2019

04.30.201904.30.2019/vToolBelt

We are full on into spring. The flowers are blooming, and I am cutting grass twice a week. Welcome to the April 2019 edition of vToolBelt. vSphere 6.7 Update 2 is the big news this month. It is out and hot. We will also cover VMware Project Skyline.

For those of you still running vSphere 6.0, don’t look over your shoulder – End of General Support is less than a year away. Time to start planning the upgrade!

Let’s get to it!

Product Watch

The following products are nearing the End of General Support. You can find the full list on the VMware Lifecycle Product Matrix.

NSX-T 2.0/2.1 – 9/7/19	vROPS – 6.6/6.7 – 8/23/19
Horizon View 6.x – 6/19/19	User Environment Manager 9.2 – 5-16/19
vRealize Log Insight 4.6/4.7 – 8/23/19	App Volumes 2.13 – 10/19/19
AirWatch Console 9.3 – 9/14/19	Identity Manger 3.12 – 9/14/19
vRealize Lifecycle Manager 1.0-1.3 – 9/19/19
vSphere 6.0 – 3/12/20

Notes from the Field

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Installing PowerShell and PowerCLI on Linux

04.07.201904.10.2019/PowerCLI, Scripting

Expanding the Lab

I’ve been working on changing some things in my lab lately, and wanted to build a jumphost that I could get to from anywhere and use it to work on my VMware Virtualization lab. While it would be pretty easy to setup a Windows machine, my lab dollars are hard to come by and I wanted to save every bit to grow the capacity. Ever since PowerShell was made available on multiple platforms, I’ve wanted to try it out on Linux.

I am in no way a Linux expert; but have worked in multiple distros and am fairly comfortable – at least for non-production use. I set up a VM with Ubuntu Desktop and applied all of the patches. I’ll let others debate the virtues of the various Linux distributions. I picked Ubuntu a while ago and it seemed to make sense to focus on a single distribution to best develop my expertise. I chose Ubuntu Desktop as I wanted to have a GUI available should I be working remotely and needed to do a demo or work though something requiring a browser.

What do I need?

The toolset I need for my jumphost is fairly easy to assemble:

Modern Web Browser – Chrome and Firefox
PowerShell – This is Microsoft’s command-line shell and scripting language. In the multi-cloud world in which we live in – this can be the tool to help automate all of these platforms together
PowerCLI – PowerCli is a PowerShell module for managing VMware vSphere
Tools for future projects (such as Restful API automation, Desired State Configuration , etc)

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Images in Messages App are broken – Fixed!

03.25.201903.25.2019/MacOS

You can put me in the long time Mac/iPhone user group. Not only do they make excellent hardware – Apple really goes to extraordinary lengths to integrate the software and user experience. A Macbook Pro has been my daily driver for work for nearly 3 years. Using a Mac all day every day is very enjoyable; but one little irritation has nagged at me. Images in the Messages MacOS app are broken! The image would never appear. An icon with a filename would appear but that was it.

No images in iMessage

At first I thought it was probably the corporate VPN connection that might be blocking them. Work had me so busy, I just ignored it and opened my phone each time a message with a picture came in.

Today there is more work than ever to do; but for whatever reason – I really had to scratch that itch this time! After some experimentation the solution presented itself!

The Messages app stores incoming images in a folder (Library/Messages/Attachments). Upon examining my system, I found a zero byte file (/Users/your-user-name/Library/Messages/Attachments). That seemed pretty odd. A bit of searching and I found an article on the Apple Communities site.

Attachments folder is really a file

Remove that file and create a directory with the same name.

Attachments is now a Folder

When you restart Messages any new messages with pictures should work just fine!

Images in iMessage now work!

A few thoughts:

It is unclear how this got “broken”. Maybe something happened when my computer was initially setup
There is no obvious way for Messages to clean up the Attachments folder. It might be a good idea to clear that out once in a while – particularly if you use your computer for work <privacy> or have images you don’t wish anyone to see </privacy>.
When you restart Messages any images already in your text streams will remain broken. Since the folder didn’t exist when they were recieved there was no way to cache them.