The next vSphere beta will be starting pretty soon and like last time, there is a chance for a public signup. If you have deployed vSphere 5.5 and 6.0 in a portion of your environment, then you are a candidate for the beta. The vSphere team will grant access to the program to selected candidates in stages, but as of yet there is no information released on dates or duration. This vSphere Beta Program is, again, subject to a Master Software Beta Test Agreement which you will need to complete before you gain access to private Beta community to download software and share information.

Yesterday, VMware announced their list of vExperts for 2016 and I’m both proud and humbled to have been selected for the second time. I’m standing on the shoulders of giants here, as a lot of the people that I have been inspired by and/or helped by over my years in the VMware community are recognised as vExperts again this year, alongside some new faces. Many folks have been vExperts for a long time and their continued dedication to the VMware ecosystem and generosity with their time is rightly recognised.

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.

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.

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.