The next vSphere beta will be starting pretty soon and like last time, there is a chance for a public signup. If you have deployed vSphere 5.5 and 6.0 in a portion of your environment, then you are a candidate for the beta. The vSphere team will grant access to the program to selected candidates in stages, but as of yet there is no information released on dates or duration. This vSphere Beta Program is, again, subject to a Master Software Beta Test Agreement which you will need to complete before you gain access to private Beta community to download software and share information.

A post to cover my initial fiddling with vRealise Operations Manager 6.2. Considering I have the vExpert licenses to play with, then installing and configuring some additional monitoring seems like a good idea, especially since the alerting and reporting tools that come baked in to vSphere itself are not that extensive. I’ve heard good things about this version of vROps, so let’s see how easy this is. Installing vROps is not difficult, since like most of the current generation of vSphere add-ons that VMware have released, there’s an appliance to use.

They’re fresh out, they contain a whole load of enhancements, and if you’re a vExpert or enthusiast running a homelab, then you’ll most likely want to get a look at the new vSphere 6.0 Update 2 stuff ASAP. Time to quickly upgrade the vCenter Appliance and ESXi hosts to take advantage of the HTML5 interface, built in Host Client, VSAN 6.2 and so on. This is assuming you’re not an enterprise with enterprise ways and means, of course…

6 new ESXi 5.5 patches came out overnight. Click here for the full release notes. Your post update 3 VUM baseline would now look like this… Vendor ID Title KB Article Fixes ESXi550-Update03 Update 3 Rollup package vSphere 5.5 Update 3 ESXi550-201510401-BG Updates esx-base KB2133825 Resolves issue with snapshot consolidation/deletion ESXi550-201512101-SG Updates esx-base KB2135795 Updates OpenSSL to openssl-1.

It was time to replace my old workhorse HP ML115’s with some new kit ready for the vSphere 6 launch and given the amount of commentary around the community at large I decided to take the plunge and source a bunch of Intel NUC devices, namely the D54250WYK model. No point doing things by halves, so I got three* and stuck 16GB memory in each, which should give me enough room to build a decent lab!

A few oddities I have discovered recently when working on one of my lab environments, so I thought that I would note them here for my own ends if nothing else. It is possible that a Windows Server based vCenter 5.5 (in my case) will not start after a reboot with the error message in vpxd.log reporting “Unable to create SSO facade: Invalid response code: 404 Not Found”. The quick way to fix this is to restart the VMware Secure Token Service, as per VMware KB2061412.

The worst kept secret in Hypervisor history was finally revealed last week, when VMware went public with the launch of vSphere 6.0 (alongside a swathe of other products) in what they are calling their biggest ever release. So big in fact that it’s taking 28 days to get through it if you read up at onecloud.vmware.com, a microsite introduced under the title “One Cloud, Any Application”. 28 days is handy in that it gives people time to digest a range of features and also write additional contributions (more on that later).

I’ve been talking to my VMware Technical Account Manager about access to the vSphere Beta for a while now but in a surprising move (for me at least) VMware have just announced the public beta of vSphere 6. Of course, the usual beta rules apply, meaning no public disclosure about the contents of the beta, but since it’s a public beta, anyone and everyone can sign up for it. That means I don’t need to tell you anything as you can go and look for yourself.

An increasing number of motherboards these days have USB sockets built in, which makes it very easy (and cheap) to run an ESX host, without having to obtain any local DAS storage. Good for the home labber, also good for the corporate guy who’s boot-from-SAN usually. There’s no point re-inventing the wheel here, since there are already blogs out there that talk you through the entire process - like this one from Brian Graf at vtagion;