vToolbelt – September 2022
Sending this newsletter a little early. Included below are links to an important Security Advisory and the live stream to the VMware Explore keynote on August 30th.
Hot Topics
- VMware Explore keynote from the General Session on Tuesday will be streamed live on Tuesday 8/30 at 12pm EST.
- A Security Advisory for VMware Tools was released on 8/23/22. VMSA-2022-0024 describes the impact as a local privilege escalation vulnerability.
- VMware Tools should be updated to 12.1.0.
- This VMware tools package can be added to your VMware environment so you can use vCenter to do the updates.
- vSphere 6.5 and 6.7 are heading into End of General Support in 6️⃣ weeks- October 15th, 2022. If your environment is still running these versions – now is the time to start your upgrade. Check out this Upgrade Planning Guide to help you get started.
Upcoming Events
VMware Explore
August 29 – September 1, 2022
In-Person at the Moscone Center
San Francisco, California
VMware Explore starts this week!
The keynote from the General Session on Tuesday will be streamed live on Tuesday 8/30 at 12pm EST.
Cincinnati VMUG UserCON
December 8th 2022
8am – 4:30pm
In-person at the Sharonville Convention Center
The Cincinnati VMUG community welcomes you back to the Sharonville Convention Center to network and engage in face-to-face conversations with your peers at the Cincinnati VMUG UserCon. Learn about the latest in IT innovations to help you stay on the cutting edge of technology. Advance your knowledge, become a better IT professional and grow as a strategic leader for your organization.
Product Support Watch
The following products are nearing the End of General Support. You can find the full list on the VMware Lifecycle Product Matrix.
vSphere – vCenter and ESXi
- 6.5 – 10/15/22
- 6.7 – 10/15/22
VMware Tools
- Tools 10.2.x – 12/14/22
vSAN
- 6.5, 6.6, 6.7 – 10/15/22
NSX
- NSX-V (all versions) – General Support ended January 16, 2022 – Customers should migrate to NSX-T
Horizon View / Workspace ONE
- Dynamic Environment Manager 10/2009 – 10/15/22
- App Volumes 2.18 – 9/16/22
- App Volumes 4 2009 – 10/15/22
- App Volumes 4 2012 – 1/7/23
- Identity Manager 3.3.5 – 11/20/22
- Workspace ONE UEM Console 2102 – 10/14/22
- Workspace ONE UEM Console 2107 (SaaS only) – 2/8/23
- vRealize Operations Manager for Horizon 6.7 – 10/15/22
vRealize
- vRealize Automation 7.6 – 9/1/22
- vRealize Orchestrator 7.6 – 9/1/22
- vRealize Automation – 8/2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5 8.6, 8.6.1 – 10/31/22
- vRealize Automation – 8.6.2 – 1/18/23
- vRealize Orchestrator – 8/2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5 8.6 – 10/31/22
- vRealize Orchestrator – 8.6.1 – 11/19/22
- vRealize Orchestrator – 8.6.2 – 1/18/23
- vRealize Lifecycle Manager 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5, 8.6 – 10/31/22
- Log Insight 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 – 10/31/22
- Network Insight – 5.3, 6.0, 6.1 – 10/31/22
- vRealize Operations 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5 – 10/31/22
- vRealize Operations for Horizon 6.7 – 10/15/22
Notes from the Field
VMware Skyline
Your VMware Cloud Services Organization name should match the name of your institution – This name is how Support Engineers look for your Skyline data when helping you with an issue. It can be hard or impossible for them to find it if an arbitrary name was chosen (ie “Arron King’s organization”, internal department name, or a mascot). I mention this because I have seen what people choose and it can prevent the engineers from finding information that can speed up issue resolution.
I recommend you take a moment and review your Organization Display Name in the VMware Cloud Services Console. If it isn’t named in a way to easily identify your organization, hit the EDIT link and change it.
New Skyline Collector – VMware has released version 3.2 of the Skyline Collector. This release adds new features and proactive findings. You will need to login to the Skyline Collector management interface (for the virtual appliance) and upgrade it. You can also enable auto-update to make your life easier.
- There is a known issue with auto-update that could prevent an upgrade from 3.1 to 3.2. If you notice the appliance hasn’t updated per your settings, review the steps in KB 89230 for the fix.
If you haven’t tried VMware Skyline – why not? VMware Skyline is free for customers with active support contracts (Production and higher). If provides pro-active notification of fixes for known issues that can affect your environment and makes it very easy for you to submit Diagnostic Log Bundles
- VMware Skyline Demo
- Installing Skyline – part of this will be to create a VMware Cloud Services account. Read the note above and choose a descriptive name!
Booting ESX hosts from SD-Cards
On 4/27/22, VMware published updated guidance on using SD Cards. The short version is “VMware will continue supporting USB/SD card as a boot device through the 8.0 product release, including the update releases. Both installs and upgrades will be supported on USB/SD cards. The change from the previous guidance is that SD/USB as a standalone device will now be supported on previously certified server platforms”. KB 85685 has the full details. Migrating away from SD cards is still recommended.
- A TAM Customer webinar in December 2021 covered this extensively. If you were unable to attend the webinar live, you can watch the recording.
- A VMware engineer has written a blog article on how to move from booting ESX from SD-Cards to using locally attached SSDs.
- KB 83376 – discusses the issues that can arise when the SD card boot device has exhausted its write capability. This KB also describes a work around VMware has developed to allow low endurance SD Cards to work with vSphere 7 Update 2 and later. It involves a manual one-time config change which moves certain highly accessed files to a RAM Disk. vSphere 7.0 U3 automated this process.
- While this should help with vSphere 7.x, VMware guidance for future versions of vSphere is to move to higher performance/endurance boot devices in a future budget or your next hardware refresh plan.