I’ve recently upgraded our environment from vSphere 6.0 (shush, it’s still in support until March 2020). Fairly standard setup really, a couple of vCenter’s, a couple of PSC’s (to allow ELM), and several hosts. We also ran the HTML 5 Fling as nobody wants to use that god-awful web client which was forced on us for some reason. Yes, it’s been years. No, I’m not over it.
I won’t go in to how to perform the upgrade, that’s well documented and often repeated already, I’ll just point out a couple of things I noticed.
The VMware Communities are an interesting beast. I’ve not really bothered with them in the past, possibly because I feel there’s nothing I can add. But upon reading them recently, I’ve noticed something which is a bit weird and possibly interesting (but probably not).
There have been enough posts of this type for me to notice. An example:
Example of odd posts on VMware communities
The posts all follow this structure – Link to an author who appears to be unrelated to anything, link to a VMware knowledgebase article that is probably related to the question, give a publication name and product version, then finish with a one sentence question.
So, VMware have a proactive support product called Skyline. You install an appliance, the Skyline Collector, in to your environment then point it at your vCenter server(s). From there, the collector monitors your environment and uploads the details to the VMware Cloud for analysis. The results are then presented to you in a portal.
Skyline overview page
Skyline is currently on release 2.0.0.2. The portal, sadly, is not a version 2 release. Whilst it does give a reasonable overview, it doesn’t quite function as I’d expect. If you apply any filters (for example, ‘Critical’ findings for ‘Compute’), click on a finding, then click the back button on the web page, the filters are removed. A minor thing, for sure, but frustrating anyway.
The ‘Date Found’ field seems to simply show the date that it was last found rather than first found. So, if you have a lot of findings (as above) and the number increases there appears to be no real way of working out what is new.
The overview page doesn’t scroll past the first 15 findings, so you have to apply filters to see all the data. This may be OK in an environment with less than 15 findings, but after that you have to remember when each finding was made – there’s no obvious way to see this – so you can tell what is a new finding.
