vCenter

What’s New vSphere 8 Update 1

Sadaf

In September 2022, an announcement was made about the release of vSphere 8 with new features and capabilities. Building on this momentum, the subsequent release of vSphere 8U1 brings new enhancements and improvements into three different categories of operating efficiency, elevated security, and supercharged workloads. So, by these pillars, customers can operate their infrastructure more efficiently, securely, and agile. So let’s start with the new enhancements in vSphere 8U1.

Operating efficiency

In vSphere 8, vSphere Configuration Profiles were introduced as a tech preview with some limitations of not supporting vSphere Distributed Switch and NSX. If you have not checked this functionality, read my blog post on what’s new in vSphere 8, which explains this functionality in more detail. But In vSphere 8U1, vSphere Configuration Profile is now fully supported and allows administrators to apply the homogenous configuration at the cluster level.

So you can set the desired configuration at the cluster level in JSON format and check the compliance of the hosts in the cluster; if they are not compliant, you can remediate the hosts to become compliant. But one point to remember, If the cluster has a Host profile attached to it, you will get a warning to remove the Host profile when you want to move to vSphere Configuration Profile. When you transition, you can no longer attach host profiles to the hosts within the cluster. vSphere Configuration Profiles now supports vDS configuration, and it can be activated when you create a new cluster, but environments with NSX still can’t use this technology.

Continue reading “What’s New vSphere 8 Update 1” →

vSphere 8 – What’s New

Sadaf

I know many customers were waiting for the next release of VMware vSphere to realize the new capabilities and features. So there you go, Let’s check what’s new in vSphere 8!

VMware vSphere is the base solution on which most private cloud datacenters are running on. As VMware defines, vSphere 8 is the enterprise workload platform that brings the benefits of the cloud to on-premises workloads, supercharges performance through DPUs and GPUs, and accelerates innovation with an enterprise-ready integrated Kubernetes runtime.

In this post, I want to introduce the new and unique features that I found useful and interesting in vSphere 8.0!

Continue reading “vSphere 8 – What’s New” →

vSAN Deployment without existing vCenter Server

Sadaf

VMware vSAN is Software-Defined Storage(SDS) solution from VMware that is fully integrated into vSphere. To enable vSAN, we need to have a minimum of three ESXi hosts, and each host needs at least one cache disk and one capacity disk. The local disks of ESXi hosts should be formatted by VMFS. Since vSAN is a vSphere clustering feature, we should also have Center Server in place before start implementing it.

If you are a System Administrator or even a Solutions Architect, you might a face a challenge to build a vSAN Cluster with minimum ESXi servers without having a vCenter in place. In many green field environments, vCenter has not been installed and you want to keep ESXi’s disks intact and unformatted. In addition, there are some customers that want to build and manage vSAN Cluster in a separate vCenter and they do not have any additional ESXi host for vCenter deployment.

Continue reading “vSAN Deployment without existing vCenter Server” →

vCenter Server 7.0 HTML5 UI error “no healthy upstream”

Sadaf

After upgrading to vCenter 7 Update 1 , when I tried to browse vCenter HTML5 UI, I faced “no healthy upstream” error. I could access to vCenter Management Interface (VAMI) https://vCenter-IPaddress:5480 without any issues. I could also connect to vCenter Server through  SSH but I realized couple of vCenter Server services could not start.

Continue reading “vCenter Server 7.0 HTML5 UI error “no healthy upstream”” →