In two weeks time (Wednesday 27th November) the annual UK VMware User Group “UserCon” conference (#UKVMUG) returns to the National Space Centre in Leicester. I’m going to be there, and here’s a summary of five things I’m looking forward to at the event.

The Wednesday General Session at VMworld Europe is usually where VMware puts the meat onto the bones of the Tuesday announcements and this year was no exception. Here’s a quick rundown of my highlights.

VMworld Europe is happening in Barcelona this week, and today saw the annual Tuesday keynote start the morning off. I’m not amongst the 14,000 attendees from 111 countries at the event this year, so I’m recapping the highlights from the comfort of the sofa thanks to the online broadcast.

A few weeks ago I had to shutdown a vSAN Cluster temporarily for a planned site-wide 24 hour power outage that was blacking out a datacentre. With the amount of warning and a multi-datacentre design this wasn’t an issue, but I made use of vSphere tags and some Powershell/PowerCLI to help with the evacuation and …

Or “How I’ve come to love my vSAN Ready Nodes”

Ladies and Gentlemen of VMworld 2019.

Wear comfortable shoes.

If I could offer you only one tip for the conference, comfy shoes would be it.

For several years vSphere admins have been able to use the Log Insight tool for free as a “25 OSI” license was included in vCenter. This has meant that deployments of up to 24 hosts (plus vCenter) have been able to use the VMware tool as a syslog server and troubleshooting tool without having to purchase further …

In the process of upgrading a vSAN ReadyNode cluster from ESXi 6.5 to 6.7 a warning appeared in the vSAN Health check. The first host in the cluster had gone through the upgrade and was now showing the warning “Controller driver is VMware certified” (Note 1 in the image below). The Dell HBA330 card was using an older …

It was announced this week that registration for VMware’s VMworld 2019 conference will open at the beginning of May so now seems a good time to look at some of the key dates for the event.