Here at Lewan we believe in supporting the lifecycle of a solution from early concept through retirement from your environment. While much of our work is about helping you create a vision and adopt what is new, it’s also our job to keep tabs on what is old and soon to be unsupported.
How time flies! Old reliable – Vmware vSphere 5.5 – is set for retirement in September of this year, meaning it will no longer be supported as of September 19, 2018.
See the Entire VMware Lifecycle Matrix
It’s had a good run and due to its impressive stability and wide adoption, I still see it deployed within many of our clients’ environments.
So what now? Our recommendation is to upgrade your systems to vSphere 6.5. Not only do you get the essential extension of support, but some really great new features.
Nobody likes to wait. And time spent waiting for an application to respond is, at best, wasted staff time, and at worst, lost revenue or lost customers. To meet this demand for high performance, always-on infrastructures, one of the most exciting partnerships we’re able to offer our clients is Nimble Storage.
Our customers already rave about the simplicity and performance Nimble has brought to their infrastructures with hybrid storage arrays, and now this week, Nimble has announced a new family of storage arrays built with only flash drives, the Predictive All Flash Array (AFA).
As a VMware solutions provider, last week was an important week for announcements of changes to the VMware product line. In a series of launch events titled The IT Agenda for 2016: Enabling the Digital Enterprise, the VMware team from Palo Alto outlined a number of feature changes, major product revisions and improvements to licensing options. If you missed the launches, here's a recap of the highlights and changes you need to know about.
Amid the holiday season you might have missed the Service Pack 9 release from CommVault so here's a reminder, it's out. And if you're in a XenServer shop, it's likely a worthwhile upgrade. A big complaint of our customers was the discontinued XenServer support in earlier service pack levels of v10. Well, it's back. You always had the option to deploy in-guest agents but in SP9 the Virtual Server Agent supports the XenServer hypervisor so you can capture full VM images. Based on the excitement I saw coming out of Citrix's XenServer 6.5 announcements earlier this month, I think it's a good call to bring support for this platform into CommVault again.
During the deployment of the vcOPs vApp for a customer I ran into a new error - well, new for me. While the vApp (v5.8.1) deployed and booted fine, as I was registering it with the vCenter (v 5.1) as part of the initial configuration I got the following error: Unable to get vCenter server certification chain. Off we go to Google... Here's a quick summary of things to check:
This came up recently for a customer and while it's not new news, I thought a quick reminder would be useful. There are a few key points to remember about licensing of Windows Server 2012 in server virtualization projects, these rules apply to XenServer, VMware, Hyper-V, Oracle VM, etc.:
So proud of Lewan's own Kenneth Fingerlos who will be speaking next week at Citrix Synergy. A link to his session overview is available on the Citrix Blog: Gaining user acceptance for your desktop virtualization project | Citrix Blogs. Well done, Kenneth! Read his post to the Citrix Blog below:
