As some seemed to have taken this too serious:
Thanks to all who took part in the viral video hoax today, the vCommunity Rocks – No vBloggers were harmed in the making of this video
— vS0ciety (@vS0ciety) September 27, 2016
How to make a host win the HA Master Election
On the community forums someone asked if it was possible to influence the HA/FDM master election. (For those who don’t know, FDM is the engineering name for vSphere HA.) Let me state first that I wouldn’t recommend doing this, but there actually is a way to make it very likely a certain host becomes the HA master. In this case this customer wanted to influence the outcome of the election as hosts are distributed across rooms and one host is less likely to fail than others due to power layout etc.
The setting is:
fdm.nodeGoodness
The explanation provided is:
When a master election is held, the FDMs exchange a goodness value, and the FDM with the largest goodness value is elected master. Ties are broken using the host IDs assigned by vCenter Server. This parameter can be used to override the computed goodness value for a given FDM. To force a specific host to be elected master each time an election is held and the host is active, set this option to a large positive value. This option should not be specified at the cluster level.
You can set this by manually editing the following file on the host where you want to increase the chances of winning the election:
/etc/opt/vmware/fdm/fdm.cfg
More details about this can be found in this KB, which also lists many other advanced options.
Running your VSAN witness for a 2 node cluster on a 2 node cluster
A week ago we had a discussion on twitter about a scenario which was talked about at VMworld. The scenario is one where you have two 2-node clusters and for each 2-node cluster the required Witness VM is running on the other. Let me show you what I mean to make it clear:
The Witness VM on Cluster A is the witness for Cluster B, and the Witness VM on Cluster B is the witness for Cluster A. As it stands today this is not a supported configuration out of the box. For ongoing support, it is required that users go through the RPQ process so VMware can validate the design. Please contact your VMware representative for more details.
A knowledge base article should be published on this topic soon, if and when it is published I will update this post and point to it.
Going to VMworld and want to #GiveBack? Buy a shirt!
Joe Baguley pointed me to something cool this week. An intern team in the UK has joined the Million Makers entrepreneurial fundraising challenge and will be selling cool shirts at VMworld of which proceeds will go to the Prince’s Trust.
The Prince’s Trust is a charity in the United Kingdom founded in 1976 by Charles, Prince of Wales to help young people aged 13 to 30 get into jobs, education and training. Many of the young people they help are in, or leaving, care, facing issues such as homelessness or mental health problems, or have been in trouble with the law. Their free programmes give young people the practical and financial support they need to stabilise their lives.
About the challenge, the Million Makers is an entrepreneurial fundraising challenge set by the trust which sees teams of employees from companies across the UK competing to raise at least £10,000 or more over a period of six months. The competition is a learning and development tool proven to build essential business skills and motivate your employees. Teams are invited to pitch their business plan in a Dragons’ Den-style panel of senior business leaders. Presentation skills are put to the test in order to secure £1,500 seed funding from The Prince’s Trust (this has already been secured).
How can you help? Below is the design of the shirt that will be sold through the VMworld store. The cost is going to be 20 Euro and there will only be 120 available at VMworld, so make sure you get one on day 1 as I suspect these will sell out fast, this is how you can GiveBack! I’ve been told that they will also be made available somehow online soon, so for those who are not going to VMworld there will be an option soon to buy one, I will let you folks know where I hear how/where/what. For now, make a mental note and pick one up!
SPBM integration with vRealize Automation
Last week a new vRealize Automation plugin was released. The plugin enables the use of storage policies within vRealize Automation, or as the Solutions Exchange page says:
Integrating storage policy consumption model into vRealize Automation. This integration enables VM-granular control based on the Storage policy based management framework. This solution exposes vSphere VM Storage policies to vRealize Automation service catalog allows the ability to dynamically assign individual VM storage polcies to virtual disks based on their storage requirements characteristics (performance, availability, security, etc).
Pretty neat solution which was shown also during the VMworld keynote. More extensive demos around the capabilities can be viewed below, and more details around the plugin and how to install / use it can be found here.