Eventful Year for vSphere: Top Blog Posts of 2019

(To mark the end of the year we are posting every day through January 1 with lighter vSphere and VMware topics. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do. See them all via the “2019 Wrap Up” tag!)

We’re in the home stretch, with mere hours until the end of the decade. To kick this series off we took a look at some of the top vSphere blog posts this year, 6 through 10. Today let’s finish it out and see which post is most popular!

5. “What’s New in vSphere 6.5: vCenter Server” and “What’s New in vSphere 6.5: vCenter Management Clients” tie for fifth place. What’s with all the interest in vSphere 6.5 when vSphere 6.7 is out? It’s because people are upgrading from vSphere 5.5 and 6.0 and catching up on their reading. Both have excellent content about changes to how vCenter Server is delivered and operated, as well as how us humans will interact with the infrastructure.

4. Speaking of the HTML5 client, number 4 on the charts this year was “Goodbye, vSphere Web Client!” As Adobe Flash hits the end of its life in 2020 the HTML5 client is the client to use. Highly recommended, partly because it doesn’t need Flash and partly because it’s laid out better (by our UX Designers) for day-to-day tasks.

3. There was a lot of interesting content written in 2019 that just missed the cut… so I added them all together to get number 3!

• “Building a Secure Data Center that You Can Carry in a Backpack, with vSphere 6.7” is all about miniaturized HCI deployments that Cubic Mission Solutions has built and deployed in very hostile environments. You thought your data center was awful, try the back of a truck!
• “vCenter Server 6.7 Update 2: What’s New” was a big post. vSphere 6.7 Update 2 brought a lot of improvements and new features with it.
• “Designing a Shared Virtualization Infrastructure for Business Critical, Machine Learning, and HPC Workloads” is a case study of a University that is trying – and succeeding – in running a lot of different workloads in a shared vSphere infrastructure.
• “Which vSphere CPU Scheduler to Choose” is the definitive guide to figuring out what CPU scheduler to use to mitigate CPU vulnerabilities that were announced in 2019. Let’s hope that 2020 is calmer when it comes to hardware-based security problems. If you’re still thinking about these things also check out “vmx.reboot.PowerCycle Makes CPU Vulnerability Remediation Easy” and “vSphere & Intel JCC, TAA, and MCEPSC/IFU.” That last post is all about the November 12, 2019 CPU vulnerability disclosures and what they mean for application performance.
• “Decoding the vCenter Server Lifecycle: Update and Versioning Explained” took us through what all the weird version numbers and letters are for vCenter Server.
• “Security Issue with VMware Tools: VMSA-2019-0009” has a ton of information about managing VMware Tools using PowerCLI and other automated methods and was really popular. It’s very important to keep VMware Tools up to date, just like any other software.
• “10 Things to Know About vSphere Certificate Management” answered a lot of common questions about changing & managing certificates in vSphere and vCenter Server. That includes non-technical questions that come up, too!
• “The vMotion Process Under the Hood” and “How to Tune vMotion for Lower Migration Times?” and “Troubleshooting vMotion” have proven again that our audience loves deeply technical content.
• “Introducing Project Pacific” and “Project Pacific – Technical Overview” were the most popular posts from 2019. Lots and lots of interest in Kubernetes and container orchestration.

2. “Which vSCSI Controller Should I Choose for Performance?” ranks at number 2 for the year. It’s an older post but still very relevant. Hint: use the pvscsi and vmxnet3 drivers whenever you can. Did you know they’re now available on Windows Update?

1. vSphere 6.7 finally makes a big appearance on this chart, in it’s rightful place as number 1. “Introducing VMware vSphere 6.7!” was wildly popular, looking at the new features and capabilities in the core of the software-defined data center.

Please keep up with us in 2020 by following us on Twitter and by adding this blog to your RSS reader. Thank you!

(Come back tomorrow for a look into where vSphere has come from! For more posts in this series visit the “2019 Wrap Up” tag.)