Data on K8s, Containers and more
I will be wearing a different shirt at VMworld this year, but that is not important. What is important is getting to In-n-Out.
Glad to see this year that Tim Oudin is organizing a run over to In-n-Out. I am planning an “afters” trip to In-n-out Monday night. Immediatley following the VMworld welcome reception we will pack folks into a cab and enjoy a Double Double (animal style).
Can’t wait to see you all again in Vegas this year.
Sometimes it seems like you look down and everything has changed. It has been almost 2 months since I blogged. That is unacceptable. I used to always write things that I was learning. I can assure you I leanr something new at work as a vSpecialist everyday.
Now that we can hopefully move past any licesing worries with vSphere 5.
I am exciting that we are now free to talk about:
So much goodness. So much potential for troubleshooting.
One potential issue I have found while installing vCenter 5. Make sure the vCenter server can resolve DNS and do reverse DNS. I thought I would be smart and placed my new vCenter in a new subnet that didn’t have the proper reverse lookup zones created. vCenter warned me during installation and then failed to generate the SSL certs and then the install failed. Just something to look out for.
I decided to wait a few months after everyone else blogged about our team experience during my first quarter at EMC.
First off it is truly an honor to be working with some awesome people at EMC and VCE. You never know what things are going to be like when you start something new. Sure I know such and such from blogs or twitter. I may have even met them in person at VMworld.
What a great team though. I just want to say thank you to the team. It was exciting to see everyone grow through the training. It is great to be somewhere that I don’t catch funny looks for being excited about working with VMware/Storage/Networking/Datacenter.
Thanks team 05.
One of the tasks that always made me crazy when doing deployments was managing multipathing. Starting with vSphere 4.0 most of the storage platforms recommended using the Round Robin policy. At some point we all had to modify the policy for each datastore via the vCenter client. It is like stabbing yourself in the eye with a sewing needle. The other way is to use a script from the cli to change the default policy for each datastore. Much easier but there should be a better way for those that don’t have crazy script capabilities.
Imagine being able to right click on an ESX cluster. Going through a small wizard and then setting all of the policies for each datastore on each host. Also works with Powerpath VE if you have it. Awesomeness. I almost shed tears of joy.
After installing the EMC VSI plugin right click a host (or entire cluster), go to EMC à Set Multipathing Policy…
Use the Wizard to set your preferred NMP (or even Powerpath VE) policy.
Like that everything is set on the host or cluster, all the same way. Thing of beauty.
If you are looking for a big list of sessions to vote for go check out Chad’s post.
As I am juggling about 5 post ideas with zero time to actually finish them. Some people may have forgot this blog exists. Today though I am asking you to go over to VMworld.com and vote for my session #2232 Building the Education Cloud.
This session will have demos AND I promise you will leave with some kind of useful practical knowledge.
Thanks again. Have a great week and remember voting ends Wednesday.
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).
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.
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.
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.
We all have a vision of how the “cloud” will help us. For us technical guys our list may look like this:
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.
A quick note to hopefully publicize a problem I had which I see is discussed in the VMware Community Forums already.
After building a new vCenter Server and Upgrading the vSphere 4.0 databases for vCenter and Update Manager. I noticed I could not scan hosts that were upgraded to 4.1. To be fair, by upgrading I mean rebuilt with a fresh install but with the exact same name and IP addresses. Seems that the process I took to upgrade has some kind of weird effect in the Update Manager Database. The scans fail almost immediately. I searched around the internet and found a couple of posts on the VMware Forums about the subject. One person was able to fix the problem by removing Update Manager and when reinstalling selecting the option to install a new database. I figured I didn’t have anything important in my UM database so I gave it a try and it worked like a champ.
Right now there is not any new patches for vSphere 4.1 but I have some Extension packages that need to be installed (Xsigo HCA Drivers). I wanted to note that I like the ability to upload extensions directly into Update Manager. This is a much cleaner process than loading the patches via the vMA for tracking and change control purposes.
The vSphere Land top 25 is up for vote once again. I am low on the list of bloggers, I just want to get close enough to see the shoes of the guy at #25. Like the picture I took in San Francisco during VMworld, I can barely see the top of the hill. Hey though, very excited to be on the ballot once again. Get on over and vote. Vote for me if you like the blog.
Here are a couple of my top blog posts from the last few months.
1. The mini ESXi 4 Portable Server
2. Storage IO Control An Idea
3. You Might be a vDiva if…
4. Adaptive Queuing in ESX
If you were wondering, “where is the in-n-out?” Here is a handy google map that @trey_anderson created. For the directions follow the link here. Remember 5:30pm Tuesday (today).
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