Hide all ‘Getting Started’ from the vSphere web client

Hi,

This will be a short and sweet post but one that I hope you will find helpful.

I have been using the vSphere web client and noticed that the ‘Getting Started’ pages appeared which was easy to remove in the full Windows client. I have now found the location to remove this and its just as simple but not that obvious.

To remove the ‘Getting Started’ just simply follow the below steps:

1. Login to the web client
2. Click on ‘Help’ in the top right corner
3. Select ‘Hide All Getting Started Pages’

That’s all you need to do and now those pages will no longer appear.

By Paul Wood

VMware announce vSphere 5.5 at VMworld

Hi,

For all of you that do not already know VMware announced yesterday vSphere 5.5 (http://www.vmware.com/uk/products/vsphere/). This is the stepping stone to what is expect with vSphere 6 and no vCenter client and all web based in the future. On the previous link all the new information can be found with what I would say is the most important ‘http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere/VMware-vSphere-Platform-Whats-New.pdf’ as always the Whats new pdf.

Its going to be an interesting week with announcements from VMworld and lots more study for all of us consultants.

By Paul Wood

VMware website change

Hi,

This may well have happened a few weeks ago but I have only just noticed that VMware have changed the design of the website. I think this looks great compared to the old version but wondered what others views are. The cleanness of the site makes navigating much easier and it seems less cluttered. Below is the link to the UK site but I’m sure you will all know the url anyway.

This is not really a very informative post but more to see what others think of the new look.

http://www.vmware.com/uk/

By Paul Wood

VMware NSX announced

Hi,

As many of you will be aware its VMworld 2013 this week and VMware have taken this opportunity to announce VMware NSX (http://cto.vmware.com/introducing-vmware-nsx-the-platform-for-network-virtualization/ and https://www.vmware.com/products/nsx/).

‘The VMware NSX platform delivers the entire networking and security model in software, decoupled from traditional networking hardware, representing a transformative leap forward in data center networking architecture.’

Introducing VMware NSX

Today, we are announcing the VMware NSX platform and products that deliver on the above mission, unleashing the power of network virtualization. The team has re-created the network and security model in software, taking advantage of the benefits of virtualization. This realizes a significant leap forward in capability across the stack, and includes several industry firsts. Before delving into the product itself, here are the key highlights:

Logical switching & routing: Routing functions have been integrated with switching in the hypervisor, enabling direct one-hop connectivity for east-west traffic in the data center, and decoupled from the underlying network fabric using overlays.  Also included are optimizations to decouple multicast, unknown unicast and ARP broadcasts from the network. Net effect is efficient, fast packet delivery in the logical plane, and minimizing control traffic in the physical fabric.

Bridging to physical: A logical view of virtual and physical devices is presented, leveraging integration between the NSX Controller and agents in Arista, Brocade, Cumulus, Dell, HP and Juniper network devices. Also included are translational bridging between logical overlays and VLANs to enable seamless interconnection of physical and virtual without re-addressing.

Distributed Firewall: Stateful firewall capability is built into the hypervisor, delivering distributed, scale-out, high-performance firewall inspection at each virtual switch port, while tracking VM adds, moves and changes. Firewall management is dramatically simplified by enabling rules, audits and monitoring based on virtual infrastructure containers, applications, AD users/identity, and yet richer, using network virtualization and VM introspection. The distributed firewall capability also enables stateful, logical insertion of partner devices/agents e.g. F5, McAfee, Palo Alto Networks, Symantec and Trend.

Logical Edge Services: The NSX Edge Services router provides the critical network services required to on-ramp/off-ramp traffic to/from the data center, including perimeter routing (BGP, OSPF, IS-IS), firewalls, user & site VPNs, elastic load balancers and DNS/DHCP/IP services.  We also take advantage of virtualization to provide flexible placement, N+1 redundancy, runtime load balancing, and per-tenant resource management. These logical, scale-out services are programmatically deployed on a per-tenant or app basis, solving the choke point and provisioning issues commonly seen in current architectures.

By Paul Wood

Microsoft Lync for Mac – Update

Hi,

I posted a few weeks back regards the image issue in Microsoft Lync for Mac but it also seems that conversations do not save in Outlook. I have had a few very length conference calls with Microsoft regards this with suggestions made and logs taken but as yet not a solution.

It has been a few weeks now and I’m still awaiting an update but it does seems as if the issues is with the Mac development team as the Windows version works fine.

I will be chasing Microsoft again today and so far below are a few test that had been carried out:

1. Remove all versions of Microsoft Lync for Mac
2. Install the older version of Lync (14.0.4) and us ‘Advanced Mode’ to setup the SIP
3. Trace from ‘Terminal’ what is happening during a conversation and pass these logs to Microsoft
4. Put on logging so and again these logs given to Microsoft
5. Checking DNS as it seems to be this that is causing the issue

At present I have no images or conversation history if I use the Microsoft Lync for Mac which is  not ideal so I use my Windows VM for this at present.

XKeyscore: NSA tool collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet’

Hi,

I do not normally take to posting regards normal everyday news but this is something that effects it seems everyone. This article by ‘The Guardian’ regards XKeyscore is shocking and I have to ask how much of it is actually true rather than some elaborate effort to make everyone think this has happened or could.

These are a couple of quotes from the article

A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.

Under US law, the NSA is required to obtain an individualized Fisawarrant only if the target of their surveillance is a ‘US person’, though no such warrant is required for intercepting the communications of Americans with foreign targets. But XKeyscore provides the technological capability, if not the legal authority, to target even US persons for extensive electronic surveillance without a warrant provided that some identifying information, such as their email or IP address, is known to the analyst.

We live in a digital age but surely this sort of access should only be allowed once adequate justification has been filed and access granted.

I would be interested in what anyone thinks who reads my blog be it for or against this sort of access.

By Paul Wood