Well it is already more than a decade ago since I visited my first VMUGBE. I have seen the event grow from 15 visitors to more than 200. The last couple of years it is hosted in the LAMOT event center in Mechelen which is a superb venue. Ever since the first time I only missed a couple due to other obligations but when I attended I took home a lot of info, knowledge and new visions. Going to VMUGBE throughout the years have made me grow due to the sessions and the peers available.
A couple of years ago I met @kim_bottu who engaged me in becoming a #vExpert. Now two years in a row I am awarded being part of this vExpert community and VMUGBE facilitated this in a way. A lot of the Belgian vExperts come year after year and are very open people ready to chat.
These are a couple of the vExperts that will be attending this year:
Erik Schils
Stijn Depril
Tom Vallons
Maarten Van Driessen
Frederiek Van Hoornick
Luc Dekens
Jose Cavalheri
Maarten Caus
Niels Engelen
Alain Geenrits
Jurgen Van de Perre
Wouter Kursten
Hans Kraaijeveld
Johan Van Amersfoort
Harold Preyers
and …
Why should you attend?
It is a FREE #vCommunity networking event with top speakers. There is top relevant content available from CNA to Horizon View and VMware Cloud on AWS to VMware Blockchain and IOT. It is all VMware related and there is some marketing stuff yes (which make the event FREE) but most is community driven and real world examples.
There are 16 sessions in total, 3 parallel tracks with 4 sessions in the morning and 4 in the afternoon. There will be a small breakfast, a free lunch, a free BBQ and a chance to win a smartphone.
What sessions am I looking forward to?
Maarten Van Driessen (@mvandriessen) will share his knowledge from the field about VVOLS. I have never worked with VVOLS so I’m curious. My lab has Synology based storage and sadly Synology does not support VVOLS. I’m personally looking forward to this session.
Our very own Luc Dekens (@lucd) will tell you about PowerCLI. Even if you know everything about PowerCLI this is a session to attend. I have been at several Luc his sessions and for me these gave me new insights about challenges I had.
Johan van Amersfoort (@vhojan) is an easy to listen to speaker which has his session right after lunch. He will tell about a project where they used the VDI infrastructure to do a whole other thing during the nighttime. Don’t miss out on this session. I have missed this session twice so I will be now. Third time is a charm.
Last but not least the #vExpert Community session led by Stijn Depril (@sdepril). This sessions is one of the last sessions and will try to highlight why you should become a #vExpert. I will be on the #vExpert panel during this session so if you want to see me sweat (it is my first public speaking session) you should attend this session. We will share a lot of personal views and insights during this session.
I could go highlight a lot more sessions but that content is all available on https://www.vmug.be/
Key takeaways and tips:
Be there on time as the opening keynote speaker is Joe Baguley (@joebaguley) from VMware and last year it was a cool story to hear.
If you are attending, take the time to come to speak to me. I still am a shy guy.
Step out of your comfort zone, take your lunch to a table and start to chat.
Knowledge is about sharing.
Thanks
I want to thank @erikschils for all his efforts in organising the VMUGBE all these years.
I also want to thank those who have attended the previous VMUGBE events and those who will be attending this year. You are the ones that make these events a success.
The Horizon Client installer generates the following errors for Multimedia Redirection:
Adding the following symlinks made the failure message go away. I’m wondering though if the packages get updated in the repositories whether this will break the Multimedia Redirection (MMR). I guess I’ll notice some day.
Update (2019/12/20): Today I updated from version 5.2 to 5.3 and ran into the same issue again. I noticed that there are symbolic links present but that they linked to the old versions. After updating the symbolic links the installer was happy again.
I decided to upgrade the vCenter Server Appliance from 6.5 U2 to 6.7 though it is not supported, see VMware KB. As this is not supported you will NOT want go ahead with this in a production environment. Maybe I will have regrets later on too … but this is my lab environment so the alternative is to redeploy a new VCSA.
Update:
While it was not possible at the time of writing of this post. This VMware KB has been updated with the following information.
Important: vSphere 6.5 Update 2d and higher are not supported to upgrade to vSphere 6.7 Update 1. vSphere 6.5 Update 2d and higher are supported to upgrade to vSphere 6.7 Update 2. For more information, see VMware Product Interoperability Matrices.
I have applied the following knowledge base articles on the source VCSA:
The first KB was applied because the installer is failing due to a lack of disk space on the source appliance. The installer gives the opportunity to supply a location on the source VCSA to export the necessary files that facilitate the upgrade.
The second KB was applied because the VMware Directory failed during the firstboot phase after the upgrade succeeded.
I downloaded the sources for VCSA 6.7.0 but had to go and download the sources for VCSA 6.7.0a. The VCSA 6.7.0 sources stalled at 5% on VMware Identity Management Service.
I also went to change the root password expiration to no and set the administrator@vsphere.local account password to only include alphabet characters.
The installer will also fail after the first phase if the VAMI port is not reachable, the first phase will finish succesfully though. I forgot to add an exception to my firewall. You can then continue the installer by going to the VAMI interface on port 5480.
Setting up the lab in Ravello – Part 1 : the jumphost
In these series we will create a lab with multiple components, a jumphost, vcsa, esxi, a vsan enabled cluster, nsx and maybe more. The aim of the series is to learn about deploying all components onto the Ravello cloud.
Part 1: Creating the Jumphost
Part one of the series will be about creating the jumphost. I’m looking at a linux system as we do not need any license to run it and it is already available in Ravello
Creating the Ravello Application
The first step is to create an application. We will create a 0.1 version of the LAB:
Creating the Jumphost VM in the Application
Drag a ‘Xubuntu Desktop 14.04.1 with qemu-kvm pre-installed’ onto the Canvas. Once the VM has been dragged onto the Canvas, there will be an error: ‘Key pair must be supplied’
You can see that the error has its source on the General tab. To correct this a Key Pair must be created.
On the General tab – Cloud Init Configuration – Key Pair
Select the Option: Create a Key Pair
In the following screenshot you can see that I already created a Key Pair
Once created the private key will be available for download. To be able to use the private key with a ssh session from putty, you will need to convert the key.pem to key.ppk. Open puttygen and load the key.pem file and save the file as key.ppk.
Now that we have created our key pair we can save the VM and the error should disappear.
On the System tab, change the # CPU to 2 and the memory to 3 GB.
On the Disks and NICs tab we leave everything as is.
On the Services tab, Add Supplied Service. We will use this Service to connect to the VM via RDP.
A second service will be added. I changed the name to RDP and chose protocol RDP which sets the Port to 3389.
We are ready to publish the application:
Change the ‘Schedule application to stop in:’ countdown timer to ‘04:00hr’. This will give us the time to update and change the VM to our needs.
Publish will power on the VM. When Powered on we will have access to the Console. Powering on the VM takes a couple of minutes.
Customizing the Jumphost VM
Upgrades
The Console will open in a new tab. The initial password for this VM is ‘ravelloCloud’.
The first thing we will do is upgrade the VM to the latest release available. Open the ‘Byobu Terminal’.
Run the command ‘sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade’ and confirm you want to upgrade all proposed packages. I tried do-release-upgrade first, which failed because of an apt dependency.
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
Now we are ready to upgrade to the lastest release. Confirm to all new version configuration files from the package maintainer. In the end all obsolete packages can be removed and reboot when finished.
Run the command ‘sudo apt-get dist-upgrade’ and confirm you want to upgrade all proposed packages. Now your system will be fully up-to-date.
XRDP 0.9.x
Install xrdp 0.9.x so that we can connect via RDP. This will be a more pleasant way of working.
We will add a PPA (Personal Package Archive) to add the package source location to the /etc/apt/sources.list file. This will enable updates through the apt update process. We will install the latest version of xrpd from this location. At the time of writing the version integrated is in the ubuntu sources is 0.6.x. The latest stable version has quite some enhancements like shared clipboard support.
The version installed at the time of writing is 0.9.4
Create xsession file with contents xfce4-session. The latest xrdp version should be detecting the desktop environment by default but in my case it did't and wouldn't work without the following xsession file.
