#VMworld EU 2017 VIO-CE Announcement

VMware has announced VMware Integrated OpenStack – Carrier Edition (VIO-CE) as part of their Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) Platform.

What is NFV? These are virtualised Carrier/SP services that have historically run on dedicated, proprietary hardware in the field. A great example is an LTE Base-station controller or an MPLS Provider Edge router, where rather than buying the dedicated hardware appliance from the vendor, you buy the licence for the Virtual Appliance (NFV certified for use with vSphere) and deploy it in a vSphere cluster instead; which is much more efficient when you combine multiple NFV services in the same vSphere cluster.

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VMware Skyline

VMware Skyline was announced at VMworld US 2017, however it did not get much press. I was listening to the VMware Communities Roundtable podcast from this week, where Skyline was the subject. I was impressed with the vision of Skyline to be a pro-active and predictive support platform for VMware customers.

What caught my attention, was the intention to leverage analytics and a VVD rules engine to notify customers if they are straying from the flock from a configuration and design perspective. Skyline is deployed as a virtual appliance (Skyline Collector) which securely feeds information and logs back to the VMware mothership.

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Directly modifying ESXi host managed by vCenter Server

In the world of Nutanix HCI on vSphere, you sometimes do not have access to the vCenter Server, but you do have the root credentials of the ESXi host. However, when you try to make your changes, the ESXi host returns the message, “Access to resource settings on the host is restricted to the server that is managing it”.

There is one particular administrator task where this workaround comes into play: the Nutanix CVM resizing procedure to increase/decrease vCPU and RAM. I always forget the exact details of this workaround and then spend 30 minutes searching for it, so here it is. If this was a Production system, then obviously you would have an approved Change Request before you executed the workaround.

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#VMworld US 2017 vSAN Announcement

VMware SABU has announced the “HCI Acceleration Kit”. Which allows enterprises to deploy vSAN, including single socket hardware, for under $25K per site for ROBO, distributed site use-cases. These types of deployments are typically seen in the retail, healthcare, oil/gas, military and manufacturing sectors.

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