IT admins receive lots of emails daily, so it is not surprising that occasionally some important vSphere notifications get lost in all the fuss. Fortunately, vSphere Alert Center, a VMware Fling app, provides a simple solution for such issues.

Sometimes, especially in a new environment, you may need to quickly find out where your ESXi hypervisor is installed. Whether it’s on a USB stick, SD card, local disk, or booting over the network via PXY, there are a few methods to identify the location correctly.

People like to oversimplify the comparison of any two things, but this is not as apparent when it comes to software. VMware Imager Fling and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) can both automate VM image deployment. However, configuration and requirement differences reveal that they are, in fact, more suitable for different use cases.

VMware introduced a number of enhancements in vSphere 8.0, including updates for vMotion. Most notably, the speed has been improved for both hot and cold migrations. However, VMware claims that cold migration is now x3 times faster than it was before. This is a positive development since previously, migration would take up too many hours.

While VMware has been overhauling and stepping up in all arias of its vSphere environment over the last decade, it’s been sort of looking over its hypervisor. The recent VMware ESXi 8.0 has seen some new introductions here and there. Most notably, improvements are seen in its installation, configuration, and user interface (UI).

Windows 11 2H22 includes several new elements that make its installation into vSphere 8 and then the creation of a VMware Golden Image much easier. Before that, the OS missed some drivers that required more juggling to make things work. Now, it includes the VMware PVSCSI and VMXNET3 drivers and other stuff to fix previous issues.

vSphere 8 introduces VMware vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA), focused on efficiency, performance, and less CPU usage. The new configuration has been optimized for NVMe-based TLC flash devices, abandoning cache layers and disk groups. VMware will privilege the deployments of vSAN as ESA, moving forward.

LocalStack is a free cloud service emulator that you can deploy locally. It runs in a single container and, emulating Amazon Web Services (AWS), allows you to test applications or play around with workflow without having to commit to paying for actual cloud services. It’s a great solution for cloud-based testing and learning.

vSphere 8 brings an abundance of cool new features. Among them, VMware Virtual Hardware Version 20 is even more efficient: newer CPU cores support, more VM count, ESXi instance on Smart NICs, higher VM density, up to 8 vGPU devices support, aware migration, NUMA nodes exposed in vSphere Client, and many many more!

Recently, at VMware EXPLORE 2022, the virtualization vendor announced a new product called VMware Aria. The new service is a multi-cloud management solution. It allows you to centralize multi-cloud operation in one console that has a single view for deployment, management, automation and cost management of your cloud-based environment.