2020

On March 27, 2020, VMware released the second hotfix for vRealize Automation 8.0.1. Included in it are sixty-three fixes for items relating to the Provisioning, vRealize Orchestrator (vRO), vRealize CodeStream, and Virtual appliance/clustering. The hotfix can be installed using vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.0.1. It is recommended to install vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.0.1 Patch 1 before installing vRealize Automation 8.0.1 Hotfix 2 (Build 8.0.1.7482). For complete details on the items that have been resolved with this hotfix, review the VMware KB article Cumulative Update for vRealize Automation 8.

While attempting to upgrade my ESXi hosts to the latest vSphere 7.0 release, I ran into the following error on all of the hosts in my home lab: The upgrade has VIBs that are missing dependencies. Remove the VIBs or use Image Builder to create a custom upgrade ISO image that contains the missing dependencies, and try to upgrade again. While the error message gives you a pretty good idea of what might be causing the issue, for the life of me, I couldn’t think of what VIBs it could be referring to.

Today, the highly anticipated VMware vSphere 7.0 release is now available for download. With it comes many new features and enhancements that I hope to write about in the near future. Until then, there are several items that you should be aware of before you begin upgrading your environments. What’s New in vSphere 7.0 There are so many new features in vSphere 7.0 that a dedicated blog post would be required to cover them all.

While vRealize Automation 8.0 may be the hot new cloud management platform from VMware, vRealize Automation 7.6 still enjoys widespread usage due to its long life and rich feature set. As such, VMware continues to provide bug fixes for vRealize Automation 7.6. Continuing this trend, VMware recently released Hotfix 3 for vRealize Automation 7.6 on February 25, 2020. This cumulative update brings us fixes for 14 separate issues relating to performance, UI, vRealize Operations integration, and adds support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.

If you’re like most large IT environments, a device naming standard is common to maintain order on your network when deploying new devices. Some IT environments utilize simple naming standards, while others are complex and might vary depending on location, device type, device usage, or some other abstract reason. vRealize Automation 8 introduced significant improvements over vRealize Automation 7 when it comes to machine naming including support for naming templates based on: