Among other exciting things, VMworld 2020 also presented project Monterey, which is to be based on a new type of network interface controller (NIC) — SmartNIC. This new NIC rendition will include DPU (data processing unit) capabilities by using different approaches. The idea is to make more server resources available by offloading a set of workloads onto SmartNIC.

As you know, there is no shortage of technologies to establish the connection of external peripheral devices. Still, while such options as FireWire or Thunderbolt already had their finest hour, USB remains the most popular choice, and USB support in VMware vSphere allows its users to maintain high-speed connections to servers, hypervisor, and virtual machines (VMs)!

Having actual physical resources today as a foundation of IT infrastructure starts to look like an extravagant decision, to say the least. Why bother with extra resources, if you can make things happen faster, better, with less hardware footprint? However, virtualization development is far from the end. The latest idea on the horizon is the concept of composable infrastructures, which is more complicated than it sounds.

Storage controllers are virtual environment tools essential for locating and accessing both block-based devices and SCSI devices. Storage controllers in VMware vSphere virtualization platform can operate with different storage controllers, varying in types, purposes, and usages. A wide range of functional capacities allows you to establish storage controller compatibility, choose configurations, and process SCSI emulation and paravirtualization. Use a storage controller as best suited for your preferred OS!

Each virtual machine (VM) is a collection of resources provided by the infrastructure layer, usually organized in a pool of resources and assigned dynamically (or in some case statically) to each VM. VMs “see” a subset of physical resources in a form of virtual hardware components defined usually by the certain minimum elements. Adding hardware components can be useful in some cases, or they can be necessary for performing some basic operations, like, for example, installing the guest OS where a video driver, a keyboard and a mouse device are needed to use the remote console. That is why you should be aware of which hardware resources can be hot-add and which hot-remove.

VMware vSphere 6 offers all new and new features including a new VMware vCenter management services architecture. vCenter 6.0 can be deployed in embedded and external options and separately as a Platform Services Controller (PSC) and as vCenter. If the Platform Services Controller (PSC) provides common infrastructure services for the data center, then the vCenter Server ensures the remainder of the vCenter Server functionality. But you’ll agree, it would be great to have a common platform that combines both solutions. This option would help reduce the number of VMs per sites without any load balanced dependencies and provide fault tolerance.

Security is typically a hot-topic due also to several regulations and compliant rules and laws. But more important, a security breach can have huge collateral effects, also if no data has been stoled, or compromised. But, for example, a “simple” DoS attack that makes a service not available can have a bad effect on the reputation of a B2C company. This post will try to give an idea of some possible security threads in a virtual environment based on VMware vSphere (but several concepts are quite general also for other virtualization platforms) and some possible approaches to minimize the effect or prevent the attacks.

Now that VMware vSphere 6.7 has been announced and it’s also available in General Availability (GA), some people may ask if it makes sense upgrade to this version (or when will make sense upgrade to 6.7). Is a GA release ready for a production environment? Or is it mature and stable enough?

PowerShell is a command line (CLI) scripting language developed by Microsoft to simplify automation and configuration management, consisting of a command-line shell and associated scripting language. It’s a (huge) evolution (or better a revolution) from the original DOS batch language (still supported in latest Windows OS with the cmd.exe command), and it’s really better compared to the different previous attempts to replace the batch language (like Windows Script Host).