Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

Call to action: Register for VMworld 2020!

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Call to action: Register for VMworld 2020!By now everyone has probably heard that VMworld is a virtual event this year. I am looking forward to it, as it means many people who were never able to “attend” VMworld sessions, can now attend/watch/learn! This year we have a 2-day event, which is taking the “follow the sun” approach with content scheduled across all timezones, and of course, there will be the option to watch recordings as well.

I am currently preparing my sessions, I have two sessions scheduled. The two sessions I have scheduled currently are:

    • vSAN 7.0: A Platform for both Virtual Machine and Containerized Workloads [HCI1814] – Duncan Epping & Cormac Hogan
    • Change Begins at the End of Your Comfort Zone: My Take 3 Journey [ETPD1043] – Duncan Epping

I want to point out that the event is free to attend for everyone, but for those who would like to have access guided hands-on-labs, 1:1’s with experts, roundtable discussions, and much more, there is a paid pass of $ 299,- available as well. There’s only a limited number of the passes available, so if you are interested make sure to register for that asap. More detail on this is available here.

Last, but not least, this year you can filter on “distinguished” speakers. These are the speakers who spoke at two consecutive VMworld events in a row, had more than 150 people at their session, and scored a 4.2 out of 5 or higher. It is a list of 61 speakers, and I am honored to be part of it. I would highly recommend the content that will be presented by these speakers, as satisfaction is (almost) guaranteed!

I hope to see you all (online) at VMworld 2020!

Fundraising for Kidspire Vietnam to enable chromebook refreshes for orphanages in Vietnam, please help!

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On the first of July, I reached my 12-year milestone with VMware. Looking back I think one of my most memorable experiences was my trip to Vietnam to help setup computer classrooms for various orphanages. When reaching the 12-year milestone each VMware employee gets a substantial amount to donate to a charity of choice. I decided to donate to Kidspire Vietnam as I know there are various classrooms that are up for a hardware refresh since I visited. With my milestone donation, and a personal donation, I have been able to provide sufficient funds to enable Kidspire Vietnam to refresh a single full classroom (15 Chromebooks) in one orphanage.

With this fundraiser, I am hoping to enable Kidspire Vietnam to refresh at least one more additional classroom in one of the orphanages they support. The cost of a refresh is between 3500 USD and 4000 USD. Hopefully, we will be able to reach this goal, but to be honest, Kidspire can use all the help they can get! Believe me when I say that nothing beats seeing how much these kids enjoy learning new technology, and are able to interact with people (and distant family) over the internet, these technology classes makes them feel they matter.

I would like to thank everyone for donating, or considering to donate. Any amount you can spare is appreciated, but is does seem GoFundMe has a 5 USD minimum unfortunately. If you are a VMware employee, I would like to ask you to consider to donate via our VMware Foundation Portal (login first!!) so that your donation is matched by VMware automatically! Note that all donations will go directly to Kidspire Vietnam, I do not hold the funds, the fundraiser is created in such a way that all proceeds will go directly to where they belong.

Thanks,

Duncan

Upgrading to vSphere 7.0b and not sure what the 7.0bs image is?

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Are you upgrading to vSphere 7.0b and not sure what the difference is between 7.0b and 7.0bs? Well that isn’t strange, I had the same problem. I asked around internally and after a bunch of email exchanges, I was informed that the vSphere 7.0bs image is “security updates only”. After I brought it up the team has since quickly modified the release notes to include the following:

Name and Version Release Date Category Detail
ESXi 7.0b – 16324942 06/16/2020 Enhancement Security and Bugfix image
ESXi 7.0bs – 16321839 06/16/2020 Enhancement Security only image

Like I said on twitter if you didn’t know, now you know!

VCG Notification demo and Changing the Default vSAN Policy Demo

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I created two youtube video last week which I just wanted to share with everyone. In these demo’s I am showing the new VCG Notification option. The VCG Notification option is very useful for customers who want to be notified via email when a change to a component of a ready node configuration has occurred. This could be a change in support, change of driver / firmware etc.

Another demo that I recorded was around how to change the default policy for a vSAN Cluster. This seems to be an option that many folks haven’t been able to find in the UI. It is pretty straight forward, hence I am sharing it here.

 

Running ESXi in “Degraded Mode”, what does that mean?

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I received a question today, and I didn’t have the answer so I reached out to one of the developers.  This person found this line in the ESXi documentation where it states the following, and the question was what does running ESXi in degrade mode actually means, or what is the impact?

If a local disk cannot be found, then ESXi 7.0 operates in degraded mode where certain functionality is disabled and the /scratch partition is on the RAM disk, linked to /tmp. You can reconfigure /scratch to use a separate disk or LUN. For best performance and memory optimization, do not run ESXi in degraded mode.

In other words “degrade mode” is a situation where you are running ESXi with a boot disk configuration which is undesired. In this case, the boot disk configuration (size, etc) results in the fact that /scratch is not stored on persistent media, but rather in RAM, which means that state is lost during a reboot. This could lead to various problems, hence it called degraded mode or state. Note that although you are now running in “degraded” mode, it could easily prevent you from upgrading potentially in the future.

So how do you resolve this problem? Follow the recommendations VMware provides for the ESXi configuration:

  • An 8 GB USB or SD and an additional 32 GB local disk. The ESXi boot partitions reside on the USB or SD and the ESX-OSData volume resides on the local disk.
  • A local disk with a minimum of 32 GB. The disk contains the boot partitions and ESX-OSData volume.
  • A local disk of 142 GB or larger. The disk contains the boot partitions, ESX-OSData volume, and VMFS datastore.

Although not a requirement, I would urge to read and follow the next sections from the documentation:

  • Although an 8 GB USB or SD device is sufficient for a minimal installation, you should use a larger device. The additional space is used for an expanded core dump file and the extra flash cells of a high-quality USB flash drive can prolong the life of the boot media. Use a 32 GB or larger high-quality USB flash drive.
  • If you install ESXi on M.2 or other non-USB low-end flash media, delete the VMFS datastore on the device immediately after installation.

If you want to mitigate the situation after upgrading to ESXi 7.0 you can add a new local disk and enable “autoPartition=TRUE” and reboot. At reboot, the disk will be partitioned and populated for usage. The use of this advanced setting, and others which relate to ESXi 7.0, are described in this KB article here.

For those wondering, “ESXi-OSData” is the partition where we now store the content of what was previously stored in “scratch”, “core”, and “locker”. Niels wrote a deep-dive on the vSphere blog here, go check that out.