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Tech Preview of Windows VC to VCSA Migration at VMworld

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A couple weeks back I had teased out the #migrate2vcsa hashtag on Twitter and said to stay tune for folks planning to attend VMworld US in person. If you attended VMworld last week, you may gotten more details during TAM Day, at the VMware Booth or in either of the VCSA breakout sessions INF5975 & INF4528. I just found out this week that some of the VMworld sessions have already been posted online for everyone and it looks like one of my sessions, INF4528 vCenter Server Appliance Best Practices & Tips / Tricks session was one of them.

Well, it looks like the cats out of the bag! To be perfectly honest, I am actually glad, since now I can share some more details with my readers on what the VC Engineering team has been working very hard on. As you probably can guess from the cryptic hashtag, the topic is related to migrating from a Windows vCenter Server to the vCenter Server Appliance. About 6 months ago, we had released the VCS to VCVA Converter Fling and the feedback from customers has just been phenomenal. Though the Fling only supported a limited set of configurations, it did allow us to quickly gather feedback from customers on whether such a tool should still be further developed and more importantly, if the current workflow met user expectations.

At VMworld, we showed off a video of an early but functional Tech Preview of migrating from a Windows vCenter Server to a the vCenter Server Appliance to help Engineering get feedback from customers on the overall workflow. From the customers that I have talked to, the feedback have been super positive and in fact, they were quite excited. I do have to stress that this is still a Tech Preview and you should review the disclaimer below, but it should give you an idea of our current thinking.

Disclaimer: This overview of new technology represents no commitment from VMware to deliver these features in any generally available product.

We would still love to hear from you in case you did not get a chance to talk to us during VMworld. We are interested in any feedback you may have in terms of the overlal workflow and whether the process is intuitive or not. If you have any feedback after watching the video, please either leave a comment on my blog here or tweet your feedback using the #migrate2vcsa hashtag on Twitter.

For comparison, you can watch the Fling's workflow video here and compare and contrast that with the Tech Preview video below. In case the video does not automatically start playing at the Migration portion of the presentation (46:35), you can click here for the direct link.

VMworld Session VCSA INF5975 & INF4528 available to public

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I just found out this week after reading Eric Siebert blog post here, that a select number of VMworld 2015 US sessions have been made available to the general public on YouTube. I thought this was a very nice and pleasant surprise, especially for those who could not attend VMworld to be able to get a taste of some of the topics covered in last weeks conference. I personally have watched both the Cloud Native Apps and Future of NSX session, both of which I think are worth checking out not to mention the various demos in the NSX session!

For me personally, a hot topic that came up in almost every conversation when talking to our customers, field and partners at VMworld was the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). There were also plenty of sessions at the conference that covered the VCSA from basic introduction to performance to availability. Below are the two VCSA sessions that were selected to be made generally available to everyone, one of which I presented on. Hopefully you enjoy both videos and I would also like to thank everyone who attended my session last Monday. It was really great meeting many of my readers as well as customers looking to take advantage of the VCSA and some of the new features in our upcoming release. I also wrote a blog post here on the upcoming release of vSphere 6.0 Update 1 (GA sometime in Q3 2015) with respect to the VCSA in case you missed it.

INF5975 - vCenter Server Appliance as "First Choice" VC

INF4528 - vCenter Server Appliance Best Practices & Tips / Tricks

Hope to see you at VMworld 2015

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The VMworld 2015 Content Catalog just went live this morning and I am please to announce that I have two sessions that were accepted at both VMworld US and Europe. The first session will be a Technical Deep Dive on our new Content Library feature which was introduced in vSphere 6.0 and I will be co-presenting that with James Chang, one of the Content Library Engineers. The second session will be covering a topic that is near and dear to my heart which is the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) and I will be covering some of the best practices along with some of the tips and tricks that you may not know about the VCSA. I hope to see you in one of these sessions and I look forward to meeting and chatting with some of my readers at VMworld!

INF5106 - Content Library Technical Deep Dive

What’s the best place to store and maintain your VM templates, ISOs, and vApps? How do you share them with other administrators and users in your organization or between two sites? The solution is a content library, a content management tool within vCenter that manages and replicates content across data centers. In this talk you will learn how to organize your VM templates for the best VM provisioning speed, pick up best practices for automatically sharing your content between sites, and understand how to migrate content from your existing vCloud Director to vCenter with the least amount of effort. And all this right from the vSphere client that you are already familiar with! Next, we will dive into advanced features like external webserver support (e.g. Amazon S3), HTTP mirroring for scale, and rapid sync using array replication technologies. Lastly, we will conclude the talk with a product demonstration showcasing the advanced content management and consumption use cases within a software defined data center

INF4528 - vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Best Practices & Tips/Tricks

In this session, I will go through some of the best practices and considerations when deploying and managing the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). I will walk through some of the changes between past releases and the new vSphere 6.0 release. In addition, I will also provide tips and tricks on using the VCSA as well as ways in migrating from a Windows based vCenter Server to the VCSA