My recommended sessions for VMworld Europe 2019!

Duncan Epping · Sep 23, 2019 · Leave a Comment

I created a list of recommended sessions for VMworld US, so I figured I would do the same for VMworld Europe. I am limiting it to 15 sessions for Europe and removed some of the sessions I had listed for the US and added some others for EMEA. I personally have 2 sessions scheduled at the moment, and they filled up rather fast in the US, so make sure to register early: HCI1870BE and HBI2186BE.

Okay, here’s my top 15 list, please note that this is pretty much in random order:

60 Minutes of Non-Uniform Memory Architecture [HBI2278BE] by Frank Denneman
This session got raving reviews in the US, I attended it personally and I can highly recommend it. That is if you think your brain can handle it… it is deep!
PowerCLI Deep Dive [HBI1729BE] by Luc Dekens and Kyle Ruddy
What can I say? These guys speak PowerCLI. They know it inside out, just make sure you are ready to go deep!
VMware Cloud Foundation Deep Dive [HBI2044BE] by Jason Shaw
I am a big fan of full-stack HCI solutions, and in this session, Jason talks about what VMware Cloud Foundation brings to the table.
HCI Management: Current and Future [HCI1207BE] by JunChi Zhang and Christian Dickmann
Every year these guys bring some really cool demos and they expect you to provide feedback at the end of the session. So if you want to have a chance to influence vSAN/vSphere, attend this one!
Project Pacific Technical Overview: Unifying vSphere and Kubernetes [HBI4500BE] by Michael West and Jared Rosoff
There was a lot of buzz surrounding the announcement of Project Pacific. I managed to sit in one or two sessions in the US, and knowing Jared was the lead engineering on this project I suspect that this session may even go deeper than the ones I attended in the US.
The Virtually Speaking Podcast Live: The Future of Storage [HCI1894PE] by Pete Flecha, John Nicholson, and guests
I was a guest on the US in this session, it was a lot of fun. A lively discussion, and great questions from the audience on top of that. Plus, it is amazing to see Pete Flecha do the intro and outro live, I always thought that was pre-recorded!
The Cloud Backbone Network: A Paradigm Shift in Corporate WAN [OCTO1911BE] by Israel Cidon
I have seen a session on this topic by Israel at an internal conference and it was nothing short of mind-blowing. I would highly recommend attending this if you want to learn more about how we could potentially improve corporate WANs in the future by leveraging SD-WAN technology. Mind, this session is foreward looking!
Showcase Keynote: HCI – The Foundation for your Future-proof Infrastructure [HCI3551KE] by Cormac Hogan and John Gilmartin
I presented this session in the US with John, Cormac will be presenting it in Europe with John. I am sure it will be filled with great demos once again, and I will definitely try to attend this one in person
Leveraging the Latest Server Technologies in vSphere [HBI2362BE] by Niels Hagoort
This session wasn’t on my list for the US, but after watching the recording I feel it is worth attending in person! A good overview of what we are doing with the latest HW technologist in vSphere.
vSphere Virtual Volumes: Technical Deep Dive [HBI2853BE] by Jason Massae and Thiruvengada Govinda Thirumal
The adoption of vVols is growing fast, and it is for a good reason. Jason and Thiruvengada will explain in-depth what vVols is and how it works, and of course what the benefits are of adopting it.
Tech Preview of Site Recovery Manager with Virtual Volumes [HCI2894BE] by Stefan Tsonev and Velina Krasteva
The tech preview of SRM for vVols has been discussed various times, but in this session by Stefan and Velina it is also demonstrated. So if you are interested in disaster recovery solutions in combination with vVols then this is one to attend!
Meet the [ML] Driver of the Self-Driving Datacenter [MLA1904BE] by Jad El-Zein and Arun Annavarapu
At VMworld US Project Magna was unveiled, VMware’s effort to deliver the self-driving datacenter. A very interesting concept, which is explained in this session by Jad and Arun. I’ve seen some of the work, and it has a lot of potential, highly recommend attending this session!
Technical Deep Dive on Cloud Native Storage 1.0 [HCI2763BE] by Cormac Hogan and Myles Gray
Cormac and Myles are the Cloud Native experts in our business unit, and I can guarantee that this will be a great session filled with cool demos.
Optimizing vSAN for Performance [HCI1757BE] by Paudie ORiordan
If anyone can explain how to optimize vSAN, how to do benchmarking, and what to avoid… it is Paudie. On top of that, he is a great speaker and you can basically ask him anything on the topic of storage. Must see!
Innovations in vMotion: Features, Performance, and Best Practices [HBI1421BE] by Sreekanth Setty and Arunachalam Ramanathan
I watched this session in the US, it provides an excellent overview of the enhancements introduced for vMotion to improve vMotion (and switch over) times. They also talk about some enhancements coming in the near future. Very interesting stuff.

Scheduling opens up tomorrow (24th of September), so make sure to hit the portal early. I guarantee that many of the sessions above will be full in a matter of days. So don’t say I did not warn you in advance!

Capacity Overview in vSAN 6.7 U3

Duncan Epping · Sep 20, 2019 · Leave a Comment

I just wanted to do a short post before the weekend, in vSAN 6.7 U3 there’s a great capacity overview screen. It shows a couple of things, first of all, it provides a simple bar that shows “data written”, “reserved space” and “free space”. The second section provides you the ability to figure out what happens to your capacity consumption if you would change the policy on all VMs. The third section gives you a nice breakdown of the capacity per category and a great circular diagram which shows immediately what kind of data is consuming your capacity. Very useful!

Can you move a vSAN Stretched Cluster to a different vCenter Server?

Duncan Epping · Sep 17, 2019 · 1 Comment

I noticed a question today on one of our internal social platforms, the question was if you can move a vSAN Stretched Cluster to a different vCenter Server. I can be short, I tested it and the answer is yes! How do you do it? Well, we have a great KB that actually documents the process for a normal vSAN Cluster and the same applies to a stretched cluster. When you add the hosts to your new vCenter Server and into your newly created cluster it will pull in the fault domain details (stretched cluster configuration details) from the hosts itself, so when you go to the UI the Fault Domains will pop up again, as shown in the screenshot below.

What did I do? Well in short, but please use the KB for the exact steps:

Powered off all VMs
Placed the hosts into maintenance mode (do not forget about the Witness!)
Disconnected all hosts from the old vCenter Server, again, do not forget about the witness
Removed the hosts from the inventory
Connected the Witness to the new vCenter Server
Created a new Cluster object on the new vCenter Server
Added the stretched cluster hosts to the new cluster on the new vCenter Server
Took the Witness out of Maintenance Mode first
Took the other hosts out of maintenance

That was it, pretty straight forward. Of course, you will need to make sure you have the storage policies in both locations, and you will also need to do some extra work if you use a VDS. Nevertheless, it works pretty much straight-forward and as you would expect it to work!

VMworld Reveals: VMware Cloud Foundation (#HBI1432BUR)

Duncan Epping · Sep 11, 2019 · Leave a Comment

At VMworld, various cool new technologies were previewed. In this series of articles, I will write about some of those previewed technologies. Unfortunately, I can’t cover them all as there are simply too many. This article is about VMware Cloud Foundation, which was session HBI1432BUR. For those who want to see the session, you can find it here. This session was presented by Mark Chuang and Jayanta K Dey. Please note that this is a summary of a session which is discussing the technology direction of the products, the discussed features may never be released, and this direction does not represent a commitment of any kind, and is subject to change. Now let’s dive into it, what is happening in the VMware Cloud Foundation space?

Jayanta kicked off with an introduction, and I believe most of you understand why we need to simplify IT, and if not, it is all about optimizing cost and improving speed/agility/time to market. This can only be achieved when you have a platform that caters for this, or basically a platform that enables you to focus on delivering services which are valuable to the business instead of focussing on the underlying infrastructure. This is where VMware Cloud Foundation comes in to play. It is a consistent and prescriptive full-stack hyperconverged infrastructure which can run any application.

VMworld Reveals: Armed and Ready (ESXi on ARM, #OCTO2944BU)

Duncan Epping · Sep 9, 2019 · 4 Comments

At VMworld, various cool new technologies were previewed. In this series of articles, I will write about some of those previewed technologies. Unfortunately, I can’t cover them all as there are simply too many. This article is about ESXi on ARM, which was session OCTO2944BU. For those who want to see the session, you can find it here. This session was presented by Andrei Warkentin and Daniel Beveridge. Please note that this is a summary of a session which is discussing a tech preview, these features may never be released, and this preview does not represent a commitment of any kind, and this feature (or it’s functionality) is subject to change. Now let’s dive into it, what is VMware doing with ARM?

First of all, what caught my interest in this session was the fact that Hivecell was mentioned. Hivecell is a rather unique solution which allows you to stack ARM hosts. What is unique about that? Well when I say stack, I mean stack in the physical sense. The interesting part here is that only the first node will need to have power and networking cables, and the rest will receive power and networking through a magnetic link. William wrote about it extensively, so go here to read more about these guys. Really cool solution if you ask me.

The session started with an intro to ARM and the various use cases. I wrote about that extensively when Chris Wolf and Daniel discussed that at VMworld 2018. So I am not going to reiterate that either, just click the link to figure out why ARM could be interesting. What was new in this session then compared to last year? Well they showed a couple of things which I have not seen shown in public before.

First thing that was discussed was the fact that VMware is looking to support the AWS ARM instances (A1 instance) which were introduced a while ago. The plan is to not only support ARM, but also support Elastic Network Interfaces(ENI) and Elastic Block Storage(EBS). All of it managed through vCenter Server of course. VMware is now looking for early validation customers and partners.