Dell EMC Yeah, I know, Dell buys EMC for a proper Doctor Evil amount of money, on top of the billions it already owed the banks and VC guys who helped it to go private last year, but like I say, a debt is just a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper until someone actually calls it in. So whatever. VMware is still independent, just as it was last week, so we all have to wait to see just how this shakes out.

Ok, so first things first, I don’t know what day this is, day 1, day 0 or day -1, so it will have to stay as Sunday. That means flying to VMworld Europe day, a number of hours spent in transit, by now the normal Airbnb approach to staying in Barcelona, considering that basically all I will do in this apartment is sleep and shower. OK, and blog. It’s only a couple of hours from Gatwick to Barcelona, but today’s transport involved car, train, plane, taxi, taxi, feet, which would have been a lot worse had I not been able to sponge lifts off of unnamed people’s expenses :-) You have to love this community.

Cormac Hogan has posted a couple of blog posts in the last 24 hours detailing the new features offered by the newly announced (today?) release of VSAN 6.1 and also lifted the veil somewhat on what can be expected in the next release, including another VSAN beta signup offer. Whatever you may think about the adoption rates for VSAN there’s no arguing with the pace of development coming out of VMware for this technology.

So here we go, The Keynote from the first day of VMworld 2015, San Fran. This is more a stream of thought than anything totally structured/sensible and is partly my notes to see what I need to go look at later on! Apps and Cloud huh? Opening with a video before Carl Eschenbach takes the stage. There are a record 23,000 folks attending in person this year, somewhat different from the 1,200 in the first year, plus loads of folks like me watching from further afield.

Sometime yesterday, VMware announced the existence of VMware Validated Designs, which are a series of architecture designs validated by VMware experts. These appear to be a number of fluid designs (sorry to use a brave liquid word there but you’ll see what I mean) which will be updated regularly, meaning that the design principles espoused within will not be stuck at a single release version and more importantly will not be stuck at a single product.

Over the last couple of weeks there’s been a lot of talk about products being launched by VMware’s relatively new Cloud-Native Applications division. Now the launch date is here and even though it’s not quite launch time yet, the cat is out of the bag. The products are currently known as; Project Photon - A stripped down Linux version optimised to run on the vSphere hypervisor which is designed solely to host and package containers.

More messing around in my lab and it was time to upgrade SRM from 5.5 to 5.8, including an update of the vCenter itself to 5.5 u2d as well as the IBM SVC SRA as precursors to the SRM upgrade itself. Upgrading vCenter is pretty simple as long as you run a custom installation and step through the components one at a time, SSO first through to vCenter 4th and last.

So, you’ve got a nice new vCenter 6 up and running, maybe you have an external PSC as well? Jolly good! Now what? There’s a whole bunch of additional configuration items that you should look at amending before too long. Log in as your SSO Admin account - administrator@vsphere.local (or whatever you changed it to during the installation) and away we go. Let’s start with something new - the Download Remote Console option.

Following directly on from my previous post where I install a PSC, it’s time for a vCenter. There’s not a lot of point having one without the other. The webpage I used to install the PSC is still open so I can just click on Install again and accept the EULA again and it is right back to the connecting to target server options once more. The same options as last time for this.

So at last, vSphere 6 release day. Let’s crack on with this new PSC stuff! vSphere 6.0 splits vCenters into a Platform Services Controller piece (SSO, licensing, Certificates - all the bits that really tie your setup together) and the vCenter installation itself. These can be on the same server (VM, right?) or different servers, creating stand-alone PSC’s which can be load balanced and so on. The vCenter Deployment Guide has been available for a few days already and that is really a step by step guide through the installations that you can do.