2020

Over the past several years of operating multiple vRealize Automation 7.x deployments, I’ve come across a situation where the data collection status for the Inventory or State data stays stuck at “In Progress” for a particular vSphere cluster. Usually, this occurs because a vSphere Agent executing the job was stopped mid-process. I initially searched online for a solution and could not find anything that helped. This left me to digging through the vRealize Automation 7.

With the new 64-core AMD EPYC processors available and the 56-core Intel Xeon on the horizon, it was bound to happen… On February 3, 2020, VMware announced that effective April 2, 2020, all per-CPU licensed products will be limited to 32 physical cores per CPU license. This change means that those shiny new 64-core processors will require the purchase of 2 CPU licenses for each processor going forward. This change affects all per-CPU licensed products, including vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and Enterprise PKS, to name a few.

Over the past several years of using vRealize Automation 6.x and 7.x, I have generated numerous dashboards and search queries within Splunk to explore the log data generated by these products. Knowing that vRealize Automation 8.0 is an entirely new product compared to previous versions, I decided that it was time to begin reviewing the log data being generated by the appliance to determine what information could be obtained from the logs.

When it comes to vRealize Automation 8.0, VMware has been moving full steam ahead with rapid product updates containing new features, capabilities, and bug fixes. Continuing this trend, on January 17, 2020, VMware released the first hotfix for vRealize Automation 8.0.1. Included in it are three enhancements, ten improvements, and fifteen fixes for items relating to the IaaS API, Provisioning, Action-based extensibility (ABX), vRealize Orchestrator (vRO), and Virtual appliance/clustering. The hotfix can be installed using vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.

On January 16, 2020, the Defense Information Systems Agency has made available the second update to VMware vSphere 6.5 STIGs released in 2019. VMware vSphere 6.5 STIG Version 1, Release 3 includes updates to both the ESXi and the vCenter Server STIGs. Per the revision history provided in the updated STIG download, the following changes were made: VMware vSphere 6.5 ESXi STIG V-94505, V-94507, V-94529, V-94531, V-94543, V-94545 - Added N/A statement when host profiles are not used to join AD These STIGs checks all relate to the authentication of users to ESXi using Active Directory.