Installing VMware vSphere 5.5 – Quick Tour

So if you haven’t gone through it in your lab, what is better than getting an idea of how to install vSphere 5.5 with a few screenshots. For the beginners out there I just wanted to walk through the process really quick like.

Boot from the media!

Still looks very familar if you have done this before. Of course if you are so awesome why are you still reading?

Look! It’s vSAN

Is it VSAN, vSAN or Vsan?

I always use password123 – just so it is easy. Just kidding. SRSLY!

By the way a note to VMware: Hitting F11 is not awesome on a Mac. Just hold every key on the bottom left side of the keyboard and hit volume down key for those that have always been mac people and thought F11 is some kind of Air Force project. Actually just FN +F11

Woot! Now you are a pro. Go take the VCP. Oh and study a bunch first.

Now it is time to add it to your vCenter.

Virtual Storage Integrator 5.6 – What’s New

The Virtual Storage Integrator or VSI has been around for a while. Seems every release something new and exciting gets added that customer have asked for. The VSI 5.6 plugin for EMC is the latest version (9/13/2013) of the plugin to help streamline and simplify interactions between the vSphere client and the EMC storage used to support your Virtual Data Center/Private Cloud/Software Defined Data Center.

The VSI plugin can be downloaded for no extra charge if you have a current support.emc.com account (BTW so glad it is not powerlink anymore).

VSI Support and Downloads Page

You may just want to post a question on the EMC Community about the VSI. You can do that here.

Yeah community!

Enough background already what is new in the new version 5.6?

XtremIO Support

Awesome provisioning and visibility for the new all flash array from EMC. Ready now for the people with XtremIO and for the many waiting to get one. Coming soon!

Here is a quick demo of the XtremIO functionality. Select 720p for better viewing.

VPLEX Support

Our data mobility team is super excited about now supporting VPLEX provisioning in the VSI plugin. So now you are able to create the VPLEX datastores straight from the vSphere client. Very cool.
Update 9/23/13 Demo of VPLEX Provisioning with VSI

VMAX Provisioning with Striped Meta

We were all very excited when VMAX provisioning was added to the VSI plugin and now it is able to use the striped meta volume, which is a big deal for some VMAX users. This is an option now and you can select either method when provisioning to the VMAX.

Update 9/19/13 -> a demo from @drewtonnesen

Did you hear there is a new VNX?

The newest versions of the VNX are supported in VSI 5.6 and as you see in the slide the some of the coolest new features of the VNX will be available for use with the new VSI 5.6

I hope you are as excited about the newest release of the plugin. Remember that is supports vSphere 5.5 too!

If you have any questions please leave a comment of better yet start a thread on the community.

EMC Speed2lead in Milan Italy

EMC Speed2Lead Launch

Today in Milan EMC announced a whole new update to many products. So first, why did I get to go to Italy for the launch. Ok, so back up one more step. Thank you EMC Elect program. EMC Elect if you don’t know is the community advocate program for EMC. I am very honored to be picked for 2013 and as part of the press/analyst launch in Milan, Italy I was selected to attend.

On a side note, how freaking awesome is it to get a chance to go to Milan. Yes, it is just 2 days after I got home from VMworld but not sure I could say no to something so cool. Not saying that everyone will get to go on a cool 2 day whirlwind trip, but I really appreciate what EMC community teams are doing to encourage the community.

XtremSW 2.0

First off I want to touch on the version 2.0 of the XtremSW. Most importantly is native support for vCenter features (like vMotion).. I am very excited about not needing a special “work around” for vMotion. Additionally, this read caching ability is able to integrate with the EMC arrays on the back end and help off load read caching from the array’s own cache. Of course EMC has been saying this for a while now but that was limited to VMAX but today some of that is expanding to VNX. At first that expansion will include the management of the XtremSW software from Unisphere on the VNX and selection of the LUN’s accelerated. Just so no one is confused as far as I can tell prefetching and cache coordination is still only on the VMAX.

The Next VNX

Get used to hearing people talking about CPU cores. Taking advantage of all the cores in the Intel processors is a huge deal. When the power is in the software utilizing the CPU fully is extremely important. So while EMC VNX will have more drives and lanes and ports and all that. The software features that really make a difference like FAST, FAST Cache, VAAI will have a bunch more processor horse power to use to help you building internal cloud in the Enterprise and public cloud service offerings (for my SP friends).

but wait there is more…

The main point is all the cool features are in software and the Software Defined craze is going to push the idle CPU we have in everyone’s storage arrays. Much like vSphere does for compute, the software features in the array are going to help abstract control for the environment. Pass operations to the places in the data center that do them best. Things like tiering, snaps, and dedupe are done at the level most efficient for your workload. Provisioning, Policy creation and management will be done in ViPR. Hope it is all starting to make sense now. Let vSphere do what it is good at, let the array do what it is good at and finally automation and policy engines like vCAC and ViPR do the repetitive work.

Look at that, Solutions

If I was able to sit down with you this VMworld I would have told you about our efforts to help EMC become more Solution Centric. Making the solution the focus of the show was a big change but was just up my alley because as a vSpecialist I had to tie all the EMC and VMware pieces together. So I am happy to end this post with a shift from some cool products to some solutions that would actually help you the EMC customer and the EMC partners.

So you may have guessed from the picture of all the new VSPEX reference architectures. Solutions built to help EMC partners deliver proven solutions to our Customers. So make sure your EMC SE and partners share with you more than the new products but rather how they can help solve your business issues. To run the applications the customers of your IT organization use to make a difference for the business. So build-your-own, VSPEX, and Vblock are all great paths to get there and when the customer gets to choose they win.

Hadoop Starter Kit and EMC Solutions Insiders Episode 2

EMC Solutions Insiders is a tool to help enable and educate EMC and Partner field technical pre-sales people.

We were lucky enough to catch up with James Ruddy (@darth_ruddy) with the EMC Office of the CTO.

James created a pretty nice starter kit to help people get up and going with Hadoop on VMware using the new Big Data Extensions and of course the simplest way to attach data nodes with native HDFS on Isilon.

Check out the show page on the EMC Community Network to get more details and links. Additionally you need to go check out the Big Data Blog at EMC.

EMC Solutions Insiders – Episode 1 SDDC

EMC Solutions Insiders is a webcast for EMC SE’s and EMC Partner SE’s. The purpose is to enable the technical field on what is pertinent to our customers.

EMC Solutions Insiders on EMC Community Network

In our first attempt we were able to get an MVP, Aaron Chaisson to talk about the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). Check out the Show page for additional links and information.

If you are an EMC customer (or want to be one) I would love to hear what you think. If you want more information contact your local EMC SE or EMC Partner SE.

Thanks.

VMworld 2013 – In-N-Out Burger Meetup

The annual 2vcps run to In-n-Out burger! This kid from Southern California now living in Atlanta, Georgia needs to get some burgers. So let’s meet up get a Double Double and talk a bit about all the cool things going on at VMworld.

Meetup
Where: at the In-n-out in San Francsico
When: Tuesday 8/27 – 11pm – after the EMC Party – Great way to finish off or begin the rest of the night.
What: Eat Double Double, Fries

At 11pm I will be getting my Double Double, Fries and Chocolate Shake. Nothing like 1200 Calories at 11pm (only 2am EST).

This: I love Google Analytics

I have not really dug into the features of Google Analytics for a long time. I was curious today to see how people were following links through the site and how they got here. I found this report that totally made me geek out.

Highlighted is people coming from twitter. Now the top referral source for any new article on the blog. Very interesting to see the flow of people as the land on a page and move to other linked topics.

Anyways back to work.

UPDATE: OSX on Fusion VM

I won’t fully apolgize for saying I wanted to punch Apple. Mainly, this is made much harder than it needs to be. If this doesn’t make sense read my previous rant about getting the install image for OSX Mountain Lion to run a VM legally and licensed on my Mac Mini purchased with Mountain Lion pre-installed.

In that article I cite an article that ended up having the answer if I would just follow the intructions. Go there I will re-describe here with the steps to getting the image installed in Fusion.

Get the BaseSystem.dmg

First we are going to mount the Apple_Boot Recoery HD. The attach the baseSystem.dmg image as a drive.

From the list we now enter:

>diskutil mount readOnly /dev/disk0s3
and
>hdutil attach "/Volumes/Recovery HD/com.apple.recovery.boot/BaseSystem.dmg"

The result of the hdutil attach command opens this window in finder. This is where I got it all wrong. Instead of following the directions I thought. Well instead of copying everyting in the download and force quiting like the instructions. I will just get the VM to boot from the BaseSystem.dmg. This seemed to be working fine.

On a side note. The BaseSystem.dmg is invisible in finder. From the CLI you can see it and make a copy from the Recovery HD to your main partition. If you want to be able to actually view the file use the command for the CLI:
>chflags nohidden ./BaseSystem.dmg
All this will do is get you this error during the install process with the menacing eyes of the Mountain Lion and the barely QA’d error message saying you didn’t buy Lion. No duh I didn’t buy Lion my mac CAME WITH Mountain Lion. Oh well I digress.

Back to instructions that will actually help you.

Install OSX Mountain Lion

Show All Disks

Use your handy EMC Elect 64GB USB drive

Seriously my 8GB USB was too small the next size up I own is 64GB (thanks @mjbrender)

Now we wait – then Force QUIT

So with a large enough USB drive you click install. The installer will now download 4+GB of installtion files into a InstallESD.dmg image on that USB drive. Now you have to read carefully. You must Force Quit when the installer is finished downloading and ready to reboot. Don’t Reboot. ALT + right click (or two finger’d, whatever). If you just normally quit the app in the dock it will clean itself up and delete the InstallESD.dmg file. Some reported seeing the file in the “Trash” after a normal quit, that just not how I roll. Force that junk!

Now copy that file somewhere else for fusion install.

The USB drive in Finder

In Fusion create a new VM

I am using Fusion 5 so this probably won’t work in previous versions with OSX 10.8
Click Continue without disc.

Choose a disc or disc image…

Now select the InstallESD.dmg image. Now Fusion will detect that you are installing Mac OSX 10.8 and roll on. Amazingly enough now it does not ask for your AppleID to verify the installation was purchased from the App Store.

Install the VMware tools and now you have a happy little OSX VM.

Turning rant back on:
I started messing with this morning and now it is 3:45pm. Thanks for taking a Saturday Apple. Urgh.

This makes me want to punch Apple – OS X in a VM

UPDATE: I found a fix and posted now.

I purchased a Mac Mini.
It has 16 GB of Memory. So why not run a VM for dev purposes. Not so fast my friend, as Lee Corso would say.

The official VMware Fusion KB says use the app you downloaded from the App Store.

So what if I purchased OSX Mountain Lion pre-installed on my mac?
The mac centric forums seem to be no help since those users seem to have no concept of a VM.

I sure won’t buy it twice. Since I already laid down money for it once.

Then I found this article on how to get the image from the recovery partition.
With a few tweeks I was able to boot the VM in Fusion and I though I was home free. Until I was told to enter my Apple ID and quickly rejected since I did not purchase Lion. Not to mention the MOUNTAIN Lion looking at me like, “take that! Punch in the gut straight from Steve Jobs.”

Whatever, time to install Ubuntu Desktop or something.

Serious though if you got this to work somehow please let me know.

EMC and ScaleIO – Give me your flash

So today EMC announced the acquisition of ScaleIO. So before you start talking about Amazon be sure the read the announcement, closely.

Pool your Flash

This is s slide from the release of all the new flash products earlier this year. Remember XtremSW? Well see that grey pooling area? Yeah just imagine how ScaleIO will slide right in.

Now expect to get more details from the smart people like Chad Sakac but I wanted to get the word out about what the target is for ScaleIO. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Some cool stuff I have learned, but this is so new please check other blogs and EMC pages for more detail.

1. Pools internal storage and presents as a block device to the host.
2. Will be used to extend the XtremSF and SW capabilities
3. Is just one part the bigger EMC Software Defined Storage strategy. Think about the other Scale Out type storage products from EMC, like XtremIO and OneFS on Isilon. Now to you can scale out that internal flash and make a big pool. Very cool.