Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

Event Season has lifted off! #VirtualRoadshow

· · Leave a Comment

It seems that Event Season has lifted off, and the virtual roadshow has really started. I can’t remember a point in time where I had this many events scheduled in a few months. Actually, I think I have more events scheduled in the upcoming 3 months than I had in the previous 12. I guess the whole Corona situation has made people realize that we don’t necessarily need to be in a single room together to share knowledge and discuss interesting situations, architectures, and/or problems. Considering I have many different events planned, I figured I would share the links where you can register for these. If you are a VMUG leader and are interested in hosting a virtual event, feel free to drop me (or Frank Denneman / Cormac Hogan) a note, and we can see how we can fit it in our schedule.

These are the “public” virtual events that are planned right now in a virtual format. There are a few more events that I will be presenting at, but these are mostly invite-only events for VMware TAM customers. Of course, we are also working with various other VMUGs that had events scheduled to see how we can turn it into a successful virtual event, so the above list will be updated in the near future probably.

If you are a member of any of the above VMUG chapters, make sure to register, and I hope to see you at one of those events.

Whitepaper: Running Augmented and Virtual Reality Applications on VMware vSphere using NVIDIA CloudXR

· · Leave a Comment

As many of you know by now, I worked on this project with the VXR team at VMware to try to run Augmented and Virtual Reality Applications on VMware vSphere. The white paper demonstrates that, using VMware vSphere backed by NVIDIA Virtual GPU technology, AR/VR applications can be run on a Windows 10 virtual machine with an NVIDIA vGPU, and streamed to a standalone AR/VR device, such as the Oculus Quest or Vive Focus Plus, using NVIDIA’s CloudXR protocol. It was a very interesting project as we had some real challenges I did not expect. I am not going to reveal the outcome of the project and our findings, you will need to read the white paper for that, it will also give you a good understanding of the use cases around these technologies in my opinion. One thing I can reveal right here though is that these workloads are typically graphic intense. I want to share with you one image which in my opinion explains why this is:

Traditional apps/workloads usually run on a single monitor with a frame rate of 30 frames per second. VR applications are presented in a VR headset. A VR headset has a display for both eyes, that doubles the number of megapixels per second immediately, but these displays also expect 72 frames per second or more typically. This is to avoid motion sickness. All of this is described in-depth in the white paper, of course including our findings around GPU utilization when running VR/AR applications using NVIDIA CloudXR, NVIDIA and VMware vGPU on top of VMware vSphere. I hope you enjoy reading the paper as much as I enjoyed the project!

Go here to sign up for the white paper: https://pathfinder.vmware.com/activity/projectvxr

Running vSphere 6.7 or 6.5 and configured HA APD/PDL responses? Read this…

· · Leave a Comment

If you are running vSphere 6.7 or 6.5 and have not installed 6.7 P02 yet (6.5 P05 is available soon) and you have APD/PDL responses configured within vSphere HA it could be that an issue causes VMs not to be failed over when an APD or PDL occurs. This is a known issue in the release, and P02 or P05 solves this problem. What is the problem? Well, a bug causes VMs which are listed in “VM overrides” to have settings that are not configured to be set to “disabled” instead of “unset”, in specific the APD/PDL setting.

This means that even though you have APD/PDL responses configured on a cluster level, the VM level configuration overrides it as it would be set to “disabled”. It doesn’t matter really why you added them to VM Overrides, could be to configure VM Restart Priority for instance. The frustrating part is that the UI doesn’t show you it is disabled as it looks like it is not configured.

If you can’t install the patch just yet, for whatever reason, but you do have VMs in VM Overrides, make sure to go to VM Overrides and explicitly configure the VMs to have the APD/PDL responses enabled similar to what it is configured to on a cluster level as shown in the screenshots below.

vSphere HA internals: VMCP super aggressive option in vSphere 7

· · 8 Comments

Most of you probably heard about a feature called VMCP aka VM Component Protection. If not, this is the functionality in vSphere HA that enabled you to restart VMs which have been impacted by a PDL (permanent device loss) or APD (all paths down) scenario. (If you have no idea what I am talking about read this article first.)

When you configure the APD response you have four options:

  1. Disable
  2. Issue Event
  3. Power Off / Restart – Conservative
  4. Power Off / Restart – Aggressive

The main difference between Conservative and Aggressive is that if you find yourself in a situation where HA isn’t sure whether a VM can be restarted during an APD scenario it will not power off the VM when using Conservative. If you have it configured as Aggressive it will power off the VM. However, if HA is certain that a VM can’t be powered on it will not power off the VM. Basically it prefers availability of the VM.

As you can imagine, in certain scenarios having a VM running while it is impacted by an “APD” situation makes no sense. The VM has lost access to storage, and you simply may prefer to kill the workload. Why? Well, when it loses access to storage it can’t write to disk. You could find yourself in a situation where a change is acknowledged and you think it is written to disk but it somehow is sitting in a memory cache etc.

If you prefer the VM to be killed, regardless of whether it can be restarted or not, you can enable this via a vSphere HA advanced setting. Now before you implement this, do note that if a cluster-wide APD situation occurs, you could find yourself in the scenario where ALL virtual machines are powered off by HA and not restarted as the resources are not available. Anyway, if you feel this is a requirement, you can configure the following vSphere HA advanced setting in vSphere 7:

das.restartVmsWithoutResourceChecks = true

vSAN 7.0 webinars, sign up!

· · Leave a Comment

There’s a series of webcasts (EMEA timezone, but available for replay as well!) scheduled on the topic of vSAN 7 and VMware Cloud Foundation 4. Topics include things like File Services, Cloud Native Apps, Networking and Security etc. I will present the “vSAN 7.0 What’s New” webinar which is scheduled for June the 23rd, and I will co-present the vSAN File Services webinar with Cormac Hogan which is scheduled for July the 7th. Make sure to sign up here.