Virtual Storage Integrator – VSI 5.5

Actually using the Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) from EMC will simplify the complex environments used to create virtual data centers and private clouds. Wanted to bring to your attention some of the new features in the VSI

What is new?

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A little deeper

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Demo from my good friend Itzik Reich @itzikr

Itzik shows off how to use the Recoverpoint Point in Time with VMware SRM and the VSI plugin to recover from a bookmark that is not the latest. Always WAS a problem if you could only restore using SRM to a corrupted point in the data. Now you can choose and SRM will failover to that point in time. Read Iztik’s blog post on RecoverPoint 4.0 – http://itzikr.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/recoverpoint-4-0-finally/

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Restore a VM from a VNX snapshot or RecoverPoint using the VSI plugin. Pretty cool.

Working on the demo for this now. I will post it in a few days.

 

VDI Calculator for VNX

Biggest question around sizing your VDI usually comes down to sizing the storage.

Some of the solutions team created a pretty cool sizing whitepaper a few months back. Which inspired me to create this web based calculator. It is not meant to do everything in the whole world.

Just give a quick and easy VNX setup.

http://vdi.2vcps.com

The source is on GitHub so please have fun with that.

Sample Output:
calc-shot

More on the EMC, Cisco and Citrix 5000 on vSphere CVD (Cisco Validated Design) in 30 minutes

UPDATED May 26 – New links included Mike Brennan’s latest blog going into the testing and details of the CVD – http://blogs.cisco.com/?p=114587

Scaling CVD for XenDesktop and EMC on Cisco <—-NEWEST Version of the paper!!!!

Back a few months ago I shared about the joint reference architecture that was able to boot and login 5000 users in 30 minutes. Using the Cisco UCS running VMware vSphere, with Citrix XenDesktop and an EMC VNX 7500. Cisco and Citrix answer a few questions with Craig Chapman on the joint validated design in this video:

http://youtu.be/Yw0P8J9e_vo

I really like this layout and it usually takes pretty pictures to get me interested. Here is a high level overview of the design.

 

 

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Some of the original CVD links:

CVD Paper – 5000 User VDI with EMC, Cisco, Citrix and VMware
Mike Brennan’s blog about 5000 VDI users

Updated May 2013
Solution Brief from Cisco 4000 Users

Update May 24, 2013 – More links:

Mike Brenner blog on the CVD
Scaling CVD for XenDesktop and EMC on Cisco <—-NEWEST Version of the paper!!!!

 

 

Come to the EMC World HoL -Thats Hands on Labs

It is always exciting to hear a bunch about what is new in Cloud, Big Data, and Information Storage but what if you could actually play with them before taking them back to work?

The EMC World Hands on Labs are here for you! These are Self-Paced labs that should take around 60 minutes.

Lab Hours:

Monday: 11:00AM- 9PM
Tuesday: 7:00AM 6:30PM
Wednesday: 7:00AM 5:00PM
Thursday: 7:00AM 2PM
*Note: Doors close 30 mins before the end of each day

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Available Labs

LAB01 SRM Suite Visualize, Analyze, Optimize
LAB02 VNX with AppSync Lab: Simple Management, Advanced Protection
LAB03 EMC Software Defined Storage (SDS)
LAB04 Atmos Cloud Storage: Mature, Robust and Ready to Rock
LAB05 EMC NetWorker Backup and Recovery for Next Generation Microsoft Environments
LAB06 Flexible and Efficient Backup and Recovery for Microsoft SQL Always-On Availability Groups
using EMC NetWorker
LAB07 Easier and Faster VMware Backup and Recovery with EMC Avamar For the Storage Administrator
LAB08 Automated Backup and Recovery for Your Software Defined Data Center with EMC Avamar
LAB09 Taking Backup and Archiving To New Heights with EMC SourceOne and EMC Data Domain
LAB10 Optimizing Backups for Oracle DBAs with EMC Data Domain and EMC Data Protection Advisor
LAB11 Operational and Disaster Recovery using RecoverPoint
LAB12 Achieving High Availability in SAP environments using VMware ESXi clusters and VPLEX
LAB13 VPLEX Metro with RecoverPoint: 3-site Solution for HighAvailability and Disaster Recovery
LAB14 Introduction to VMAX Cloud Edition
LAB15 Replication for the VMAX Family
LAB16 Performance Analyzer for the VMAX Family
LAB17 Introduction to the VMAX Family
LAB18 Storage Provisioning and Monitoring with EMC Storage Integrator (ESI 2.1)
and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager
LAB19 EMC|Isilon Compliance Mode Cluster Setup, Configuration, and Management Simplicity
LAB20 EMC|Isilon Enterprise Ready with OneFS 7.0 Enhancements
LAB21 RSA Cloud Security and Compliance
LAB22 VMware vSphere Integration with VNX
LAB23 VNX Unisphere Analyzer
LAB24 VNX/VNXe Storage Monitoring & Analytics For Your Business Needs
LAB25 VNX Data Efficiency
LAB26 VNXe Unisphere Administration & Snapshots
LAB27 EMC VSPEX Virtualized Infrastructure for End User Computing
LAB28 Collaborative Big Data Analysis with the Greenplum Unified Analytics Platform
LAB29 Manage Your vCloud Suite Applications with VMware vFabric Application
LAB30 Discover VMware Horizon Workspace
LAB31 Deploy and Operate Your Cloud with the VMware vCloud Suite

As you can see, three is clearly something for everyone. Storage (hey it IS EMC World), Security, Big Data Collaboration, VMware, Horizon, Cloud Suite and VSPEX! All awesome.

Sneak peak

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What a great new addition to the EMC World interface! Everything is on demand and running the very best of VMware, EMC and VCE.

Backend Infrastructure Details

 

The backend infrastructure is run out of our massive Durham data center, with the infrastructure being based on VCE Vblock architecture. *Note: we are also running eight XtremIO bricks to serve up the content.

  • EMC Data Center: Durham North Carolina

  • EMC: Storage (VNX & XtremIO)

  • Cisco: Servers (UCS) & Networking

  • VMware: vSphere 5.1 & vCD

Management & Monitoring Showcase (You KNOW you love Dashboards)

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If you are just amused by blinking lights (I know I am) check out the displays in the HOL showing the backend HOL Cloud infrastructure:

  • EMC SRM Suite:

    • ProSphere

    • Watch4Net

  • EMC XtremIO

  • VMware vCOPS

Finally Win an Apple TV

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I have an Apple TV now I wish I had 2. So do a lab and get entered to win!

My VMworld Session – Enterprise PaaS

If you have a session I missed please put it in the comments are yell at me on twitter.

My submission

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I had 2 other sessions that seemed to be the exact same submissions as a certain VP from EMC, so I stuck with 5351 Enterprise Platform as a Service. – How IT will compete for internal business customers. There was an alternative title to this session and I promise to reveal it if my session gets approved. http://www.vmworld.com and make sure you vote!

SO. MANY. Sessions. Here are a few others I found interesting.

Other Sessions I see as interesting.

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This should be very interesting, two very smart and interesting folks, Wade and Matt. Really looking to see some new faces on stages this year.

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HMA was a customer of mine before I moved to a role in the EMC solutions group. It will be good to hear how they are leveraging cloud in their 80+ facilities.

Cloud Foundry and Puppet

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I am on a Cloud Foundry/PaaS/DevOps/Next-Gen Apps kick as of late.

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Must admit, Jonas rocks. Magnus is pretty cool too. Razor and SDS should prove to be a informative and not boring session.

PaaS Related

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I am extremely interested on how to get from “Here is a VM” to “Here is an API, write some code”

An All New but Very Similar Adventure

The more things stay the same the more they change, or something like that. At the beginning of the month I started a new place within EMC. I am now the VMware/Cloud/SDDC guy for the Solutions Marketing and Enablement team with the EMC Solutions Group. Exciting new and fun things coming especially around content related to the same old theme for me. VMware, Virtualization, Cloud and all the related points, now with a focus on end-to-end solutions that address requests coming from the business. I am working with a pretty awesome team and I am excited to see what we can produce over the next few months.all-the-stuffz

So check back here soon for information on EMC World, All new reference archtectures, whitepapers, webcasts, podcasts and all way to get involved in the overall cloud community and conversation. As always it is my pleasure to take stuff I learn day to day and show it to you all in a way that will help you. Thanks for reading!

awesome

VMware View Stretched Cluster

The last few days I have been considering the best way to stretch a cluster of VMware View resources. After digging and talking to people smarter than me I figured out there is a lot of things to consider and that means lots of ways to solve this. In this first post I want to highlight the first overall solution that was inspired by an actual customer. This design came from one of the fine EMC SE’s and it inspired me to share further. I stole his picture. It is very storage centric (imagine that) so most of what I share will give some detail to the VDI and VMware portion.

VMware View and VNX and Isilon

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Probably more detail then you need. Important things to remember. The VPLEX will keep the Volume in sync across distance at each site. All the benefits of FAST Cache will still be in place for each site.
In this solution each location will have file data redirected to the Isilon for SMB shares. I will use the VMware View pools and entitlements to force users to each side. Group Policy (GPO) or Third Party Persona Management will direct the users to their data. We are active/active in the sense that workloads are live at each site. Active Passive for the File portion as we will only kick users to site B in the event of a planned or unplanned event.
In another post I will discuss what I learned to make it complete non-persistent site to site active active everything. There is some cool stuff coming here.
First I used Resource pools to map to the VMware View Pools I created to. In the picture below the “Dell-Blades” cluster hosts 1-3 are in site A and hosts 3-6 are site B. One problem How to make sure each pool is pinned to each location?

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Create the VM Group and Host Groups first!

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Create the VM Site A and B group first. Then Create the Host Groups. As simple as editing the settings in your cluster and clicking DRS Groups Manager. One gotcha is you have to have hosts and VM’s first before making the groups. This may be an issue you have have not provisioned your View desktops first (I would wait). Just use some dummy VM’s at first to get the rules created.

With the Groups created Create the Rule

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Remember these rules should say “Should run on hosts in group” (big thanks to @VirtualChappy). If you don’t have the rules right failover won’t work in case of a site going away for whatever reason.

Useful Script for setting DRS Host Affinity for all VM’s in a Resource Pool

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This script I located on the community forums from the amazing LucD and at fix from another community user "GotMoo" I love the VMware Community.

What is so cool is I can run this after provisioning all of my desktops to get them in the right DRS VM Group and since usually in VMware View Environments you might create and destroy desktop VM’s regularly this helps a ton.

$vCenterServer = "vcenter.domain.lab"
#authenticating and Connecting to the VC

$CurrentUserName = [Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::getcurrent().name
$cred = Get-Credential $CurrentUserName
Write-Output "Connecting to vCenter. Please stand by..."
Connect-VIServer -Server $vCenterServer -Credential $Cred

 

#Function for updating the Resource VM Groups
function updateDrsVmGroup ($clusterName,$resourcePoolName,$groupVMName){
$cluster = Get-Cluster -Name $clusterName
$spec = New-Object VMware.Vim.ClusterConfigSpecEx
$groupVM = New-Object VMware.Vim.ClusterGroupSpec
#Operation edit will replace the contents of the GroupVMName with the new contents seleced below.
$groupVM.operation = "edit"

$groupVM.Info = New-Object VMware.Vim.ClusterVmGroup
$groupVM.Info.Name = $groupVMName

# Perform your VM selection here. I use resource pools per cluster to identify group members,
# but you could use any method to select your VM's.
get-cluster $clusterName | Get-ResourcePool $resourcePoolName | get-vm | %{
$groupVM.Info.VM += $_.Extensiondata.MoRef
}
$spec.GroupSpec += $groupVM

#Apply the settings to the cluster
$cluster.ExtensionData.ReconfigureComputeResource($spec,$true)
}

# Calling the function. I've found the group names to be case sensitive, so watch for that.
#updateDrsVmGroup ("ClusterName") ("ResourcePool Name") ("DRS VM Groupname")
updateDrsVmGroup ("UCS") ("DesktopsA") ("VM Site A")
updateDrsVmGroup ("UCS") ("DesktopsB") ("VM Site B")
# updateDrsVmGroup ("Cluster_STAGE") ("Group A") ("Group A VMs (Odd)")
# updateDrsVmGroup ("Cluster_STAGE") ("Group B") ("Group B VMs (Even)")
Disconnect-VIServer -Confirm:$False

More to come…

Finally this is a quick look at setting up View to be cross location. Of course other considerations about web load balancers, networking, number of View Connection Managers all need to be decided for your environment. Next post will include some of the stuff I found about keeping the users data live in both sites. Things like Windows DFS (Isilon can be a member), Atmos, VNX replication, and something called Panzura.

Cisco, EMC and Citrix 5000 Users in 30 minutes – Cisco Validated Design

Cisco + EMC + VMware + Citrix goodness.If you are working on deploying XenDesktop on VMware (the best way to do XenDesktop). Check out this article and Cisco Validated Design.

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http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/unified_computing/ucs/UCS_CVDs/citrix_emc_ucs_scaleVDI.pdf
http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/zero-to-5000-citrix-vdi-users-logged-in-and-working-in-just-30-minutes/Give it a read and see how it all works.

If you are like me and looking for where they get “30 minutes” from goto page 11.
“We were able to ramp (log in and start workloads) up to steady state in 30 minutes without pegging the processor, exhausting memory or storage subsystems.”

Build IP Management Server with Ubuntu, GIT and Nmap

Have 25 Vlans in your lab and Storage, Servers, Switches and other equipment all over the place?

Build a good Ubuntu box

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If you need more help on this leave some comments. It is pretty straight forward.
Be sure to select openssh server as a role.
After you login:
Remember to
$sudo apt-get update
$sudo apt-get upgrade
#If you are adventurous
$sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Install VMware Tools (you ARE doing this in a VM right?)

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From your VI Client set the VMware tools install to start, this will insert the disk for VMware Tools, but unfortunately doesn’t automate the install.
$sudo -s
#apt-get install build-essential
#apt-get install
#apt-get install apache2
The last two steps might not be needed but I do them out of habit. They allow the VMware tools to build the Kernel modules needed for VMXNET drivers.#mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cd
#cp /mnt/cd/VMwareTools-8.6.0-425873.tar.gz
#tar xvzf /tmp/VMwareTools-8.6.0-425873.tar.gz
#cd vmware-tools-distrib
#./vmware-install.pl
Now Run through the install of VMware tools.#apt-get install nmap
#apt-get install gitweb
#exit
You want to do some of the next steps as your normal user not root.
$cd ~
$mkdir nmaps
$git init nmaps
$sudo vi /etc/gitweb.conf
Modify the project root var to match your path to you nmaps.
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Now restart apache.
$sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload
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Ok great, the webpage will be up at http://yourhost/gitweb
Now to add your network information:
$nmap -sP 10.10.10.0/25 -oG /pathtoyour/nmapsdirectory/file.map
<update> The above command is to scan a subnet with pings then dump the output to a file.</update>

Nmap – great network scanner, the -sP sets it to “Ping” mode, you don’t need to crawl ports or anything so ping is fine, it will resolve the DNS if that is working.
my example:
$nmap -sP 172.10.0.0/16 -oG /home/lab-admin/nmaps/vlan10.map

For what it is worth a /16 network takes forever. If you know the usable ip’s are a way smaller subset you can specify a range.
$nmap -sP 172.10.0.1-100 -oG /home/lab-admin/nmaps/vlan10.map

Next on the first time you must add the file to the git repository
$cd nmaps
$git add /home/lab-admin/nmaps/vlan10.map
$git commit -m “My Network Maps”

Now we have some content on the gitweb page.

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Click tree to see the files you have added.
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Click on blob to see your IP’s in use.

Let’s automate it with crontab

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As you can see it is fairly easy to get rolling. Before you finish, run the nmap command for each subnet and git add each file to the repository.Now we will tell cron to run the nmap scans on a regular interval and git commit the changes.
$vi ip-scanscript.sh
In this file put each ip scan on its own line. As seen above. Save the changes and exit.
$chmod +x ip-scanscript.sh
$./ip-scanscript.sh
This will create all the files you want in one swoop.
$cd nmaps
$git add *
This will add all the new files in the nmaps directory to the git repository.Edit the script one more time.
$vi ip-scanscript.sh
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By adding the git commit line to the script you can now set this up to automatically run with cron.
$crontab -e
[note]I was having issues with the range line in the screenshot above. Still testing.
[2nd note] change the git commit line to include a ‘-a’ example:
git commit -a -m “My IP Lists”
If you need help with crontab this is where I go when I can’t remember.
http://www.adminschoice.com/crontab-quick-reference
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2011/07/cron-every-5-minutes/
I set mine to run every 4 hours.Hope this is helpful, not much reason to buy a fancy product when this can be up and running so quickly.

More References:
http://gitref.org/basic/