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Starting them Young – Learning the vSpecialist Message

My 7 month old and I are learning the vSpecialist message… VDI, App Dev woo woo! She loves the Post-PC era.

Yes, I am not above using my blog to brag on my cute kids.

Someone at VMware…

Someone at VMware is very funny or searching for “more” in life.

From the dialog to reboot a server.

Some Reality for us Infrastructure Peeps or Apps are cool too

Don’t’ you just love double titles?

For many years I have been an infrastructure guy. I really liked how the cables, and processors and Memory and blinking lights worked. Applications were often the necessary evil tolerated so that I can play with cool technology. During my own journey toward learning about the cloud it becomes increasingly important to consider the function of the application. Six years ago me would totally punch me in the face right now. Traitor. J

1 – Don’t get your App messed up in my resource buckets of awesomeness

So the reality check to the Infrastructure geek in me is this: The application teams really think of what you do as the network. That is why when anything is ever wrong it is always “the network’s” fault. What we love to do is getting abstracted more and more. I will still contend that is very important and very hard to do. Whether you are building reference architectures or deploying a converged infrastructure appliance almost no one but us cares. They just want the data to do their jobs. So while we have really great discussions about speeds and feeds, the guy in the picture below just wants the app. From the hypervisor down we need to design with the application in mind or we will risk becoming like that goth dude locked in the server room on IT Crowd.

2 Honey badger don’t care about FCoE

My next post will get into what I have been researching regarding what is out there and hopefully help us (infra. peeps) understand our App/Dev brothers better.

You are probably an Infrastructure person if:

You read this blog.
You work mainly with Virtualization
Storage Admin
Network Admin
You like to make fun of DBA’s

Atlanta vBeers – March 12, 2012

Next week besides the already large numbers of Virtualization and Storage experts in the Atlanta metro there are a few more people coming to town. Don’t really need a better excuse, and with all the people based in Atlanta (we should do this more). Monday March 12, 2012 a #vBeers will be occur at the Taco Mac near the Perimeter mall. Five to 8 or later if you prefer.

Steps to Enjoying vBeers

Leave your sales pitch in the parking lot.
Get a beer or a Coke (in Atlanta it’s Coke)
Come meet new people
Come excited about some tech, Virtualization, Storage, Networking, App/Dev, Cloudy Cloud Cloud.
Share what you know, but also listen. There is so much to learn.

Taco Mac Perimeter
1211 Ashford Crossing, Atlanta, GA 30346
(678) 336-1381 (404) 378-4140 (Mobile)

Extents vs Storage DRS

I was meeting with a customer today and had to stop for a second when they said they were using 10 TB datastores in vSphere 4.1.

At first I was going through my head of maybe NFS? No they are an all block shop. Oh wait yeah, extents. They were using 2 TB -512 byte luns to create a giant Datastore. I asked, why? The answer was simple, “so we only manage one datastore.”

I responded with well check out Storage DRS in vSphere 5! It gives you that one point to manage and automatic placement across multiple datastores. Additionally you actually can find which VM lives where, and use Storage Maintenance mode to do storage related maintenance. Right now they are locked into using extents. If they change their datastores into a Cluster the gain flexibility while not losing the ease of management.

I wanted to use the opportunity to list some information I think about Extents with VMware.

Extents do not equal bad. Just have the right reason to use them, and running out of space is not one.
If you lose one extent you don’t lose everything, unless that one is the first extent.
VMware places blocks on extents in some sort of even fashion. It is not spill and fill. While not really load balancing you don’t kill just one lun at a time.

An extent with a datastore is like a stack of luns. Don’t knock out the bottom block!

Some points about Storage DRS.

Storage DRS places VMDK’s based on IO and Space metrics.
Storage DRS and SRM 5 don’t play nice, last time I checked (2/13/12).
Combine Storage DRS with Storage Policy and you have a really easy way to place and manage VM’s on the storage. Just set the policy and check if it is compliant.

A Storage DRS cluster is multiple datastores appearing as one.

Some links on the topics:

Some more information from VMware on Extents
More on Storage DRS (SDRS)

In conclusion, SDRS may be removing some of the last reasons to use an extent (getting multiple lun performance with single point of management). Add that to being able to have up to 64 TB Datastores with VMFS and using extents will become even rarer than before. Unless you have another reason? Post it in the comments!

CCNA Exam Experience and Happy New Year

IF you have been paying attention to me on twitter the last few days I was whining about studying for the CCNA. Even though I work with switching on a regular basis for the past 5 years there is still lots of little details you forget about when it comes to the intricacies of how a network works. That being said, I don’t normally work on border routers ever anymore. It has probably been 3 years since I configured a router to route, I mostly play with Layer 3 switches for Inter-VLAN activity. I was surprised by how much has changed since I last passed the CCNA in 2006. Some quick non-test question disclosing thoughts.

No Subnetting or Binary math conversions! What? You Say. Yes I was disappointed too.
Normal questions on VTP, VLANs, routing, IP.
Know ACL and EIGRP, no OSPF this time around and almost zero about RIP
Upset by there still being Frame relay questions, I mean come on really? DLCI and Inverse ARP?
Extra IPv6 questions and wireless LAN too. I did not really like prepare for WIFI and IPv6 so I am very glad that didn’t cost me.

I used some online practice tests to fine tune what will be tested. I can’t just memorize answers I need to actually practice the SIMs and Labs. So practice tests for me are perfect for this.

Best of all I can relax over the New Year holiday and not worry about VLANS and network masks and all of that… Have a great 2012 everyone.

A Year Later

Around this time last year I blogged that I was joining EMC as a Sr. vSpecialist. Well that is just what happened and at the beginning of the year I started at EMC. I have been between Georgia and Florida quite a few times sharing with customers about VMware and EMC. It has been great fun and lots of hard work.

Some Highlights:

vSphere 5 was released, always fun to meet with customers and share what is new and how it can help them out.
Demos, showing customers actually what is available to simplify their environments. The Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) is a big one, also View 5, the VNXe VMware provisioning wizard, the Cisco UCS (I even help out my Cisco brothers). This in addition to showing off EMC storage.
Chances to share the wonders and pros and cons of vMSC with VPLEX.
Even more out there for me being the former VMware installation guy, introducing people to Greenplum, Isilon, how “big data” relates to their business, hadoop, vFabric, Springsource, Cloudfoundry
I even wrote a Ruby on Rails app that shows me my twitter status updates(slightly better than Hello World) that runs on Micro CloudFoundry (but not CloudFounry public if you can help I will take it).
Went to EMCworld and VMworld in Las Vegas. Was so busy did not get to see as many people from the community that I wanted. Something that needs to be fixed next year by me.
The Lab
Passed VCP 5
Work with an amazing team of people that get me because they are a lot like me.
Personally we had our third child in August so it has been especially chaotic around this house (probably resulting any many blog ideas getting forgotten long before they reach the web).
Just like her Daddy

All together I am stoked that it seems like there is something to learn everyday and that keeps me very excited. Really looking forward to next year.

My First Big Data

Ok while I was on vacation away from all things virtual last week. Some reason I had some deep thoughts about Big Data. At least deep for me. So this is mostly incoherent rambling, but I want it written down in case it happens.

What I kept coming to is how will data be used in a way that is NOT trying to sell me some XYZ product?

Mostly I think about big data as pulling public (or private) data about me in order to gain some edge to get me to buy the next tablet or phone.

I don’t know much about the entire big data industry, but I thought there must be more, and isn’t just about finding what I think about a brand on the twiiter.

Researchers – create a bunch of data about X. Give us cool graphs on the internet about how X and Y intersect. I feel this is extremely important. The next cures will be created outside a lab and 50 test subjects. Obvious Jon, I bet someone has already said that.

My linked in network

Innovation – can the next big thing be the output of some insane amount of data? How do I create a solution to a problem everyone has but they don’t know about yet? How can it be beyond the Social media craze. Big data is bigger than social networks. The next idea needs crush Google, Apple, Twitter and Facebook. I know there are armies of geniuses at those companies but the next thing will be created by someone we don’t know. Maybe I can use big data to find that person before anyone else?

vSphere Metro Stretched Clusters – Some Info/Links

A lot of questions lately about vSphere Clusters across distance. I really need to learn for myself so I collected some good links.

Make sure you understand what “Only Non-uniform host access configuration is supported” means. Someone correct me if I have this wrong but your device that enables the distributed virtual storage needs to be sure that hosts in site A are writing to their preferred volumes in site A and vice versa in Site B. Probably way over simplifying it.