Lewan Technology Blog

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.

Here at Lewan HQ we have a robust internal lab where we demo solutions and hardware for customers and train our team. The lab gives us the opportunity to actually touch and test products before evaluating or installing onsite for clients.

As part of our lab, we have a complete VMware Horizon Enterprise deployment with all the bells and whistles and integrated technologies from our other hardware and software partners. This allows us to do expanded testing beyond what the primary manufacturers can do.

Today that was integration testing for VMware Horizon 7, and I learned a few things I wish I'd known before I started. I hope this post saves you the time I spent troubleshooting cryptographic protocol issues and makes for a more seamless upgrade of your infrastructure!

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.

Working in VMware vCenter Server daily, these are the top three of the admin features I find most useful:

If there are disk array or networking issues in VMware ESX 3.x or vSphere, some virtual machines (VMs) may appear in the vSphere Client as being Invalid and are greyed out. The following steps will fix this issue.

When using Virtual Machines (VM's) from other VMware products, the easiest way to get these VM's into ESX/vSphere is to use VMware's product called vCenter Converter Standalone. vCenter Server does include a version of Converter, however I've had better success in using the standalone version to do VM conversions as it is (typically) a newer version with more features than the one included with vCenter. This lesson describes how to use vCenter Converter Standalone to import VM's or VMDK files from other VMware Products, such as VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and VMware Server.