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Month: July 2018

Homelab Considerations: Software Licensing for Your Homelab

Scott Forehand

Part 1: Homelab Considerations: Software Licensing for Your Homelab
Part 2: Homelab Considerations: Storage Simulators for Your Homelab

So I’ve been digging into how to license enterprise software for my homelab, and I thought I’d share some of what I’ve found. Some people choose to go the route of getting below-board licensing for enterprise software, but I’m not one of those people. For those of us who want a legitimate software footprint on their network, this post is for you. We are not going to cover how to build your homelab, or what storage you should use. We are going to cover how to license your  homelab at little or no cost to you, including your choices for legally licensing products from VMware, Microsoft, Veeam and more.

VMware Licensing

Let’s start the conversation by talking about VMware, since virtualization is the main focus of this blog. While VMware does offer their ESXi hypervisor for free, that doesn’t include some of the enterprise features like access to APIs, and the rest of the vSphere suite. In terms of licensing, the cheapest way to get a production copy of VMware for an enterprise is vSphere Essentials, which costs $560 at the …

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vSphere 5.5 and vSAN 5.5 End of General Support Reminder

Scott Forehand

I thought I’d take a moment to remind everyone that the End of General Support (EOGS) for vSphere 5.5 and vSAN 5.5 is September 19, 2018.

VMware recommends that anyone still running those versions of the software upgrade to vSphere 6.5 or vSphere 6.7 as soon as possible to maintain your full level of Support and Subscription Services. Upgrading to vSphere 6.5 or 6.7 will put you in a good spot, and give you all of the latest capabilities of vSphere and vSAN. VMware has announced that vSphere 6.5 and vSphere 6.7 general support has been extended to five years from it’s release date, which will end on November 15, 2021.

Note: vCloud Suite 5 and vSphere with Operations Management (vSOM) customers running vSphere 5.5 are also recommended to upgrade to vSphere 6.5 or vSphere 6.7.

Visit the VMware vSphere Upgrade Center for more information on the benefits of upgrading and how to upgrade from vSphere 5.5 to vSphere 6.5 or vSphere 6.7. If you’re looking for detailed technical guidance, visit vSphere Central and the vSphere 6.5 Topology and Upgrade Planning Tool.

If you need a little bit of help upgrading to a newer version of vSphere, VMware …

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VMware Product Walkthroughs Tool

Scott Forehand

The VMware product line can be a little overwhelming. With VMware announcing new features, products and services regularly, it can be hard to keep up. That said, VMware offers a tool to help you digest and retain all of that information, and they’ve been keeping it up to date. It’s been around for a while now, since about 2014 I think, but if you haven’t seen it…

Allow me to introduce the VMware Product Walkthrough website. The site is mobile friendly, and pretty intuitive.

This tool provides technical overviews and step-by-step guides for installing, configuring and managing VMware products and services. Every single walkthrough includes screenshots and detailed explainations.

You can also use the site as a self-paced demo of VMware products and features. Get familiar with the basic features of VMware products before you dive into the VMware Hands-on Labs for those products.…

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Veeam 9.5 Update 3a Available Now

Scott Forehand

As of yesterday, Veeam has officially released a new version of Veeam Backup & Replication. The update includes support for new platforms, a large number of ecosystem changes in support of the upcoming set of Veeam capabilities due later in 2018 that were showcased at the VeeamON conference, some optimization for technologies like direct SAN access and virtual appliance modes, and some bug fixes. Veeam is planning a larger update coming soon, which will carry the Update 4 mantle.

So what does Update 3a get you? Well…

Additional Platform Support

  • VMware vSphere 6.7
  • VMware vCloud Director 9.1
  • Preliminary support for VMware vSphere 6.5 U2 (See more below)
  • Microsoft Windows Server 1803
  • Microsoft Windows Hyper-V Server 1803
  • Microsoft Windows 10 April 2018 Update
  • VMware Cloud on AWS version 1.3
  • Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 1801

Support for these platforms means that Veeam Backup & Replication will now do the following:

  1. Install Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3a on the new Windows operating systems.
  2. Install components (such as proxies, repositories, etc.) on the new Windows operating systems.
  3. Perform backup and replication jobs from the new vSphere platforms and the Hyper-V roles in the Microsoft Windows Server 1803 operating system.

You …

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vSphere Deployment: Configuring an HA Cluster in vCenter 6.5

Scott Forehand

vSphere Deployment is a 6 part series that will walk you through deploying and configuring the components of vSphere 6.5.

Part 1: vSphere Deployment: Deploying ESXi 6.5 to a Host
Part 2: vSphere Deployment: Deploying the vCenter Server Appliance 6.5
Part 3: vSphere Deployment: Configuring an HA Cluster in vCenter 6.5
Part 4: vSphere Deployment: Configuring Traditional Storage in vCenter 6.5
Part 5: vSphere Deployment: Configuring a Datastore Cluster in vCenter 6.5
Part 6: vSphere Deployment: Configuring vSphere Update Manager (VUM) in vCenter 6.5

vSphere HA clusters allow ESXi hosts to work together as a group and provide performance assurance and higher levels of availability for hosted virtual machines. Before we get into building vSphere HA clusters, let’s go over how vSphere HA works. vSphere HA provides high availability for virtual machines by pooling the virtual machines and the hosts they reside on into a cluster of ESXi hosts. Hosts in the cluster are actively monitored through a network and datastore heartbeating and if a failure occurs, the virtual machines on failed hosts are automatically restarted on alternate hosts.

Note the distinction between vSphere HA (High Availability) and vSphere FT (Fault Tolerance). vSphere FT allows for no service interruption, …

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