Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Unable to query vSphere health information. Check vSphere Client logs for details.

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After an upgrade from 6.5 U1 to 6.7 U1 a customer received the following error in vCenter: Unable to query vSphere health information. Check vSphere Client logs for details. They looked at the log files but couldn’t get an indication of what was wrong. In this case, it was pretty simple, one of the required services wasn’t started for whatever reason. You can verify this in the vCenter Appliance VAMI (management interface for the appliance), which can be accessed by going to “http://ip-of-vcenter:5480”. When logged in you have to check the Services section, and make sure the VMware Analytics Services is running, as shown in the screenshot below.

Top 25 VMworld US 2019 sessions to attend (or watch online)

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I do this every year, list my favorite 25 VMworld sessions which you definitely should try to attend in person. Or if you are not going, watch online. Most of these sessions are by folks I know, or folks I have seen presenting, or topics which I find interesting for various reasons. Make sure to register for these sessions as soon as possible, as these are the sessions which tend to fill up extremely fast. I also have couple of sessions, 3 to be precise, make sure to register for those as well. You can find them through this link. HCI1870BU is the HA best practices for vSAN customers, HBI2186BU is the vSphere HA and DRS Hybrid Cloud Deep Dive which I will be presenting with Frank, and HCI3551KU is the HCI Keynote.

Now that I got that out of the way, let’s take a stab at my top 25, these are in random order! if your session is not on the list it is not because I think it was not good enough to be on there, it is because there are simply too many awesome sessions to select from. Here we go!

  1. 60 Minutes of Non-Uniform Memory Architecture [HBI2278BU] by Frank Denneman
    I am sure this session will go extremely deep, everything you always wanted to know (and more) about NUMA and vSphere. I don’t think I need to say much more.
  2. A Practitioner’s Guide to vCenter Server Architecture [HBI2227BU] by  Emad Younis and Sandeep Byreddy
    Of course, you don’t need to understand the vCenter Architecture to use vSphere, but we are all geeks, right? So this is probably the perfect session to understand more about the internals, services, modules etc.
  3. HCI Management: Current and Future [HCI1207BU] by Junchi Zhang and Christian Dickmann
    This is a great session where product management and engineering talk (and demo) new HCI management features. It typically contains at least 2-3 cool demos, and I watched the session previous years and it was well worth it.
  4. “If This Then That” for vSphere – The Power of Event-Driven Automation [HCI1379CU] by William Lam and Michael Gasch
    I found the abstract of this session very interesting, event-driven automation is definitely something that should of interest for most of you. And when it happens to have William and Michael speaking, you know you will be in for something good.
  5. Hyperconverged Infrastructure: Present and Future [HCI2733BU] by Vijay Ramachandran
    Another forward-looking session, this one by the VP of Product Management, and a bit more generic than the HCI Management session. Previous editions of this session showcased vSAN Data Protection for instance. So expect insights of what the future holds for vSAN/HCI.
  6. VMware CTO Panel: What’s Over the Horizon? [OCTO2899PU] by Ray O’Farrell, Pere Monclus, Greg Lavender and Christos Karamanolis
    The CTO panel has always been interesting, typically they will start with a discussion about where VMware stands and where VMware is going, followed by audience questions and deep (forward-looking) answers/statements. Very entertaining and worth the time!
  7. The Virtually Speaking Podcast Live: The Future of Storage [HCI1894PU] by Pete Flecha, John Nicholson, and Ken Werneburg
    A VMworld session which at the same time will be a live podcast, by your favorite podcast team. Not only are all three great speakers, I suspect they will have some amazing guests and I suspect it will be very entertaining at the same time.
  8. PowerCLI Deep Dive [HBI1729BU] by Kyle Ruddy and Luc Dekens
    These guys are the PowerCLI guru’s, if you want to get your mind blown and learn more about PowerCLI and automation, then this is the session to attend. I can guarantee that you will walk out with new ideas and knowledge.
  9. vSphere Virtual Volumes: Technical Deep Dive [HBI2853BU] by Jason Massae and Thiruvengada Govindan Thirumal
    Adoption of VVols is going up fast, and there’s a good reason for it. Find out what is so special about VVols and why you should consider it. Jason and Thiruvengada are experts on the topic, and will be able to go deep!
  10. VMware Cloud on AWS: SDDC Availability Deep Dive [HBI1924BU] by Jeremiah Megie and Glenn Sizemore
    VMware Cloud on AWS has some very appealing availability features which you won’t find anywhere else. Want to understand how VMware and AWS are working together to improve your uptime and resource availability? Make sure to attend this one by Glenn and Jeremiah!
  11. Zero to DR in 60 Minutes: VMware Site Recovery DRaaS Technical Deep Dive [HBI1229BU] by Stefan Tsonev and Cato Grace
    One of the use cases for public cloud, of course, is disaster recovery, in this session, Stefan and Cato will do a deep dive on the VMware DR as a Service solution.
  12. Extreme Performance Series
    Yes, I am cheating as this is actually 5 separate sessions, but these are simply a must attend/watch! I’ve learned a lot about vSphere internals over the past years by watching these sessions, they cover things like persistent memory, schedulers, best practices etc.
  13. How GPU-Assisted ML for Medical Research Proved to Be a Force for Good [HBI1546BU] by Niels Hagoort and Johan van Amersfoort
    Very interesting use case explained by Johan and Niels. They will discuss how a vSphere environment is used machine learning and deep learning. Worth attending!
  14. One Storage Platform for Thousands of Cloud Providers [HBI2537PU] by Ari Paul, Rawlinson Rivera, and John Toor
    In this session, they will discuss the availability of S3 compatible object storage in vCloud Director based platforms and the use cases. It will feature Rawlinson from Cohesity and John from Cloudian. Hosted by Ari Paul from VMware.
  15. Core Storage Best Practices: Ensuring Your Storage Is Reliable [HBI2751BU] by Jason Massae and Cody Hosterman
    This session has been in the top VMworld sessions for the past couple of years. Jason and Cody have a wealth of knowledge to share with you on the topic of core storage (VMFS, NFS, VAAI etc)
  16. Optimizing vSAN for Performance [HCI1757BU] by Paudie O’Riordan
    Paudie is one of the most technical guys in our team, if anyone understands vSAN (and performance) inside out it is him. Make sure to attend this one to get a good understanding of how to tweak vSAN to get the best performance out of it.
  17. Showcase Keynote: Hybrid Cloud Architecture – The New Standard from the Data Center [HYB3544KU] by Kit Colbert, Raghu Raghuram and Mark Lohmeyer
    I always enjoy these showcases as they discuss what we have today, but more importantly what is coming in the future. Kit, Raghu and Mark are excellently equipped to bring you up to speed!
  18. vSphere Networking in the Data-Centric Future [HBI2136BU] by Sudhansu Jain and Disha Chopra
    I am not a networking guy, but this sounds very interesting as in this session the future of networking will be discussed. What are the current trends, where is the market moving towards?
  19. Innovations in vMotion: Features, Performance, and Best Practices [HBI1421BU] by Sreekanth Setty and Arunachalam Ramanathan
    vMotion is the most used vSphere feature, and it continues to evolve. Over the years the vMotion innovations/futures session has always been very interesting, and I suspect it will be again this year!
  20. VMware Cloud on Dell EMC: Technical Deep Dive [HBI1975BU] by Mike Hall and Sridevi Ravuri
    This session will provide a deep dive on what was formerly called Project Dimension. A very interesting concept where VMware and Dell will join forces to deliver and manage an SDDC as a Service on premises.
  21. Encrypting VMs on Standalone Hosts: Tech Preview [HBI1947BU] by Mike Foley and Samyuktha Subramanian
    A session title with “tech preview” always has my interest! In this session they will also be discussing very interesting use cases for this potential future feature.
  22. Diversity and Inclusion Tech Panel: You Can Drive Success for Women in Tech [PD2632U] by Jodi Shely
    An interesting topic, and an important topic as well, definitely one I will be attending or watching!
  23. Accelerating Intra-Host PVRDMA Storage Traffic in a Future Dell AMD Server [OCTO2718BU] by Richard Brunner and Shyamkumar Iyer
    I’ve attended various sessions by Richard, and they are always excellent and very deep and typically forward-looking. I know this one will also be, and I am sure they will go deep fast!
  24. Edge Computing Innovations in Office of the CTO and Dell Technologies [EIOT2715BU] by Chris Wolf and Daniel Beveridge
    This session was one of my favorite sessions last year, although the title has slightly changed, I am sure it will be packed with cool demos, industry insights, and futures!
  25. How to Become the Platform Engineer of the Future [PD2248U] by Martijn Baecke and Matthew Steiner
    The last session on this list and I think it is an important one. How do you evolve as an IT practitioner, what kind of opportunities are out there and what types of skills would you need for those opportunities? Martijn and Matt will guide you through a fast evolving IT world.

That was it for now, enjoy the show. (Early bird tickets will end the 21st of June, so get them now!)

Does a vSAN IO Limit impact resync traffic?

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A question just came in, and I figured other people may have the same question so I would share it. The question was if a vSAN IO limit would impact resync traffic or for instance SvMotion? In this case the customer defines limits within each policy to ensure VMs do not interfere with other VMs or excessively uses IO resources. Especially in cloud environments this can be useful, or when running production and test/dev on the same cluster. The concern, of course, was if this limit would impact for instance recovery times after a failure. Because you can imagine that a limit of 50 IOPS would be devastating when a VM (or multiple VMs) need to have objects resynced.

The answer is simple: no, the IO limit specified within a policy does not impact resync traffic (or SvMotion for that matter). It only applies to Guest IO to a VMDK, namespace or swap object. Which means that it is safe to set limits when it comes to recovery times.

Major vSAN Milestone: 20K customers – Celebrating by dropping the price of our book with 50%!

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I haven’t done one of these in a while, and as it is a question that comes up regularly during customer conversations I figured I would share a nice quote from the VMware earnings call. But before I do I want to thank every VMware employee, partner and customer who helped us reaching this major milestone. Sometimes customers ask how invested VMware is in storage, well very invested. Determined to remain the number 1 player in the hyperconverged and hybrid cloud world, and the below numbers show why!

vSAN license bookings grew over 50% year-over-year in Q1 with a total customer count growing to over 20,000. (seekingalpha.com)

Yes, that is 20,000 customers indeed. Actually, more than 20k customers. Which, again, is a great success and would not have been possible without the help from you guys. So to thank all of you Cormac and I have decided to lower the price of our book temporarily. For 1 week, today until Friday the 7th, we have lowered the price of the book by ~50%. This means that on the Amazon US store the book will be 20 USD for the paper version, and only 5 USD for the ebook. So pick it up! (It may take a day for the price change to reach some of the Amazon stores…) Please note, as an Amazon Associate I earn from below qualifying purchases.

<UPDATE>

It seems the price has been pushed down to all “local” amazon websites. So go to your local website and pick up the book for 50% of the previous price. Links to most localized websites here:

Site locality in a vSAN Stretched Cluster?

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On the community forums, a question was asked around the use of site locality in a vSAN Stretched Cluster. When you create a stretched cluster in vSAN you can define within a policy how the data needs to be protected. Do you want to replicate across datacenters? Do you want to protect the “site local data” with  RAID-1 or RAID-5/6? All of these options are available within the UI.

What if you decide to not stretch your object across locations, is it mandatory to specify which datacenter the object should reside in?

The answer is simple: no it is not. The real question, of course is, would be: should you define the location? Most definitely! If you wonder how to do this, simplicy specify it within the policy you define for these objects as follows:

The above screenshot is taken from the H5 client, if you are still using the Web Client it probably looks slightly different (Thanks Seamus for the screenshot):

Why would you do this? Well, that is easy to explain. When the objects of a VM get provisioned the decision will be made per object where to place it. If you have multiple disks, and you haven’t specified the location, you could find yourself in the situation where disks of a single non-stretched VM are located in different datacenters. This is, first of all, terrible for performance, but maybe more importantly also would impact availability when anything happens to the network between the datacenters. So when you use site locality for non-stretched VMs, make sure to also configure the location so that your VM and objects will align as demonstrated in the below diagram.