The Inventory service came about as a separate item in vSphere 5.x and is the place where all of your web client tags get stored (you ARE using tags, right?) but it also gets used to cache queries destined for the vCenter database from the web client, which reduces the load on the vCenter server database. It’s also a database that grows substantially if you ever recover a load of VMs with SRM or similar, but that’s another story.

I attended my third UK VMUG Conference on the 19th of November (again at the National Motorcycle Museum) an event which is put on by the London VMUG Committee. As planned, I spent the majority of the day in the Community Track, lending my support to all the folks from this amazing community who’d come from near and far to present sessions. What with the vCurry and the vQuiz the night before, which gives folks a chance to catch up with old friends and meet new ones, the UK’s National VMUG conference is always a great event.

6 new ESXi 5.5 patches came out overnight. Click here for the full release notes. Your post update 3 VUM baseline would now look like this… Vendor ID Title KB Article Fixes ESXi550-Update03 Update 3 Rollup package vSphere 5.5 Update 3 ESXi550-201510401-BG Updates esx-base KB2133825 Resolves issue with snapshot consolidation/deletion ESXi550-201512101-SG Updates esx-base KB2135795 Updates OpenSSL to openssl-1.

VMware have not shouted about this one as much as they should have, given the potential gravity of the situation. If you use linked mode to connect multiple sites and have SRM 5.8.0.1 installed, then you will not be able to run an SRM recovery when you have the sites disconnected. As in, when you are experiencing a disaster which you want to recover from as quickly and painlessly as possible, as in, precisely what you purchased SRM for in the first place, you’re out of luck.

I recently saw a problem where a vCenter linked mode configuration appears to have failed half way through. It’s highly unusual in that from the C# Client when certain users log in to certain vCenters, they can see the newly added vCenter visible in linked mode as if everything was perfect. Other C# client users, anyone logging in to other vCenters or anyone using the web client does not see this intended end state.

A lot of folks head back home on Thursday, so the train and bus were both pretty empty this morning. The hardy folks who do make it in generally make use of the bag drop today for all those suitcases full of accumulated swag. I had 5 sessions planned for Thursday, so for me, this was a busy day session wise. Most of these were TAM sessions, so TCC was my first port of call for some welcome tea and croissants.

Rubrik The first thing I had on my agenda after the General Session was to take a look at Rubrik, one of the companies that have been getting a fair aount of buzz lately and so I took the opportunity to go and find out why. A hyperconverged type solution, a number of blocks (briks, obviously) a nice interface, dedupe, replication, all that seems to be the thing to do these days.

Setup Poised with the same team as yesterday in the Hang Space awaiting the General Session, plus a couple of extra faces. The raised desks and UK plug adapters are well set up for the blogger types. Cloud Stuff The cloud academy video from US VMworld opens up proceedings again, so I am expecting Carl, but it’s Sanjay Poonen, without people dressed as clouds or apps. He even slips in a Louis Suarez comment, but I didn’t bite.

TAM Session - ESXi Lifecycle I was straight off to the first of my TAM sessions after the general session, covering the ESXi lifecycle. The basic gist of this one is that VMware recognise that customers find it time consuming to maintain hosts and possibly difficult to spin up hosts. There’s one tool to provision (auto deploy), another place to go for initial configuration (host profiles) and then another to manage going forward (VUM).

Setup A better start than last year since we were able to set up in the Hang Space before anyone started speaking. I managed to get a seat along with @julian_wood, @scott_lowe and @vcdxnz001 and had a go at the minimal setup, iPad for blogging, iPhone for twitter and a bluetooth keyboard. That wasn’t as “corridor warrior” as I had hoped, it doesn’t really cut it as a practical solution, is’s simply too slow to keep up and I struggled to blog and watch the twitter feed at the same time.