October 2018 marks my 18 year anniversary working in Higher Education IT (so yes, about the same time since this year’s Freshers were born). It’s been a long ride and things have changed dramatically from technology, personal, and industry perspectives in that time. In this post I’ll be discussing a …

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In one month from now I’ll be speaking at VMworld in Barcelona with a concise session on coding skills for the IT operations team. To quote the abstract for the session:

I believe every IT Ops person, SysAdmin, and vSphere administrator should do some coding

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A quick script that came up in response to a situation where I wanted to know the date a workstation on the network was last built without visiting the machine or interrupting the currently logged on user. PowerShell to the rescue!
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With VMworld US 2018 out of the way, focus turns to the European conference now only a couple of months away. For attendees of the Barcelona event, 25th September is a date to put in your diary as the “Schedule Builder” will be released.
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This “HCI Futures” session at VMworld US was hosted by two VPs from the Storage and Availability Business Unit, plus a customer guest. It covered the new features recently added to the vSAN environment with the release of 6.7 Update 1, alongside discussion of the possible future direction of VMware in the …

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This session at VMworld US 2018 covered the past, present, and some of the future of the VMware vSphere Client. I caught up with the session via the online recording.
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There’s an ever growing variety of NSX flavours as VMware expands the range of their Network Virtualisation and security platforms. A recent podcast highlighted these to me, and I thought it worth summarising here in a quick post.
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Symptoms

• vCenter (in my case VCSA 6.5 ) is not sending alert emails even though the mail server appears to be configured properly (in the vSphere Web Client this is on the vCenter node under Configure, Settings, General).
• Network connectivity between vCenter and port 25 on the SMTP server is fine and has been tested.

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I’m using vSphere Replication to replicate a number of VMs to a datastore which is being decommissioned. I can’t reconfigure replication by code (I’ve mentioned that there’s no public API or PowerCLI around the vSphere Replication functionality in vSphere 6.5 before- most recently on Twitter) …

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Registration for VMworld 2018 opened this week (8th May) with Early-Bird discounts available until 15th June for the US event, or 27th July for the European event. This gives prospective attendees a $300 / €200 discount on the regular price which runs up until the day before the respective events.
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