Entries from Eric Sloof

In this video, we'll quickly walk you through one of vRA 7’s powerful new features called the Converged Blueprint (CBP) designer. The CBP is a unified authoring canvas that redefines hybrid cloud service authoring and delivery, allowing infrastructure and application architects to author any service using the intuitive user interface. 

The VMware esxtop tool provides a real-time view (updated every five seconds, by default) of ESXi Server worlds. The term world refers to processes running on the VMkernel. 

Andreas Lesslhumer over at running-system.com has released a great vSphere 6 toubleshooting resource, it's a poster shwoing all the esxtop information and their best practice values. You can get your copy here.

Virtual SAN is natively integrated with vSphere and it is configured with just a few mouse clicks. Since disks internal to the vSphere hosts are used to create a Virtual SAN datastore, there is no dependency on external shared storage. Virtual machines can be assigned specific storage policies based on the needs of the applications.

These workloads benefit from dependable shared storage predictable performance and availability characteristics. The new release of Virtual SAN, version 6.2, further reduces TCO by reducing data capacity consumption by as much as 10x.


Virtual SAN 6.2 is optimized for modern all-flash storage, delivering efficient near-line deduplication, compression, and erasure coding capabilities that enable high performance all-flash systems for as low as $1 per GB of usable capacity.

Download: Technical White Paper VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 Space Efficiency Technologies

This eLearning course on Horizon 6.2 View: What’s New provides an overview of the scalability, availability, and security enhancements introduced in VMware Horizon Vewi 6.2.



This course also explains the new features introduced in VMware Horizon 6.2 to access local files from virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and remote desktop session host (RDSH) desktops and applications using client drive redirection.

At the end of this course, you should be able to:

• Outline the scalability, availability, and security enhancements in Horizon 6.2
• Identify the enhanced features that provide rich experience for Horizon 6.2 users
• Explain how Horizon 6.2 allows access to local files from VDI and RDSH desktops and applications using client drive redirection
• Identify the graphical enhancements included in Horizon 6.2

This Getting Started Guide:

• Offers a presentation of DLB
• Explain how to enable DLB + configure DLB VIP
• Give an example on how to demo DLB
• Offers a video of DLB
• List known limitation on the current DLB preview

VMware Workspace ONE is the simple and secure enterprise platform that delivers and manages any app on any smartphone, tablet, or laptop. It begins with consumer grade self-service, singlesign on access to cloud, mobile, and Windows apps and includes powerfully integrated email, calendar, file and social collaboration tools that engage employees.

Meanwhile, employees are put in the driver’s seat to choose their own devices and the weight of management necessary to drive the adoption of BYOD programs including a combination of VMware Identity Manager and AirWatch Enterprise Mobility Management to enforce fine-grained, risk-based conditional access policies.

Finally, Workspace ONE ruthlessly automates traditional onboarding, laptop and mobile device configuration, and delivers real-time application lifecycle management that bridges between legacy enterprise client-server apps to the mobile-cloud era.

During this five-day course, you will focus on installing, configuring, and managing VMware vRealize Automation.

You will learn about the configuration and use of the vRealize Automation platform, including self-service provisioning and the creation of catalog services that include predefined virtual machines, software components, and on-demand VMware NSX networks.



This training course also covers interfacing vRealize Automation with other systems, using VMware vRealize Orchestrator to leverage workflows, and creating approval cycles and managing machine lifecycles to conserve resources.

In addition, you will better understand and know how to achieve the benefits of automation as a component of the software-defined data center.

By the end of the course, you should be able to meet the following objectives:

• Describe the vRealize Automation architecture and use cases
• Install and configure vRealize Automation 
• Manage vRealize Automation entities on VMware and third-party virtual, cloud, and physical infrastructures
• Configure and manage catalogs and blueprints
• Configure and manage business groups and reservations for compute resources on VMware, Microsoft,  Amazon, and other platforms
• Use the self-service portal to request and manage machines in accordance with vRealize Automation approval and governance policies
• Explain vRealize Automation extensibility and workflows
• Manage and monitor machines and resource reclamation

vRealize CloudClient is a separate command-line utility that provides a unified interface for working with the vRealize Automation APIs. It provides verb based access to many of VMware's Management level applications. CloudClient provides an easy to use command-line & scripting capability.

The current list of supported product plugins (with varying levels of capabilities) are vRA (vRealize Automation), vCO and SRM. CloudClient simplifies accessing & interacting with the multiple product level APIs as well as providing a common security, exception handling, json, CSV and tabular formatting, file export, auto login for scripting (password and keyfiles) and documentation.


Finally, all blueprints can now be exported as YAML code using the CloudClient. Once exported, admins can edit/change/manipulate the content how ever they see fit, then import back into vRA as a new blueprint.  And since it’s just text — the YAML can be sent anywhere, edited, and imported into disparate vRA environments.


Get vSphere Blueprint:

vra blueprint detail

Parameter    --name (Provide a valid Blueprint name)
Mandatory    false

Parameter    --id (Provide a valid Blueprint ID)
Mandatory    false

Parameter    --export (Provide a file to export all results)
Mandatory    false

For information about vRealize CloudClient, see the VMware Developer site at https://developercenter.vmware.com/tools.

VMware vRealize Automation 7.0 enables simplified blueprint authoring for both infrastructure and applications, helping to reduce time to delivery of your IT services. In this session, we will demonstrate the creation of a multi-tier application blueprint, then export the blueprint as code for check-in to a code repository. 

In this session you will learn:

• How to build an infrastructure blueprint
• Adding applications to an infrastructure blueprint
• How to export your blueprint as code for check-in
• Bonus – Using the new version of Cloud Client

VMware's technical team will help you gain maximum value from your VMware solutions. These sessions will help you learn about and more effectively utilize VMware vRealize solutions, speeding your ability to get a return on your investment.

Featured Speaker:

David D'Entremont
Cloud Management Specialist Systems Engineer, VMware

The "VMware Certified Professional 6 - Data Center Virtualization" (VCP6-DCV) exam is one of the most popular and recognized certifications in the industry. Becoming certified not only increases your knowledge of VMware Vsphere, but also improves your credibility to your organization.

SimpliVity has teamed up with Vladan SEGET to bring you an all-inclusive study guide for your VCP6-DCV certification exam based on the latest VMware VCP6-DCV blueprint.

Download your study guide today and learn how to manage and operate virtual technologies such as:

• vSphere HA and DRS Clusters
• Storage virtualization using VMFS
• Storage DRS and Storage I/O Control
• Network virtualization using vSphere standard and distributed switches and Network I/O Control
• vSphere management using vCenter Server and vRealize Operations Manager Standard Virtual Machines