Being a sysadmin often means doing some boring stuff on a daily basis. Well, sure, you can use PowerCLI to save yourself the hassle. It’s a powerful tool that I believe any vSphere admin should master at some point. While PowerCLI provides you the ultimate freedom of IT infrastructure management, there’s still a workaround to automate some tasks even through GUI. For instance, you need, let’s say, to take a VM snapshot regularly, but you cannot write a script for that purpose yet. You still can automate that process and some other tasks with vCenter Server inbuilt task scheduler. No vCenter? No problems, you can schedule some processes on ESXi! The only thing is that you may be limited to the guest OS inbuilt scheduler capabilities. For more freedom, you need some PowerShell and PowerCLI skills. In today’s article, I look through some tasks that you can automate with vCenter and teach you how to schedule them.

An ability to back up and restore vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) configurations appeared back in vCSA 6.5. I guess that many have already used it. If you were unlucky to restore from that backup, you know that this procedure is not that straightforward. Bad news: In vCSA 6.7 Update 1 configuration restore process is still like that. In today’s article, I take a closer look at how you back up and restore VMware vCSA 6.7 configuration.

19 September 2018, VMware announced the end General availability for vSphere 5.5 – their probably most installed vSphere versions to date. But, wait, why write about it in January 2019? You see, some being misled by a title starting with “End”, think that it might be the end for the solution… WRONG! To overcome this fallacy, I decided to write an article that sheds light on VMware Lifecycle Policy and proves that End of General Availability is not the end!

There are always several reasons to move on from your existing infrastructure. Some admins are pursuing recent versions of familiar products. Some, on the other hand, just want to get rid of the bugs they already learned to live with but would rather not. Others are attracted by promises to increase the performance of their environment. Finally, everybody wishes to go with the times and use the latest software. Whatever the reason, we all eventually come in terms with the necessity to upgrade the infrastructure to the most recent version.

There are a few things to know about upgrading from vSphere 6.5 and older versions to the latest one.

vSphere 8 brings an abundance of cool new features. Among them, VMware Virtual Hardware Version 20 is even more efficient: newer CPU cores support, more VM count, ESXi instance on Smart NICs, higher VM density, up to 8 vGPU devices support, aware migration, NUMA nodes exposed in vSphere Client, and many many more!

There are many “moving parts” to cybersecurity, among which, encryption is on the frontline. Previously, you’d have to use a third-party key management solution to facilitate security in a vSphere environment. Now, you can use Native Key Provider to integrate vSAN encryption, VM encryption, and virtual Trusted Platform Modules (vTPM).

You can’t be too close to comfort whenever cybersecurity is involved. Despite ESXi being pretty secure even after out-of-the-box installation, its security can be tightened more. Certain common, baseline hardware elements can be added and several tweaks to ESXi security itself will make all the difference you didn’t know they could.

When implementing virtualization into your IT environment, you need first to take care of the security of your virtual and physical infrastructure. In the VMware vSphere environment, the vCenter server appliance (VCSA) is a key management element, so should be as secure as possible.