Friday Shorts – VMFS6, Backups, and GUIs…

A collection of interesting things I found on the internets….

A change to sub-blocks on VMFS-6

For the most part, when we perform upgrades to our infrastructure we tend to focus on some of the more publically marketed features.  With vSphere 6.5 the buzz has mostly been around the VCSA parity with its Windows counterpart, vCenter High Availability, etc.  But the fact of the matter is when VMware releases even a minor version of their product there is a lot of things that tend to fly under the radar!  Cormac Hogan does a good job here at explaining just how exactly one change to sub-blocks within the upgraded VMFS-6 affects your environment.

Automating VM keystrokes using the vSphere API & PowerCLI

William Lam never ceases to amaze me with some of the APIs and hooks that he finds buried deep with vSphere code.  Here he continues that trend, taking a look at how we can automate keystrokes on the VM console using the vSphere API.  To me this is a really neat feature as at times I find myself looking to automate some sort of solution that provides no hooks whatsoever – this could possibly be a workaround to that!

vSphere 6.5 – Automate VCSA Backup

Speaking of automation I was thinking about doing up an article in regards to how to use the newly minted backup functionality within the VCSA.  After going through the article I thought there must be a way to schedule this functionality as no one would want to go and do this manually all the time.  A bit more googling led me to this post by Brian Graf.  Now there is no way I’m going to author a script better than Brians – so if you are looking for ways to automate those VCSA backups I’d suggest having a look at his – all done through the magic of PowerCLI.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 1.5 is available today!

If you are a user of Veeam Backup for Office 365 you might want to think about upgrading to the newly minted 1.5 release now!  Scaleability is the theme around this release with the product now supporting more than one proxy – making it behave just like their other product, Veeam Backup and Replication.  So now you can essentially backup and restore faster.  Other enhancements such as the addition of a REST API and more hybrid support is also available in this release, with more to come in version 2 which will include backup support for both SharePoint Online and OneDrive!

I have a confession – I’ve never used VSAN

That’s right!   It’s really due to just not having enough time to get a proper lab built but I’ve never actually configured and setup VSAN outside of the VMware Hands On Labs!  That said its something I want to explore in the next coming months for sure so I’ve begun doing a lot of reading on it.  Since I have a lot of remote offices the ROBO solutions out there are very interesting to me – and low and behold Mr. Cormac Hogan popped up in my search results again, this time with an article published just today – Cormac takes us through various scenarios around networking considerations when deploying the 2-node options, as well as confirms that they are indeed a VMware supported solution!

The death of the GUI?

Here’s a debate which has been, and most likely will be going on for a long time!  Are GUI’s on their way out?  It’s funny that I’ve seen a few different references to this just this week.  The first from the On-Premise IT Roundtable coming from the NFD folks where they talk about the death of the CLI – and the second coming from Joseph Griffiths blog titled Does Cloud + REST API spell the end of the GUI? – This is a tough one – while I’m all for scripting, automation, APIs and CLIs sometimes they can be quite unforgiving when performing certain tasks – while GUIs tend to give us that little bit of confirmation as to what we are doing!  There is certainly room for both and I like the trends of today where GUIs are being built around APIs – I don’t see either disappearing for quite some time!