ESXi Host Updates with HPE OneView for VMware vCenter

Reading Time 3 Minutes

The vSphere Lifecycle Manager has been accompanying us since vSphere 7, which not only allows us to equip hosts with the latest ESXi and vendor add-ons, but also to update hardware to be VSAN-compliant and equip it with fresh firmware.

Hardware manufacturers such as HPE, Dell, Lenovo, Fujitsu, etc. have continuously improved their support and expanded their Hardware Support Managers.

For administrators, it’s definitely worth using these tools. The manual firmware update process becomes as simple as a host update.

Here, we’ll discuss how to configure and use the Hardware Support Manager, specifically the HPE OneView for VMware vCenter, which we’ll refer to as OV4VC from now on.

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Change an Air-Gapped vSphere Lifecycle Manager from Baseline to Single Image

Reading Time 2 Minutes

A few days back i had the challenge to convert a vSphere 7.0 U3 Cluster (which was still managed in Lifecylce Manager with Baselines –> which are finally going away after vSphere 8, btw., so it’s time to migrate, folks!) to a Single Image.

I’m not going into details about vSphere Lifecycle Manager with Single Image and/or Baselines here, there’s lot’s of other stuff to read about that on the internet.

The challenge here was that the vCenter had no connection to the internet, so all the benefits like giving me a long list of ESXi releases and Vendor Add-Ons was not the case, and I couldn’t find any advice in the documentation on how to do it “offline” and seperated from the World Wide Web.

So, let me show you how I did it.

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vSphere Replication and Traffic Separation

Reading Time 4 Minutes

Recently I had more to do with vSphere Replication and Site Recovery Manager (more specifically with versions 8.6) and would like to share my experiences with Traffic Separation for vSphere Replication with you.

What is Traffic Separation?

Traffic separation is the possibility of splitting network traffic between different networks/port groups/VLANs and thereby possibly achieving an increase in security and performance.

So why separate?

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Replacing the vCenter Machine Certificate …and don’t forget the VxRail Manager!

Reading Time 3 Minutes

The topic of certificates seems to be haunting me at the moment.
Anyway, I want to briefly show here how easy it is nowadays to replace the SSL certificate of the vCenter with an Enterprise CA-signed one.

If you look at the KB article from VMware (Replacing a vSphere 6.x /7.x Machine SSL certificate with a Custom Certificate Authority Signed Certificate), the “certificate-manager” is still quoted here on the command line.

Create CSR in vSphere Client

But it is also very easy via the vSphere Client. In my case, there are a couple of VxRail clusters connected to this vCenter, here you also have to do something in the VxRail Manager (in this case still via CLI), but it’s also easy, see below.
To the Demo!

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vSphere+ – Installation and First Impressions

Reading Time 4 Minutes

Everyone has been talking about vSphere+ for a few weeks now, so I wanted to get a (technical) impression of what’s behind all the marketing-heavy blog articles and announcements.

A short diagram in advance so that it is clear what we are dealing with:

Traditional vSphere Environment converted to vSphere+ Subscription, graphic courtesy of VMware

In a classic vSphere environment, there are one to many vCenters that need to be managed. With vSphere+, a vCenter Cloud Gateway is introduced which acts as a relay between the VMware Cloud and the on-premises vCenters. This allows services from the VMware Cloud to be used with the on-premises datacenter. Sounds pretty easy!

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