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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:

I want my kids to recognize me.
I want tools that work.
I like sleep.
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.

Trunks – Dell Power Connect and Cisco

I recently needed to install a stack of Dell 6224 Power Connect switches. The core of the network was actually a Cisco 3560 (no G). While there are already posts existing from Scott Lowe about using the “General” mode to keep VLAN 1 untagged and also have other VLAN’s tagged. Dell’s General mode traditionally works just like a default dot1q trunk in Cisco. However when VLAN 1 is in use I secretly grumble because I know the fact that Dell’s general mode is finicky when interoperating with some devices. Most of the time general mode works like a charm but not on this day.

Dell’s “trunk” mode worked fine. Any tagged VLAN would pass fine to the Cisco. Except that pesky native VLAN 1. We HAD to have VLAN 1 passed down to the ESX servers. So after kicking around wondering what I did wrong I decided to just work around the problem. I tagged vlan 1 on the Dell port and changed the native vlan on that specific trunk on the Cisco to another vlan (not being used on the Dell). BAM it worked.

Note: Dell was running their newest firmware on that day – 3.2.0.9 (they have since released 3.2.0.10)
Note 2: I am all about auto-negotiation at Gigabit but still like 100Mbps switch links to be hard coded.

Cisco 3560 (no G).

interface FastEthernet 0/24
speed 100
duplex Full
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport trunk allowed vlan 1,10,11
swtichport trunk native vlan 8
switchport mode trunk

Dell 6224

interface Ethernet 1/g24
no negotiation
speed 100
duplex full
switchport mode trunk
switchport trunk allowed vlan add 1,10,11

Dynamic Cluster Pooling

Dynamic Cluster Pooling is an idea that Kevin Miller ( @captainstorage) and I came up with one day while we were just rapping out some ideas on the whiteboard. It is an incomplete idea, but may have the beginnings of something useful. The idea is that clusters can be dynamically sized depending on expected workload. Today a VMware Cluster is sized based on capacity estimates from something like VMware Capacity Planner. The problem is this method requires you apply a workload profile across all time periods or situations. What if only a couple days of the month require the full capacity of a cluster. Could those resources be used elsewhere the rest of the month?

Example Situation
Imagine a scenario with a Virtual Infrastructure with multiple clusters. Cluster “Gold” has 8 hosts. Cluster “Bronze” has 8 hosts. Gold is going to require additionally resources on the last day of the month to process reports from a database (or something like that). In order to provide additional resources to Gold we will take an ESX host away from the Bronze cluster. This allows us to deploy additional Virtual Machines to crunch through the process or allow less contention for the existing machines.

You don’t have to be a powercli guru to figure out how to vMotion all the machines off of a ESX host and place it in maintenance mode. Once the host is in maintenance mode it can be moved to the new cluster, removed from maintenance mode and VM’s can be redistributed by DRS.

Sample Code more to prove the concept:
#Connect to the vCenter Connect-VIServer [vcenterserver] #indentify the host, you should pass the host or hosts you want to vacate into a variable Get-Cluster Cluster-Bronze | get-vmhost


#Find the least loaded host(skipping for now)
#Vmotion the machines to somewhere else in that cluster

Get-VMHost lab1.domain.local | Get-VM| Move-VM -Destination [some other host in the bronze cluster]
#Move the host

Set-VMHost lab1.domain.local -State Maintenance

Move-VMHost lab1.domain.local -Destination Cluster-Gold

Set-VMHost lab1.domain.local -State Connected

#Rebalance VM's Get-DrsRecommendation -Cluster Cluster-Gold | Apply-DrsRecommendation

I was able to manually make this happen in our lab. Maybe if this sparks any interest someone that is good with “the code” can make this awesome.

Storage Caching vs Tiering Part 2

Recently I had the privilege of being a Tech Field Day Delegate. Tech Field Day is organized by Gestalt IT. If you want more detail on Tech Field Day visit right here. In interest of full disclosure the vendors we visit sponsor the event. The delegates are under no obligation to review good or bad the sponsoring companies.

After jumping in with a post last week on tierless caching I wanted to jump in with my thoughts on a second Tech Field Day vendor. Avere presented a very interesting and technical presentation. I appreciated being engaged on an engineering level and not a marketing pitch.

Avere tiers everything. It is essentially a scale out NAS solution (they called it a FXT Appliance) that can front end any existing NFS. Described to me by someone else as file acceleration. The Avere NAS stores data internally on a cluster of NAS units. The “paranoia meter” lets you set how often the mass storage device is updated. If you need more availability or speed you add Avere devices. If you need more disk space you add to your mass storage. In their benchmarking tests they basically used some drives connected to a CentOS machine running NFS front-ended by Avere’s NAS units. They were able to get the required IOPS at a fraction of the cost of NetApp or EMC.

The Avere Systems blog provides some good questions on Tiering.

The really good part of the presentation is how they write between the tiers. Everything is optimized for that particular type of media, SSD, SAS or SATA.
When I asked about NetApp’s statements about tiering (funny they were on the same day). Ron Bianchini responded, “that when you sell hammers, everything is a nail.” I believe him.

So how do we move past all the marketing speak to get down to the truth when it comes to Caching and Tiering. I am leaning toward thinking of any location where data lives for any period of time as a tier. I think a cache is a tier. Really fast cache for reads and writes is for sure a tier. Different kinds of disks are tiers. So I would say everyone has tiers. The value comes in when the storage vendor innovates and automates the movement and management of that data.

My questions/comments about Avere.

1. Slick technology. I would like to see it work in the enterprise over time. People might be scared because it is not one of the “big names”.
2. Having came from Spinnaker. Is the plan to go long term with Avere, or build something to be purchased by a big guy?
3. I would like to see how the methods used by the Avere FXT appliance can be applied to block storage. Plenty of slow inexpensive iSCSI products that would benefit from a device like this on the front end.