Hot VMware Topics – May 2016

Another Month of 2016 is marked off the books, so that means its time for another segment of our Hot VMware topics series. As a reminder to those that aren’t familiar, in this series we like to post interesting stories, howtos, and VMware news that we’ve found to be interesting throughout the previous month. This way, you can stay informed about all the cool VMware stuff that is happening out there, without having to scour the net for it.

Let’s get started!

1. I Have Memory Pages Swapped, can vSphere Un-swap Them?

I run into people wondering this all the time, so I was very happy to see Duncan Epping, post about that question exactly. While in an ideal world you wouldn’t let youself get into a situation where you have memory contention in the first place, the world is hardly ideal. With that said, many people using vSphere just assume that this happens behind the scenes anyway. If you want a little more information and clarification on this process, by all means check out the article. Duncan does an excellent job of explaining it.

2. VMware HCL Check with PowerCLI (Proof of Concept)

I found this link a week or so ago, and felt this was a REALLY cool thing. Most of us like to check the HCL whenever we’re doing upgrades or whenever we’re buying new hardware. But what if you could query the HCL using PowerCLI from the system you need to check? That is EXACTLY what this script does. The script was written by Florian over at virten.net and is certainly worth your time to review!

3. Deploy and Configure VMware NSX in 23 Minutes

Speaking of impressive scripts…  I have another one for you this month as well. This one is brought to you from Martijn Smit over at vmguru.com. We all know that NSX is a Hot VMware Topic in the industry right now, but many administrators are still testing it in their labs. Well what if you needed to keep spinning it up and tearing it down to test out deployment operations and other items? This script will deploy NSX in 23 minutes. Yes that is correct. What takes most people an hour or more, can be done in 23 minutes with this script, so be sure to check it out!

4. VMware Virtual SAN Availability Features and Capabilities

I found this to be a well-worth-it 30 minute video to watch. Especially if you want to brush up on VSAN a bit. This video is done by Rawlinson Rivera. The video is embedded below.

5. VMware NSX 6 Component Communication Diagram

Here is another goodie from Florian at Virten.net. This link contains a diagram of all the various pieces of component communication that are involved in the NSX solution. NSX can be a somewhat complicated monster to wrap ones head around, but a picture says a thousand words, so this diagram is immensely helpful. It’s certainly one for the bookmarks folder.

6. Goodbye vSphere Client for Windows (C#) – Hello HTML5

This will likely come as no surprise, but it’s nice to see the official announcement that VMware has deemed the old vSphere fat client to be dead. As we’ve talked about before, VMware is going full speed ahead on the HTML5 web client so that they can get rid of the nasty flash requirement that is present in the current version. Officially kicking the fat client to the curve will allow them to focus more time on getting the HTML 5 client up to snuff. Check out the article for more details!

7. Windows Nano Server: Virtualization with VMware vSphere

If you’ve been keeping up on the Microsoft side of the world, you know that Nano Server is a BIG deal right now. Nano Server is Microsoft’s new ultra-slim server installation for running workloads like IIS, Hyper-V, DNS, Storage Spaces, and more. There have been many folks on the VMware side though that have seen value in running nano inside of vSphere. I’m not going to lie. The current process, is not easy, it’s not quick, but it gets the job done. If you need a good afternoon project, this is the article for you!

Wrap-Up

That concludes our list for the month! Hopefully this has giving you enough reading and learning for the coming weeks and we hope that you enjoyed it! As always, if you know of a link that isn’t shown here, that you feel SHOULD be in this list, by all means, let us know in the comments section below! Until next month!

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