The big day for VMware admins around the world is here with the first day of VMworld 2013. Kicking off the conference (besides the pre-parties) is the keynote given by the CEO of VMware, Pat Gelsinger. The big announcements from the keynote are: VMware vSphere 5.5 As rumored, we didn’t see vSphere 6, but there were several enhancements here that caught my eye. A new VM version which now supports better vGPU and more device support (more disks per VM).

Another VMworld is upon us and its time for my VMworld 2013 predictions. I’m going to leave out some of the gimme predictions of NSX being released and a new vSphere / ESXi / vCloud. But I’ll go into the some of the features that I think they’ll have. It should be noted, the company I work for is not a part of any beta trials at the moment nor have I had any preview as a vExpert (though one would be nice!

For those that are interested in learning a little bit more about Puppet, join me at the KC VMUG Meeting on August 15th from 1:30 – 4. I’ll be giving a talk on how we use Puppet at LightEdge and a few cool things you can do to automate your server deployments. Should be a good (and informative) time.

Finally dug out of the past couple of weeks to do some writing and I have a bunch of stuff to talk about. Hoping to have several posts here in the next week or so. One of the big events that has happened over the last week is that I was selected as one of the vExperts for 2013. I’m honored to be one of the selected members for this year and truly grateful for the recognition.

With the latest and greatest VMware Tools updates, you may have noticed a change to the VMware Tools Toolbox. Mainly, the inability to do anything that you used to be able to do. Now you are simply greeted with the version, some copyright information and a status that tells you if the service is running or not. This change is outlined in the ESXi 5.1u1 notes as follows: VMware Toolbox. vSphere 5.