Author: Jon Owings

A Team Makes a Difference

I decided to wait a few months after everyone else blogged about our team experience during my first quarter at EMC.

First off it is truly an honor to be working with some awesome people at EMC and VCE. You never know what things are going to be like when you start something new. Sure I know such and such from blogs or twitter. I may have even met them in person at VMworld.

What a great team though. I just want to say thank you to the team. It was exciting to see everyone grow through the training. It is great to be somewhere that I don’t catch funny looks for being excited about working with VMware/Storage/Networking/Datacenter.

Thanks team 05.

VSI Plugin: vSphere Multipathing Coolness

One of the tasks that always made me crazy when doing deployments was managing multipathing. Starting with vSphere 4.0 most of the storage platforms recommended using the Round Robin policy. At some point we all had to modify the policy for each datastore via the vCenter client. It is like stabbing yourself in the eye with a sewing needle. The other way is to use a script from the cli to change the default policy for each datastore. Much easier but there should be a better way for those that don’t have crazy script capabilities.

Imagine being able to right click on an ESX cluster. Going through a small wizard and then setting all of the policies for each datastore on each host. Also works with Powerpath VE if you have it. Awesomeness. I almost shed tears of joy.

After installing the EMC VSI plugin right click a host (or entire cluster), go to EMC à Set Multipathing Policy…

Use the Wizard to set your preferred NMP (or even Powerpath VE) policy.

 

Like that everything is set on the host or cluster, all the same way. Thing of beauty.

Vote Soon! VMworld 2011 Session

If you are looking for a big list of sessions to vote for go check out Chad’s post.

As I am juggling about 5 post ideas with zero time to actually finish them. Some people may have forgot this blog exists. Today though I am asking you to go over to VMworld.com and vote for my session #2232 Building the Education Cloud.

This session will have demos AND I promise you will leave with some kind of useful practical knowledge.

Thanks again. Have a great week and remember voting ends Wednesday.

An Idea for vCloud Director and View

Sometimes I am sitting up late at night and I have a thought of something I think would be cool, like if x and y worked together to get z. This time I thought this was good enough to blog about. Now I want to stress that I do not have any special insight into what is coming. This is just how I wish things would be.

Today there are two end user portals from VMware. The vCloud Director for self-service cloud interface and the View Manager access point for end-users to access Virtual Desktops. Each interface interacts with one or more vCenter instances to deploy, manage, and destroy virtual machines. Below is a way over simplified representation of how View, vCloud Director (plus Request Manager) relate to the user experience. I think maybe there is a divide when there does not need to be (someday).

 

 

My idea

What if vCloud director could be used in the future to be the one stop user interface portal. Leveraging vCloud Request Manager, vCD could deploy cloud resources, Desktops or Servers or both. vCloud Director would be the orchestration piece for VMware View. Once the Request for a desktop is approved the entitlement to the correct pool is automatically given. If extra desktops are needed the cloning begins. vCloud Director will learn to speak the View Composer’s language, providing the ever elusive ability to use linked clones with vCD. vCloud Director with this feature could be great for lab and test/dev environments. The best part is operationally there is one place to request, deploy, manage all virtual resources from the end-user perspective. This could eliminate the ambiguity for a user (and service providers) on how to consume (and deliver) resources. This has implications on how IaaS and DaaS would be architected.

 

Now some drawbacks

You might say, hey, Jon you are going to make me buy and run vCD just to get VDI? No. The beauty of the API’s is each product could stand alone or work together (in my Vision of how they should work). Maybe even leverage Composer with vCD without View or Request Manager with View without vCD.

One Cloud Portal to rule them all.

First Three Months and the Cloud

This is the post where people start accusing me of working for EMC. Guess what? I do.

Now that Geek Week and onboarding are finished and I got my really cool shirt I wanted to spend a few minutes reflecting on the things I learned in the last few months. This post will introduce a few topics and be an overall summary of my first 3 months as a vSpecialist.

What is great is I didn’t have to be convinced to like or do something I didn’t already think or believe. I am definitely able to articulate my thoughts in a somewhat coherent manner.

I believe the way we DO technology will need to transform in order compete in the future. If you are doing well now and still spending most of your time and money keeping the lights on the margin for error is shrinking. Your IT needs to be empowered to focus on applications that will give you a competitive edge. I have seen that EMC is going all in to make this vision of the cloud reality.

Automate – Manage – Self-Service

We all have a vision of how the “cloud” will help us. For us technical guys our list may look like this:

  1. I want my kids to recognize me.
  2. I want tools that work.
  3. I like sleep.
  4. My Call of Duty Black Ops game needs some work.

Will we all be able to play golf every afternoon because of cloud? Most likely not. Let me know if it happens for you. It will enable us to provide more meaningful impact on the bottom line of our business. If that means I can spend less time pouring over logs to find errors and fixing them and more time improving the delivery and impact of our applications, I am sold. What I seek is less time fighting fires and more time creating value. I see that EMC is aiming (and currently delivers) to provide tools to make this happen. This will be done with tools to help automate, manage and supply self-service IT.

It has been a good few months learning. Soon I will have a few more posts about the last few months.

Coming Soon:

Everyone has a Shiny Thing

EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) is really cool.

You Care about Business Impact

A Team Makes a Difference

No clever title – ESXCLI

I have been missing in action for a few weeks. It is time to catch up for all the lost time. One topic I feel many people don’t know too much about is esxcli. I know how to do what I usually do with esxcli. There is a lot more there for us to explore.

First stop and take a look at the virtuallyGhetto article.

It can be run from the Service Console, the ESXi Tech Support Mode command line, or from the vMA. As William points out if you are running these command from the vMA you need to authenticate individually to each host. He goes on to list some articles that go over the most used case of esxcli, swiscsi.

A couple of quick examples I like to use:

esxcli nmp device setpolicy –device naa.6090a07800c2ea66b8c114050000c00d –psp VMW_PSP_RR

This command changes the policy for a storage device to another path selection policy. In this case it is Round Robin. This is great for when you are rebuilding ESX and the storage is already zoned. ESX will add the storage with the default PSP and changing a few dozen datastores on each host one at a time via the GUI can be VERY tedious.

Then how do I change the default PSP?

esxcli nmp satp setdefaultpsp –psp VMW_PSP_RR –satp VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA

This can be modified for different array types after the “—satp” tag or different path policies after the “–psp” tag.

For the VCAP-DCA4 exam I am studying for I wonder how much deeper than this they will go? I would feel most Data Center Administrators need to set up swisci settings and possibly change path policies. Anything I am missing? If you check out Duncan’s article here it will be great to know how to list what is available.

VCAP-DCA Study

I found over the years that I don’t really know something until I can teach it to someone else.

I plan on writing some new posts inspired by the VCAP-DCA blue print.

Here is some good resources based on the VCAP-DCA

Most of my old VCDX study notes are based on the VCDX3 path.

http://www.simonlong.co.uk/blog/vcdx-study-notes/

http://professionalvmware.com/brownbags/

http://www.seancrookston.com/2011/02/02/the-vcap-dca-study-guide-lives-on/

http://www.seancrookston.com/vcap-dca/ (more links here)

 

Any resources I am missing?

Putting the Truck in Reverse Review of 2010

I had to come up with a super cheesy line for the title. Maybe this post will be a little different than the other reviews of the past year. I am always just trying to be funny and in my own mind I am. I won’t list the number of views to my site (because my numbers are small compared to some) but I did double my viewers from 2009. I won’t write the Christmas letter of changes during the year, mainly because my big Virtualization/Storage industry change won’t come until 2011. This last year was a banner year though. I wrote 46 new blog posts this year. Almost one a week, which was my goal.

My Favorite Posts of the Year

You might be a vDiva if…
Hope this one doesn’t get me in trouble at the new job.

iSCSI Connections on EqualLogic PS Series
This was fun to work on and it is a popular post.

The Mini ESXi 4 Portable Server
This was a great post to put together. This little server is a lot like my R2D2 now. That droid and I have been through a lot together. The box I carry it in from customer to customer is looking pretty worn. It has been an awesome time saver on the roll outs we do. I am going to miss this little machine so much I will probably build a new one soon.

 

Even better I met some really cool people this year between Partner Exchange in Las Vegas and VMworld in San Francisco and of course all the awesome customers I met during the year.

Making Changes

It is not catchy or a creative title. It does however communicate exactly what I need to say. Things for me are going to change in a good way. It has been a very chaotic final three months of the year. Without going into every personal detail emotions have swung from really high and great to very low and difficult. It is awkward for me to kind of share the personal parts of my life.

The topics of this blog have always been driven by what I am working on and learning. I am certain in the next few months and years I will be learning lots of new topics. Soon I will be joining EMC as a Senior vSpecialist. I will still be based out of the Atlanta area and I am excited to see what will come in the future.

Additionally, I want to say something about VeriStor. The people at VeriStor became more than co-workers and bosses. They are like friends and family and it is very hard to leave them. Luckily they won’t be too far away. The work of implementing virtualization solutions is something I enjoy tremendously and I could be doing for many more years. My time at VeriStor opened up worlds of opportunity for my family and me. This opportunity at EMC though is a chance to move into a role that will challenge me in new and exciting ways.

Hopefully over the next few months I will share the journey of becoming a vSpecialist and all the new things it will bring.

Wyse PocketCloud on iPad

I have run the Wyse Pocket Cloud application on my iPad almost since I purchased the iPad last spring. I must admit though, I couldn’t really use it on a regular basis. One, my main workstation at work is a Mac. Two, I just didn’t have the pressing need to use windows from my iPad. So I saw that the application updated a week or so ago and decided to try it out to check things on my home PC when I am not sitting in my home office. I first noticed that the Wyse PocketCloud Windows Companion can now login using your gmail or Google Apps account to connect you straight to any PC that is running the agent. Reminds me more of how LogMeIn worked but using authentication I already have available.

It worked great.

First I had to turn on Remote Desktop in Windows 7. I had to use the “less secure” option to make it work.

Next install the Wyse PocketCloud Assistant agent on the PC. The software can be found here. Once it is installed notice the new system tray icon.

 

After the application is signed in with Google sign in the same credentials from the Wyse App on the iPad.

 

Before I knew it I was into my personal Windows 7 desktop from my iPad. You can tell when I logged in I still had my Google Chrome browser open to the download for the Wyse PocketCloud Companion.