VMware vSphere 7 announced

VMware
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VMware vSphere 7

Some pretty big news coming out of VMware today. The announcement of VMware vSphere 7 to become available May 1, 2020! One of the biggest item coming out of this news so far is that vSphere 7 will come in two options.

The first being vSphere 7 as we all have known it to be for years and then the second being vSphere 7 with Kubernetes which will be available through VMware Cloud Foundation and is a new generation of vSphere for containerized applications.

Other notables is that the flash based vSphere client is FINALLY no more! From here on out, only the HTML 5 will exist. vCenter Server on Windows will also finally be put to rest and new deployments of vCenter server will be done using the tried and tested vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) based on PhotonOS linux.

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How to convert VMDK to OVF file format

VMware
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Here is a quick and easy way to convert a VMDK to OVF file format using the OVF Tool from VMware.

  1. First download and install the VMware OVF Tool for your operating system.
  2. Open a command prompt as Administrator and navigate to the OVF Tool install directory: 
    
cd C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool

    vmdk to ovf command prompt

  3. Next, type in the following command to convert VMDK to OVF: 
    
ovftool.exe \virtualmachine.vmx \virtualmachine.ovf

    convert vmdk to ovf command

After a few minutes time you should you should see a “Transfer Completed, Completed successfully” message and your VMDK to OVF file conversion is complete and ready for use.
convert vmdk to ovf complete

Upgrade Synology DS1819+ RAM to 32GB

Synology
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Recently got my hands on a Synology DS1819+ which offers a number of great features, one of which is the ability to support 32GB memory! Giving me more than plenty of resources for all kinds of Docker containers, virtual machines, and Synology applications.

In this quick guide I’ll detail how to upgrade your Synology DS1819+ to 32GB of RAM.

Items needed:

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How I backup my VPS servers to AWS S3 bucket

AWS
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VPS backup to AWS S3 bucket

Lately I’ve been asked or seen questions regarding how to backup a WordPress site or VPS server. I know many use WordPress plugins, though I’m not a fan of this process.

My answer has always been that I use a script that backups up my website files and databases to an AWS S3 bucket. While I’ve shared the scripts with a few people that have asked, I figured I’d make a post and share the information with everyone.

In this post I’ll share my setup on how I backup all the VPS servers I manage to Amazon S3 buckets.

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VMware Site Recovery Manager 8.2 – No more Windows

VMware
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VMware has just announced the release of Site Recovery Manager 8.2. There are a number of new items in SRM 8.2, such as enhancements to the HTML5 user interface, support for vSphere 6.7 Update 2, but most notably is Site Recovery Manager 8.2 virtual appliance!

No more Microsoft Windows license needed! The SRM 8.2 virtual appliance runs on the Photon OS distro, which is similar to what the vCenter virtual appliance has been running on for years now.

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Let;s Encrypt on Microsoft IIS

How to install a Let’s Encrypt SSL cert on Microsoft IIS

Other
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If you’ve ever wondered how to install a Let’s Encrypt certificate on a Microsoft IIS server than this post is just for you.

Let’s Encrypt has always been pretty easy to setup on a Linux box and not so much on the Windows side. Thankfully, there are now nearly a dozen different tools that make adding a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate to a Microsoft IIS server just as easy.

In this post we’ll be focusing in on, and using the Windows ACME Simple (WACS) solution. Mostly because it’s so easy to use, how easy? Well lets take a look!

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Update VMware Windows VM’s DNS using PowerCLI

How to update VMware Windows VM’s DNS using PowerCLI

VMware
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This post will show you how to update a VMware Windows virtual machine’s DNS IP addresses using PowerCLI.

You’ll also see how I went from a starting point to a fully working script – all thanks to the awesome #vCommunity!

Here at work we’ve been doing a number of networking, AD, and DNS changes. In doing so, our DNS IP address have changed. Changing the DNS settings for our workstations was easy, simply edit the DHCP scope.

The servers on the other hand all had static IP’s and static DNS IP’s entered, each of which needed to be updated.

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Dell R720 Server

My VMware ESXi Home Lab Upgrade

Home Lab
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Although the focus in my career right now is certainly more cloud focused in Amazon Web Services and Azure, I still use my home lab a lot.

For the last 5+ years my home lab had consisted of using 3x Intel NUC’s (i5 DC53427HYE), a Synology NAS for shared storage and an HP ProCurve switch. This setup served me well for most of those years. It has allowed me to get many of the certifications I have, progress in my career and have fun as well.

At the start of this year I decided it was time to give the home lab an overhaul. At first I looked at the newest generation of Intel NUC’s but really wasn’t looking forward to dropping over $1,300 on just partial compute (I’d still need to be RAM for each of the 3 NUC’s). I also wanted something that just worked, no more fooling around with network adapter drivers or doing this tweak or that tweak.

I also no longer needed to be concerned about something that had a tiny footprint. I also questioned if I really needed multiple physical ESXi hosts. My home lab isn’t running anything mission critical and if I really wanted I could always build additional nested VMware ESXi hosts on one powerful machine if I needed.

So in the end, the below is what I settled on. Replacing all of my compute, most of my networking and adding more storage!

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AWS Systems Manager

Using AWS Systems Manager to regain access to an EC2 machine

AWS
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The other last night I received a call from a co-worker who added a Windows firewall rule to a production AWS EC2 machine running Server 2016. Soon after he couldn’t access the server via RDP nor were any of the IIS sites loading.

Of course a snapshot was not created prior to the change, because “It worked in Test”.

At first I thought we might be up a creek and restoring from an older backup. But, then I remembered AWS Systems Manager and the ability to send commands to an AWS EC2 machine via the AWS console.

Below are the quick steps I took to disable the Windows Firewall using AWS Systems Manager to regain access into the EC2 machine.

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