I had an issue with the Docker Swarm subnet automatically generated when I do:
$docker swarm init
Basically it was choosing the subnet my VPN connection was using to assign an IP to my machine on the internal network. Obviously this wreaked havoc on me being able to connect to the docker hosts I was working with in our lab.
I decided it would be worth it to create the docker_gwbridge network and assign the CIDR subnet for the network that would not overlap with the VPN.
I did this before I created the swarm cluster. So far everything is working fine in the lab and I am able to SSH to the Docker Host and connect to the services I am testing on those machines. There may be other issues and I will report back as I find them.
Look for a post about going to In-n-Out some time soon, it is my tradition.
Be sure to check out what we will be doing at VMworld at the end of the month. Click the banner below once you are done being mesmerized by Chappy. Sign up for a 1:1 demo or meeting, I’ll be there are would love to meed with you. See how focused a demo I give.
Sessions to be sure to see featuring the Amazing Cody Hosterman
SDDC9456-SPO: Implementing Self-Service Storage Provisioning with vRealize Automation Xaas
VMware vCenter is no longer meant to be the end-user interface for requesting and managing virtual machines and related resources. Storage is no exception. Join Cody Hosterman as he discusses how vRealize Automation Anything-as-a-Service (Xaas) provides the ability to easily import vRealize Orchestrator workflows to control, manage and provision storage via the self-service catalog offering vRealize Automation.
Wednesday, Aug 31, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
NF9455-SPO: Best Practices for All-Flash Data Reduction Arrays with VMware vSphere
As All-Flash Data Reduction arrays are becoming common place in VMware environments due to their performance, flexibility and ease-of-use, it is important to understand how to best implement and manage them with EXXi. Data-reduction and flash changes how an administrator should think about various configuration options within VMware and those will be discussed in detail. VAAI, Space Reclamation, virtual disks, SIOC, SDRS Queue depths, Multipathing and other points will be highlighted.
So lets say the power goes out and half of the vm’s on your “lab storage that uses local disks” go into an infinite BSOD loop. I was lucky as one of the servers that still worked was a AD Domain Controller with DNS. Since I usually don’t try to fight BSOD’s and just rebuild. I did so. One very helpful page to move the AD roles was this article on seizing the roles. Which I had to do since the server holding the roles was DOA.
You may or may not have heard about Pure Storage and Cisco partnering to provide solutions together to help our current and prospective customers using UCS, Pure Storage, and VMware. These predesigned and tested architectures provide a full solution for compute, network and storage. Read more here:
There are more coming for SQL, Exchange, SAP and general Virtual Machines (I call it JBOVMs, Just a Bunch of VM’s).
Turn-key like solution for compute, network, and storage
Know how much and what to purchase when it comes to compute, network and storage as we have worked with Cisco to validate with actual real workloads. Many times mixed workloads because who runs just SQL or just Active Directory. It is proven and works. Up in running in a couple of days. If a couple of months was not good (legacy way), and then 2-4 weeks (newer way with legacy HW) wasn’t good enough, how about 1-2 days? For reals next generation datacenter. Also, scale compute, network and storage independently. Why buy extra hypervisor licenses when you just need 5 TB of space?
Ability to connect workload from/to the publics clouds (AWS, AZURE)
I don’t think as many people know this as they should, but Rob Barker “Barkz” is awesome. He worked hard to prove out the ability to use Pure FlashArray with Azure compute. Great read and more details here:
No secret here we are working hard to integrate with backup software vendors. Some have been slow and others have been willing to work with our API to make seamless backup and snapshot management integration with Pure and amazing thing.
Just one example of how Commvault is enabling backup to Azure:
Check how easy it is to setup the Commvault and Pure Storage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=af-dxbYYo2g
Ease of storage allocation without the need of a storage specialist
If I have ever talked to you about Pure Storage and I didn’t say how simple it is to use or mention my own customers that are not “Storage Peeps” that manage it quite easily then I failed. Take away my Orange sunglasses.
If you are looking at FlashStack or just now finding out how easy it is now. Remember no Storage Ph.D. required. We even have nearly everything you need to be built into our free vSphere Plugin. Info from my here Cody Hosterman here.
A common question I get from my customers is: Why does vSphere say my data store is full? when the array is 4% used? I usually make a quick explanation of how the VMFS file system has no clue that the block device underneath is actually deduping and compressing the data. So even though you provisioned 1TB of VM’s the Array might only write a fraction of that amount. This can get many different reactions. Anger, disbelief, astonishment and understanding. This post is to visually show that what vSphere is thinking is used on VMFS will not necessarily be reflected the same on a data reducing array (including FlashArray).
When vSphere says I am FULL
Even when the FlashArray says plenty of space
You can tell from my environment testing vRealize Automation and Orchestrator that there is a lot more being “used” in vSphere than is written to the array. In your head start to do the match though. 3.4 times 8.19GB does not equal 169GB. That is because we do not claim thin provisioning as actual data reduction. This includes any set of “zeros”. Space not provisioned to a VM at all, the empty VMFS space AND the empty space provisioned to a VM (lazy or eager zeros) not consumed or written to by the VM. Since my enironment is mostly empty VM’s you can see the Total Reduction is ridiculously high.
Some solutions.
1. Use Thin Provisioned VM’s with Automatic UNMAP in vSphere 6. Read more from Cody Hosterman here. Direct Guest OS Unmap in vSphere 6.
This will give closer accounting of VM provisioned space and space consumed on the array. It is still not aware of the compression and dedupe behind the scenes on the array.
2. vVols provide the storage awareness needed to let VMware know the actual consumption per VM. Come see at the Pure Storage booth at VMworld.
Use the plugin!
At least you can quickly see that the 169.4GB will be reduced by 3.4:1 (for actual written data) all in one screen.
The best just gets better? Pure1 Manage is Pure Storage’s SaaS based management tool for Pure customers. Beside getting tons of health, capacity and performance information you now have some new. It is a pretty hard upgrade process that requires updating VM’s at each site and possibly some consulting services. Just kidding. It is already available, no effort from you required. Just login to pure1.purestorage.com.
Capacity Analytics
You are now able to use the Analytics tab to project out your current growth to determine when your array will be getting towards full. Very nice. Included with your Pure Storage FlashArray. No extra anything to buy. Sweet.
Support
Also, as a bonus, you can see the Support tab now in the Pure 1 Manage screen. This will let you see all open support tickets for each of your arrays. Simplicity wins every time. Keep checking the Pure 1 portal as our team rolls our great new innovations.
Have you registered for Pure Accelerate yet? You should do it right now.
The next great conference where you actually learn about what is pertinent to your passion for IT. Develop insight for what is next, and hear from your peers and industry experts about moving to the next generation of IT.
In 10 years you will tell people, yeah, I was at the very first Pure//Accelerate, I was there before EVERYONE else. You can be the IT hipster all over again. Before it moved to Moscone and had 30,000 people. You can move to Portland and drink IPA’s and post pictures of them to Instagram.
Pretty sure my friend Cody Hosterman has talked about this until he turned blue in the face. Just a point I want to quickly re-iterate here for the record. Run unmap on your vSphere Datastores.
Read this if you are running Pure Storage, but even if you run other arrays (especially all-flash) find a way to do UNMAP on a regular basis:
Previously I blogged about getting PureELK installed with Docker in just a couple of minutes. After setting up your intitial array’s you may ask what is next?
Loading a preconfigured PureELK Dashboard
Click load saved dashboard and select one of the Pure Storage dashboards.
Remember there is a 2nd page page of Dashboards.
Pure Main Dashboard
Top 10 Volumes
Alert Audit
Max vs Average Pure Performance
Pure Space Analysis
Space Top – Bar Charts
Volume List View – Space and Performance
You can see there are several pre-made dashboards that you can take advantage of. What if you wanted to make your own Dashboard.
Create your Own Dashboard
To create your own Dashboard:
1. Click the Plus to Add a Visualization
2. Select a visualization
3. Once you have all of your Visualizations added you can click the Save icon and keep your new Dashboard for later use.
Some tips is you can resize and place the visualization anywhere you like on the dashboard. Just remember to click save. Also, You can can use the powerful seach feature to create tables of useful information that you are looking for.
[UPDATE June 2016: Appears this works with Ubuntu only, maybe a debian flavor. I am hearing RHEL is problematic to get the dependencies working.]
I have blogged in the past about setting up vROPS (vCOPS) and Splunk to monitor a Pure Storage FlashArray using the REST API. Scripts and GETs and PUTs are fun and all but what if there was a simple tool you can install to have your own on site monitoring and analytics of your FlashArrays?
Enter Pure ELK. Some super awesome engineers back in Mountain View wrote this integration for Pure and ELK and packaged it an amazingly easy insatllation and released it on Github! Open Source and ready to go! https://github.com/pureelk
Don’t know Docker? Cool we will install it for you. Don’t know Kibana or elasticsearch? Got you covered. One line in a fresh Ubuntu install (I used Ubuntu but I bet your favorite flavor will suffice).
This will download and install docker, setup all the dependencies for Pure ELK and let you know where to go from your browser to config your FlashArrays.
I had one small snag:
Connecting to the Docker Daemon!
My user was not in the right group to connect to docker the first time. The Docker install when it is not automated actually tells you to add your user to the “docker” group in order to
$sudo usermod -aG docker [username]
Log out and back in that did the trick. If you know a better way for the change to be recognized without logging out let me know in the comments.
I re-ran the install curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pureelk/pureelk/dev/pureelk.sh | bash -s install
In about 4 minutes I was able to hit the management IP and start adding FlashArrays!
Quickly add all your FlashArrays
Click the giant orange PLUS button.
This is great if you have more than one FlashArray. If you only have one it still works. Everyone should have more Flash though right?
Fill in your FlashArray information. You can choose your time-to-live for the metrics and how often to pull data from the FlashArray
Success!
I added a couple of arrays for fun and then clicked “Go to Kibana”
I could have gone to
https://[server ip]:5601
Data Already Collecting
This is just the beginning. The next post I will share some of the pre-packaged dashboards and also some of the cusotmizations you can make in order to visualize all the Data PureELK is pulling from the REST API. Have fun with this free tool. It can be downloaded and setup in less than 10 minutes on a linux machine, 15 minutes if you need to build a new VM.
