Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Various

Cool tool update: RVTool 4.0.4 released

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Probably one of the most downloaded tools ever, just released a new version: RVTools 4.0.4. Rob emailed me over the weekend, that this new version was just released and he also mentioned that he has reached over 1.2 million downloads. 1.2 million indeed! Crazy number, especially knowing how many customers VMware has today. Congratulations Rob! Anyway, RVTools 4.0.4 was just released, what is in it?

Version 4.0.4 (May 1, 2020)

  • Upgraded RVTools solution to use VMware vSphere Management SDK 7.0
  • Upgraded RVTools solution to use CIS REST API, available since vSphere 6.5, to get tag information
  • vInfo tab page new columns: Virtual machine tags and min Required EVC Mode Key
  • vCPU tab page new columns: Virtual machine tags
  • vMemory tab page new columns: Virtual machine tags and Memory Reservation Locked To Max
  • vDisk tab page new columns: Virtual machine tags
  • vPartition tab page new columns: Virtual machine tags
  • vCD tab page new columns: Virtual machine tags
  • vFloppy tab page new columns: Virtual machine tags
  • vNetwork tab page new columns: Virtual machine tags
  • vSnapshot tab page new columns: Virtual machine tags
  • vTools tab page new columns: Virtual machine tags
  • vRP tab page new columns: Resource Pool tags and object ID
  • vCluster tab page new columns: Cluster tags, custom attributes and object ID
  • vHost tab page new columns: Host tags, in Maintenance Mode and in Quarantine Mode
  • dvSwitch tab page new columns: Distributed VirtualSwitch tags, custom attributes and object ID
  • dvPort tab page new columns: Distributed VirtualSwitch Port Group tags and object ID
  • vDatastore tab page new columns: Datastore tags, custom attributes and object ID
  • Preference extra checkbox for “Exclude tags”
  • CLI new parameter -ExcludeTags
  • Bug fix: removed column “Config Checksum” from vInfo tab page.
    This Base64Binary field was sometimes the cause for a XML deserialize error!
  • Bug fix: not all snapshots from all snapshot siblings where displayed
  • Bug fix: preference setting “Exclude Annotation fields” value was overwritten.
  • Bug fix: Name on vRP tab page was full path
  • Bug fix: In example RVToolsBatchMultipleVCs.ps1 script parameters changed for RVToolsMergeExcelFiles.exe
  • Bug fix: vSphere 7, “Unhandled exception: Input string was not in a correct format.”
  • Known issue: Tags are only visible when logged on with userid/password. It’s not working when SSO is used!

You don’t need any brains to listen to music – the grunge edition

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A while ago I did a bunch of posts on the topic of music. I haven’t done a post on this topic in a while, and as I did a podcast with a friend in dutch (you can listen to it here) on the topic of Grunge I figured I would share the songs that were played during the podcast and the stories around these songs with you. Some of you will know this already, but I have always been a big fan of alternative music. Metal, punk, hardcore-pun, metalcore, thrash metal, death metal, etc. I also listen to other styles though, and grunge is one of them. I started listening to grunge around 1989 probably, the very early days and got acquainted with it through this album by Nirvana called Bleach. Grunge back then wasn’t that popular just yet, but it wouldn’t take too long before it took off massively. Surprisingly to many, as grunge is pretty raw and dark, and can also come across chaotic at times.

For this podcast, I was asked to create a list of my five or six favorite songs in a specific genre and preferably from different bands. Which wasn’t too difficult as there are many great grunge bands around. I wanted to share these songs with you as well. I created a simple Spotify playlist with the songs featured in this podcast but I also want to provide the reason I picked these tracks. I also added the Youtube videos after each song below, for those who prefer to watch the videos.

If anyone has any recommended bands or songs, just drop them in the comment section, always interested in expanding my horizon.

The first song is a song by Pearl Jam called State of Love and Trust. Pearl Jam’s album Ten is probably one of my favorite albums from the 90s. That whole album just breaths rock/grunge from start to finish. State of Love and Trust, however, was not on that album, although it does have the same vibe as the songs on Ten. It probably also is my favorite Pearl Jam song. You may wonder why it has the same vibe while it isn’t on the album, well this song was recorded and written during the same timeframe, it just wasn’t released as part of the Ten release but was a song for a movie called Singles. The interesting thing about the track is that there are two versions, and I recommend you to listen to both, there’s one version with drummer Dave Krusen, and one with drummer Dave Abbruzzese. The one by Krusen sounds a bit trashier, while the one by Abbruzzese is a bit faster. Both versions are awesome though. The youtube video below is the live version as there’s no video clip.

The second song on the list is Hunger Strike by Temple of the Dog. Temple of the Dog is formed out of members of various other bands and was started as a tribute to the vocalist of Mother Love Bone who died of an overdose. I love this song because it is a duet between Chris Cornell (Soundgarden) and Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam), but originally it wasn’t intended to be a duet. Eddie Vedder was asked to join during the recordings when Chris Cornell had trouble recording certain parts of the song. It is my favorite song of the album, and it was recently covered by Chris Cornell’s daughter Toni. Watch that version as well if you have some time on your hands…

Next on the list is Heart-Shaped Box by Nirvana. I personally feel that every single grunge playlist needs to have at least one Nirvana track. This is the band that literally introduced grunge to the world. Although there were various bands playing grunge before Nirvana, none of them were as successful as Nirvana was (and still is). This song is from my favorite album called In Utero. The album came out after the hit album Nevermind and probably shocked a lot of people. Instead of the more clean sound that Nevermind had, In Utero was raw, and that is probably also why I really like it.

Whenever Nirvana and Kurt Cobain’s name comes up, the name Courtney Love also comes to mind as she was married to Kurt. Courtney was part (or was) of the band called Hole, and a lot of people at the time felt that Hole was mainly getting attention because of that Nirvana/Cobain connection. I don’t agree with that. If you listen to their album Live Through This, and especially the song Doll Parts, you realize that this is much more than just lifting on the success of Nirvana. The song is about the early days of the relationship between Kurt and Courtney and has that characteristic Hole sound with the distinct sound of Courtney Love’s vocals.

One of the bands I never really was in to was Melvins, well I did listen to them but they simply weren’t my favorite band in this genre. They did however undeniably influence the grunge scene, and many other genres as well. They also released an insane amount of albums so it wasn’t easy to pick a song. I picked a song called Night Goat as it is dark, sludgy, doom, and grunge at the same time. Definitely my favorite Melvins song. It just sounds scary and you simply can’t play it loud enough. The video below is a live version, but the quality is great.

Last but not least is Outshined by Soundgarden. The vocals by Chris Cornell are brilliant on this track, but what stands out most are the lyrics. I think everyone who has heard this song will be able to sing along the famous sentence: “looking California and feeling Minnesota”. It is a shame

I hope you enjoyed the list and some of the backstories.

Inspecting vSAN File Services share objects

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Today I was looking at vSAN File Services a bit more and I had some challenges figuring out the details on the objects associated with a File Share. Somehow I had never noticed this, but fortunately, Cormac pointed it out. In the Virtual Objects section of the UI you have the ability to filter, and it now includes the option to filter for objects associated to File Shares and to Persistent Volumes for containers as well. If you click on the different categories in the top right you will only see those specific objects, which is what the screenshot below points out.

Something really simple, but useful to know. I created a quick youtube video going over it for those who prefer to see it “in action”. Note that at the end of the demo I also show how you can inspect the object using RVC, although it is not a tool I would recommend for most users, it is interesting to see that RVC does identify the object as “VDFS”.

Introducing vSAN File Services as part of vSAN 7.0

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There was a great article by Cormac talking about vSAN File Services published last week. I had some articles planned, but hadn’t started yet, so when I saw the article I figured I would do something different. No point in rehashing what Cormac has already shared right. I figured I would shoot another demo, and do a brief write-up so people know what vSAN File Services is all about. In vSAN/vSphere 7.0 there’s now a new feature, and this is vSAN File Service. vSAN File Services can simply be enabled on a cluster level and provides you NFS 3 and 4.1 capabilities. The great thing about the solution is that you can create file shares and associate policies with the file shares. In other words, you can have a file share with RAID-1, RAID-5, or maybe even striping or stretched across locations when that is supported.

When you enable File Service, vSAN will deploy a number of “agent VMs” and these VMs/appliances are fully managed by vSAN. These agent VMs run Photon OS and have the file service capabilities enabled through docker/container technology. After these File Service Agent VMs have been deployed, the docker container instances have been instantiated and configured, vSAN File Service will be up and running and available for use. Next, you could simply create a file share and start consuming it. But before I reveal everything, let’s just head over to the demo below. I hope you enjoy it!

NVIDIA rendering issues? Look at the stats!

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I’ve been down in the lab for the last week doing performance testing with virtual reality workloads and streaming these over wifi to an Oculus Quest headset. In order to render the graphics remotely, we leveraged NVIDIA GPU technology (RTX 8000 in my case here in the lab). We have been getting very impressive results, but of course at some point hit a bottleneck. We tried to figure out which part of the stack was causing the problem and started looking at the various NVIDIA stats through nvidia-smi. We figured the bottleneck would be GPU, so we looked at things like GPU utilization, FPS etc. Funny enough this wasn’t really showing a problem.

We then started looking at different angles, and there are two useful commands I would like to share. I am sure the GPU experts will be aware of these, but for those who don’t consider themselves an expert (like myself) it is good to know where to find the right stats. While whiteboarding the solution and the different part of the stacks we realized that GPU utilization wasn’t the problem, neither was the frame buffer size. But somehow we did see FPS (frames per second) drop and we did see encoder latency go up.

First I wanted to understand how many encoding sessions there were actively running. This is very easy to find out by using the following command. The screenshot below shows the output of it.

nvidia-smi encodersessions

As you can see, this shows 3 encoding sessions. One H.264 session and two H.265 sessions. Now note that we have 1 headset connected at this point, but it leads to three sessions. Why? Well, we need a VM to run the application, and the headset has two displays. Which results in three sessions. We can, however, disable the Horizon session using the encoder, that would save some resources, I tested that but the savings were minimal.

I can, of course, also look a bit closer at the encoder utilization. I used the following command for that. Note that I filter for the device I want to inspect which is the “-i <identifier>” part of the below command.

nvidia-smi dmon -i 00000000:3B:00.0

The above command provides the following output, the “enc” column is what was important to me, as that shows the utilization of the encoder. Which with the above 3 sessions was hitting 40% utilization roughly as shown below.

How did I solve the problem of the encoder bottleneck in the end? Well I didn’t, the only way around that is by having a good understanding of your workload and proper capacity planning. Do I need an NVIDIA RTX 6000 or 8000? Or is there a different card with more encoding power like the V100 that makes more sense? Figuring out the cost, performance and the trade-off here is key.

Two more weeks until the end of my Take 3 experience, and what a ride it has been. If you work for VMware and have been with the company for 5 years… Consider doing a Take 3, it is just awesome!