Among a flurry of VMware updates this week, the company has dragged its syslog analytics tool, vRealize Log Insight, into the 21st century, ending restrictions that previously only let users export 20,000 log messages. There is now no upper limit in Log Insight 8.0*.

(Log exports are often used to document the root cause of issues or as a record of security incidents: 20,000 messages can be little more than a minute’s worth of data for large users.)

Content packs for vSphere, vSAN, and NSX-T have all been improved as well to boost log capabilities in conjunction with Log Insight, so users get better visibility into storage policy modifications, failed login attempts, NSX backup failures, and service disruptions, et al.

vmware updatesVMware Updates: An Unexpected OS Switch…

Those looking to upgrade (and VMWare has over half-a-million customers around the world, including Adobe, Accenture and Amazon just in the shallow end of the alphabet) also get some unexpected OS-based tweaking, with 8.0 performing an in-place OS swap from SUSE to Photon.

Alarmed? Don’t be: VMware says the change is harmless: VMware’s Matt Bradford writes: “This means you don’t have to stand up a new cluster and migrate your old data. Instead, our team of brilliant engineers has figured out a way to reliably replace the OS in-place with a single PAK file.

“This means that upgrades are just as easy as they have been in the past. This does, however, require you to be on Log Insight 4.8 so you may have to perform an incremental upgrade if you’re running an older version. If you think this sounds like a risky maneuver, it’s actually quite safe.

He notes: “The existing SLES partition includes enough free space to accommodate Photon OS without impacting its ability to run. [During upgrade] the SLES partition is shrunk and a new partition is created. Photon OS 3.0 then gets installed in this new partition and then gets added to the appliance’s boot loader as the new default OS. And because Photon is such a lightweight OS, there’s no need to remove SUSE so you can take comfort in knowing you can roll back instantly should you need to.”

VMware Upgrades

The tweak is one of a range of upgrades to several VMWare tools this week, with vRealize Suite 2019, vCloud Suite 2019, and vCloud Suite 2019 Platinum all getting a substantial range of new and welcome features.

vRealize suite — a hybrid cloud management platform that enables IT Operations to deliver a self-service private or hybrid cloud — for example gets improved Kubernetes workloads support, direct integration with VMware Cloud on AWS and enhanced integrations with AWS, Azure, GCP, Terraform, Infoblox, Ansible, Git, Jenkins, Bamboo.

The VMware updates are all part of a “major refresh of our multi-cloud management platform” in the face of growing competition from the hyperscale cloud providers’ native platforms.

Users can get more details on all the VMware updates here.

Read this: Windows Virtual Desktop Lands: Should Your Business Consider It?

*VMware has fast-forwarded from version 4.8 to release 8.0. Don’t worry, admins: you haven’t fallen asleep for a few years, skipped a few versions and woken up in a horrific world you don’t recognise, albeit one with better syslog tools: VMWare has just decided to bring its version numbers in sync; the rest of its vRealize suite is at 8.0, and now, so is Log Insight.