Well, VMware continues to improve the vSphere 6.5 release of code for customers who haven’t migrated up to vSphere 6.7 as of yet. The great thing with vSphere 6.5, VMware continues to bring many of the features found in vSphere 6.7 down to the vSphere 6.5 release. Recently, vSphere 6.5 Update 3 was released with …

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One of the exciting features with vSphere 6.5 is the ability to perform virtual machine encryption. We have already taken a look at Hytrust KeyControl as a great way to perform virtual machine encryption. When thinking about virtual machine encryption and the high availability aspect of the solution, we want to make sure to have …

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As we have covered in previous posts, VMware virtual machine encryption requires an external key manager.  There has been work done to allow testing this feature out by way of a cool docker container key manager.  However for those really wanting to test out a production ready key management server, Hytrust KeyControl is a production …

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When managing and maintaining a VMware vSphere environment, keeping an eye on storage and storage I/O is extremely important. In most virtualization environments where shared SAN storage is in place, it is not uncommon to see storage I/O resources exhausted before CPU and in many cases memory. In many cases, a higher than expected number …

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One of the exciting new features included with VMware vSphere 6.5 is the ability to encrypt VMware virtual machines by using a native encryption process that is managed at the hypervisor level.  Since the encryption is done at the hypervisor level, this takes the heavy lifting out of managing encryption of each virtual machine separately. At …

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When thinking about security, security hardening is one of the terms we use to describe what we do to reduce the attack surface of a host to make it more difficult for it to be compromised in an attack. There are several recommendations that we can implement to reduce the attack surface in VMware ESXi …

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We have covered the Avago/LSI StorCLI in past posts and how extremely useful it can be loaded on ESXi servers that have DAS volumes being presented with an Avago/LSI RAID controller. The advantage of loading/using the Avago/LSI StorCLI utility is we don’t have to reboot the host to start using it as the VIB install …

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Let’s face it, syslog collection is not as exciting as other things we would like to be doing as administrators, but often it is a necessary evil that we have to face when troubleshooting or trying to identify potential problems before they happen. Today, let’s highlight a tool that if you are not using as …

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VMware Virtual Machine Storage Policies fall under the realm of Storage Policy Based Management that assists with virtual machine provisioning. When defined, Storage Based Policies define which type(s) of storage are presented for the virtual machine and how the virtual machine is placed within storage and also data services. There are certain builtin storage policies …

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We have covered in detail how to in general provision an FTP server using FileZilla for the purposes of targeting for our VCSA 6.5 backups.  However, to take this a step further, what if you want to secure the backup of your VCSA 6.5 appliance by using a secure FTP process?  To do that, we …

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