Hello from the ITS Private Cloud! Welcome to issue 2023.2

ITS Cloud News

👋 Hello from the ITS Private Cloud! Welcome to issue 2023.2. Read on for ITS Private Cloud news, tools, security advisories and features released within the last month (or so).

Have ideas for future issues? Reply to this email with suggestions or feedback.

News

Moving towards secure by default Virtual Machines

Default firmware set to UEFI and secure boot when creating new virtual machines. We still allow use of BIOS, but please, consider using UEFI and secure boot.

Guest OS customization runs on Windows Guests

Customizing Windows OS after deployment is now supported by the ITS Private Cloud custom_spec attribute and vss-cli option --custom-spec. Only requirement is to have VMware Tools Installed and Running.

How-To's

Deploy Windows 11 VM

UEFI and Secure Boot, vTPM, VBS are among the Microsoft Windows 11 system requirements.

Deploy a VMware Photon OS VM pre-configured with the vss-cli in minutes

Photon OS, is an open-source minimalist Linux operating system from VMware that is optimized for cloud computing platforms, VMware vSphere deployments, and applications native to the cloud.

Tools & Formulas

VSS Command Line Interface (vss-cli) v2023.2.0🎉

Introducing vss-preference.

VSS Command Line Interface (vss-cli) v2023.2.1🎉

compute vm mk from-file adds declarative infrastructure for clone, template, clib and shell deployment methods. secure-boot management.

Notes

New ITS Private Cloud Guideline: Virtual Machine Disk Size

Based on years of experience, we have come up with a maximum VMDK size of 6TB to keep Storage vMotion performant. This ensures that the Storage vMotion process remains quick and efficient, while minimizing the performance impact on the virtual machine and virtual infrastructure.

Have questions, a special use case, or business requirements?