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I am very honored to be selected as a vExpert for the fourth year in a row! ​
​Congratulations to everyone that was selected this year, you can see the list and announcement here: http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2016/02/vexpert-2016-award-announcement.html
There are many benefits to becoming a vExpert, private community access from VMware, cool free shirts and lots of swag!  But my favorite is from Pluralsight which offers access to their entire training library for vExperts and MVP’s.
Check out http://blog.pluralsight.com/2015-vexperts-mvps-free-training
I watched two courses on VMware NSX, which covered a lot of material for the VCP-NV exam, which I was able to pass last year.  More info on that exam coming up!
Congratulations again to all of the vExperts of 2016!!

A while back I had the opportunity to be a reviewer for the new book by PACK Publishing, https://www.packtpub.com/ , the VMware vSphere Security Cookbook, by Mike Greer.

This was my first time as a book reviewer, and I had thought it would be a few minutes in the evening reading the sections the publisher emailed me, then adding some short comments, wrong!  As I read over the chapters I started thinking about how I would write or explain the specific topic, then doing research on the web or in the VMware KB’s to verify what I thought, or what was in the chapters accurate and the best way to explain the specific topics.

I can tell you from past experience in writing procedure documents for customers, you really need to have the steps to follow defined correctly and accurately.  What I really like is the way it details the steps to configure the components of vSphere security whether you are doing it for the first time, or you have done it several times.

The book is based on vSphere vCNS 5.5, however I have been working with NSX since its release and I can see that many of the interfaces are identical.  This is especially true with most of the Edge Services Gateway configurations.  

The book covers additional security areas that you always need to interface with, such as Microsoft Active Directory and SSL Certificates.  The use of the SSL Certificate Automation Tool, with real life examples, is covered as well!

You can find the book at: https://www.packtpub.com/virtualization-and-cloud/vsphere-security-cookbook  

I hope you find the book helpful in your daily vSphere administration!!

I recently gave a presentation at several Lunch and Learns that covers getting started with VSAN.  I was happy to see that a third of the people who attended had already deployed VSAN to some extent, mostly as a test to get familiar with the configuration and technology.
You can download the presentation from my web site: http://www.virtualsouthwest.com/presentations.html
Since I gave the presentation, there has been a patch released that solves a couple of serious issues-

• Virtual machine operations on the Virtual SAN datastore might fail with an error message similar to the following:
  create directory <server-detail>-<vm-name> (Cannot Create File)
  The clomd service might also stop responding.
• Virtual SAN cluster might report that the Virtual SAN datastore is running out of space even though space is available in the datastore. An error message similar to the following is displayed:
  There is no more space for virtual disk <vm-name>.vmdk. You might be able to continue this session by freeing disk space on the relevant volume, and clicking _Retry. Click Cancel to terminate this session.

Under the Host Performance tab when you change the chart option to display the CPU Usage and Usage in MHz metrics and compare the values with the values displayed in the CPU Demand metric on the performance chart, you will notice a huge difference in the demand and usage in the CPU performance data. The difference is due to incorrect calculation of the values for Usage and Usage in MHz

Full details of the KB are at: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2102046

Being a former Windows admin, I can never remember the steps to install VM Tools on a Linux VM, so I end up searching Google each time and finding the specific steps.  So I am finally posting this more for me, but I hope it will help out others as well!

So here are the steps I use:
1.  From the vSphere client, select the VM, Right click, select Guest, then Install/Upgrade VMware Tools.  This will mount the ISO file to the VM
2.  In the Install/Upgrade Tools window, select Interactive Tools Upgrade button and click OK
3.  Now log onto your Linux VM as root
4.  Create a mount point and mount the CD-Rom using:
-          mkdir /mnt/cdrom
-          mkdir /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
5.  Unpack the Tools Tar gzip file:
-          Tar –xzvf /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-version-build.tar.gz
6.   Run the Install.pl to install VMware Tools:
-          ./vmware-install.pl –d  ( -d will use the default answers when installing tools )
7.   Unmount the CD:
-          umount /mnt/cdrom
And you’re done! The last few I have installed in Cent OS did not need a reboot..