vSphere, vCloud and other VMware Product Updates

There are new updates available for the following products and including their release notes.

 To download the updates you need MyVMware credentials.


VMware vSphere 5.1 Update 1
https://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere5/doc/vsphere-vcenter-server-51u1-release-notes.html


VMware vSphere Update Manager 5.1 Update 1
http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere5/doc/vsphere-update-manager-51u1-release-notes.html


vCenter Server Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.1
https://www.vmware.com/support/mhm/doc/vcenter-multi-hypervisor-manager-11-release-notes.html


VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.1
https://www.vmware.com/support/converter/doc/conv_sa_51_rel_notes.html


VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.5 Update 1
https://www.vmware.com/support/heartbeat/doc/vcenter-server-heartbeat-65-u1-release-notes.html


VMware vCloud Director 5.1.2
https://www.vmware.com/support/vcd/doc/rel_notes_vcloud_director_512.html


VMware vCloud Director Appliance 5.1.2
http://www.vmware.com/support/vcd/doc/rel_notes_vcloud_director_512.html

VMware vSphere Replication 5.1.1
http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere5/doc/vsphere-replication-511-release-notes.html


vSphere Site Recovery Manager 5.1.1
https://www.vmware.com/support/srm/srm-releasenotes-5-1-1.html


vSphere Data Protection 5.1.20
https://www.vmware.com/support/vdr/doc/vdp_5120_releasenotes.html


vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1.3
http://www.vmware.com/support/vsa/doc/vsphere-storage-appliance-513-release-notes.html


vCloud Networking and Security 5.1.2a
https://www.vmware.com/support/vshield/doc/releasenotes_vshield_512a.html


Please refer the upgrade guides before you plan the upgrade to stay away from any gotchas.

Enjoy your upgrade Time !!

Care and share !!

VMware Certifications List with recent name change

Recently VMwrae Education Services has renamed all the available Certifications including VCDX.

Here is the full List of all the certificates except the once highlighted in Red which are coming soon.


CLOUD (vCloud Director based)

VMware Certified Professional – Cloud (VCP-Cloud)
VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Cloud Infrastructure Administration (VCAP-CIA)
VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Cloud Infrastructure Design (VCAP-CID)
VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Cloud Governance (VCAP-CG)
VMware Certified Design Expert – Cloud (VCDX-Cloud)



DATA CENTER VIRTUALIZATION(vSphere 4.x and 5.x based)

VMware Certified Professional 4 – Data Center Virtualization (VCP4-DCV)
VMware Certified Professional 5 – Data Center Virtualization (VCP5-DCV)
VMware Certified Advanced Professional 4 – Data Center Administration (VCAP4-DCA)
VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5 – Data Center Administration (VCAP5-DCA)
VMware Certified Advanced Professional 4 – Data Center Design (VCAP4-DCD)
VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5 – Data Center Design (VCAP5-DCD)
VMware Certified Design Expert 4 – Data Center Virtualization (VCDX4-DCV)
VMware Certified Design gpExpert 5 – Data Center Virtualization (VCDX5-DCV)



END USER COMPUTING (VMware View based)

VMware Certified Associate 4 – Desktop (VCA4-DT)
VMware Certified Professional 4 – Desktop (VCP4-DT)
VMware Certified Professional 5 – Desktop (VCP5-DT)
VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Desktop Design (VCAP-DTD)
VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Desktop Administration (VCAP-DTA)
VMware Certified Design Expert – Desktop (VCDX-DT)


For more information on each one visit the site here. 

Care and share please.

Good Luck !!

vCenter Certificate Automation Tool 1.0

Recently with the introduction of SSO people find it difficult to manage SSL certificates with various VMware products. So based on the issues and other facts VMware has released today a new tool called "vCenter Certification Automation Tool version 1.0" which will help implementation of Custom certificates which can be mainly categorized in the following category

1. Secure token Service Certificate – Certificate used by vCenter Single Sign On (SSO) for encryption tokens
2. Solution User Certificates – Certificates used by each solution to identify themselves as users to SSO
3. SSL Certificates  – certificates needed for SSL communication for the UI and API layer
4. Host Certificates – These certificates are deployed in each ESXi host and used for secure vCenter to ESXi communication.

This tool will help configuring the SSL certificates for the following products

1. vCenter Server
2. vCenter Single Sign On
3. vCenter Inventory Service
4. vSphere Web Client
5. vCenter Log Browser
6. VMware Update Manager (VUM)
7. vCenter Orchestrator (VCO)

KB 2041600 is published which will discuss about the Tool in detail and you can find the blog post here.


You can download the Tool from here which will require you MyVMware Account credentials.

Hope you now have smooth experience while dealing with SSL certificates.

Lot of people are involved in developing this tool and Hats Off to all of them.

Please provide the feedback about the tool on the VMware blog post page.

Enjoy and share !!

Is my VM running off the Snapshot Delta or Base disk?

I came across few instance recently where the the Virtual machine was either consolidating all the snapshots taken by backup software or adding/removing snapshots and at the same time Edit Settings of the virtual machine is not giving you any details as its grayed out.

User is finding so many delta disks on the respective datastore/s which is occupying the disk space on the Shared LUNs/local Datastores.

Now how to find if the VM is running off base disks or its running off snapshot files.

To recover the space consumed by the deltas which are not really having any information inside.

There are few ways you can find out if the VM indeed running on snapshot delta files or not.

1st method is to use the SSH/DCUI/DRAC/iLO/KVM/RSA whichever method you seems easy and you are comfortable with, using which access the console of ESXi.
Login with root account privileges and change to the virtual machine directory.

#cd /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/vmname

Once you are in the VM directory and then run the following command to see if the virtual machine snapshot file in use.

#less vmname.vmx | grep -i *.vmdk

The above command will list all the vmdk files in use for that virtual machine which includes all the snapshot delta file and base disks. The example will be scsi0:0 and the file name vmname-000001.vmdk or scsi1:0 and the file name vmname-000004.vmdk etc. etc. The number of scsi devices represents the number of VMDKs presented to the virtual machine.

Now there are many 3rd party applications available in the market which can do this job for you. You just need to run those tools and they will give you the report in various forms. You can use the PowerCLI script also to find out the same within the Datacenter or at the cluster level.


2nd method is if you can go under Edit Settings option then you can login through vSphere client and connect to the vCenter/ESXi host and then click on the Edit Setting of the Virtual Machine.

Click on HDD1 and go to the disk file option on top right corner and put the cursor and click "End" button on the key board which will take you to the end of the file name. If the datastore name and virtual name is shorter then you dont need to do that and you can see the file name right away and see if there is -000000.vmdk added to the file than you know that the VM is using the Snapshot file.


If the name does not have and if you see vmname.vmdk then you know its running off the base disk. For the subsequent disk you will see vmname_1.vmdk, vmname_2.vmdk and so on.


You need to repeat the step for each HDD which you are using on the virtual machine.


Hoping that the above will help you out finding unnecessary snapshot files for the VMs which are using critical space and you can recover that space by dealing with them accordingly.




Please share and care!!

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