Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Cool fling: vSAN Performance Monitor

· · 1 Comment

The vSAN team has just published a cool fling, the vSAN Performance Monitor. This performance monitor allows you to monitor multiple clusters at once, or as the team describes it:

The vSAN performance monitor is a monitoring and visualization tool based on vSAN Performance metrics. It will collect vSAN Performance and other metrics periodically from the clusters configured. The data collected is visualized in a more efficient and user-friendly way. The vSAN performance monitor comes with preconfigured dashboards which will help customers evaluate the performance of vSAN clusters, identify and diagnose problems, and understand current and future bottlenecks. The dashboards are heavily inspired by vSAN Observer.

It leverages Grafana for the frontend to visualize the metrics which are stored in an InfluxDB and collected by Telegraf. It is pretty simple to set up and it is made available for free via the Flings website. You can download an OVA and a User Manual to configure. Please note that it does require you to be on vSphere 6.0 or higher, but hopefully everyone is by now!

PS: Yes I know there was an issue with the upload of the OVA, I reported that with the dev team and it has been fixed since! Yes I tested it, and it does indeed import and boot correctly.

Runecast Analyzer 3.0!

· · Leave a Comment

This week I had a brief conversation with the folks from Runecast. I have been following them since day 1 and they have made a big impression on me from the start. During the conversation the Runecast folks shared with me that Runecast Analyzer 3.0 was going to be announced today and they gave a quick overview and demo of what would be announced and included in 3.0. They also quickly went over the functionality that was added the past year, some things which really were well adopted by customers were HIPAA and DISA-STIG compliance feature. Also Horizon support and security auto-remediation capabilities. Another thing that customers really appreciated were the upgradability simulations (beta feature), where Runecast validates your environment against the HCL.

Stan (Runecast CEO) also mentioned that this year Runecast signed up a customer with over 10k hosts, as you can imagine a lot of the work in the past 12 months was focused on scalability and performance at that level of scale. But that is not what today’s announcement is about, today Runecast is announcing 3.0. In 3.0 there are some great enhancements to the platform again. First of all, production-ready HCL Analysis for vSphere and vSAN. On top of that, the ESXi Upgrade Simulation is now GA, and the log analysis has been improved. Runecast is also introducing a new H5 Client plugin-in with new widgets and a dark theme! Just look at it below, you have got to love the dark theme!

But as I mentioned, there’s more to it than just the H5 Client Plugin, the HCL Analysis and the Upgrade Simulation are two key features if you ask me. During the demo, Stan showed me the below screen, and I think that by itself makes it worth testing out Runecast. It simply shows you in one overview if your environment is compliant to the HCL or not, and if it is not compliant, which combination of firmware and driver you should be using to make it compliant. In this example, the driver should be upgraded to 2.0.42. A very useful feature if you ask me. Note that this will work for both vSphere and vSAN and all components needed to run either of these.

Just as useful is the Upgrade Simulation by the way, are you considering upgrading? Make sure to run this first so you know if you will end up in a supported state or not?! And some of you may say that VMware has similar capabilities in their product, but the Runecast appliance doesn’t need to be connected to the internet at all times. You can regularly update the dataset and run these compliancy and upgrade checks (or any of the other checks) regularly offline. Especially for customers where internet access is challenging (dark sites) this is very helpful.

All in all, some very useful updates to an already very useful solution.

vSAN Deep Dive book available in traditional chinese

· · 1 Comment

It took a while, but it is my pleasure to announce that the publisher DrMaster just published the Traditional Chinese version of “VMware vSAN 6.7 U1 Deep Dive”. For those who would like to get a copy of the book in Traditional Chinese, there are a couple of ways to pick it up:

I would like to thank the folks at DrMaster for taking on the effort of translating and publishing it!

VMworld Run 2019??

· · Leave a Comment

A few folks had asked me if I will be organizing a VMworld RUN again in San Francisco this year. I organized one in 2009 and then after that, the VMworld team took over. In Las Vegas running wasn’t really an option considering the heat. But now that we are back in San Francisco the question popped up again. I briefly considered it, but then I came to my senses and realized that it wouldn’t be the smart thing to do. It would be too big and risky. After some discussions, I found out that there’s a run organized called the Bridge to Bridge run on the 25th of August. (https://bridgetobridge.com/) Why organize something yourself when you can potentially work with a professional organization? I reached out to the VMworld team, the VMworld team reached out to the Bridge to Bridge organization, and they came back with the following:

Looking for a fun and active way to kick off your VMworld experience? We’ve partnered with the Bridge to Bridge run in San Francisco to offer VMworld attendees $15 off registration for their annual run supporting the Special Olympics of Northern California on August 25th. Just enter the code INNOVATEVM750 during registration to save.

Register here if you want to join a great run, and take advantage of a 15 dollar discount, while supporting the Special Olympics: https://raceroster.com/events/2019/16196/bridge-to-bridge-run

Sign up!

Self-publishing, where do you start and which tools to use?

· · 3 Comments

I have had this question a couple of times and typed lengthy emails as a response, I figured I may as well write a blog post and share that going forward. Self-publishing, where do you start and which tools to use?

Well, I think the process is rather simple, but it takes a lot of time. Before you even get started writing a book you need to ask yourself if you will have the time to write a book and if you have the support of your family. As it typically means you will end up sitting in your home office for many evenings, and weekends, typing up content. Without the support of your family, or time, you won’t be able to finish it. Especially when it is your first book, expect it to take 6-9 months. Unless you get time from your work to add in extra hours during the week, and even then it probably takes 6 months at least.

Then there’s the question, self-publishing or a publisher? There are advantages to either, of course with a publisher a cut of the royalties will go to the publisher and typically as an author you will get between 8-12% (with 15% being the upper end). Big benefit of a publisher is the fact that they will provide editors, pay tech reviewers and will do all the formatting for you for both the paper and ebook edition. With self-publishing, you have to do that yourself, but it also means you are in control and you get to determine the price, which is nice as you can for instance price the ebook at 9.99 instead of the 40 USD a publisher will ask. (This will help with volume.)

Now when it comes to self-publishing, how do you start? I would recommend the following:

  1. Write a short summary of what you are going to write about and what you expect the reader to learn from the book
  2. Decide if you want a co-author or not, and ask the co-author if you want one
  3. Create a Table of Content (list of chapters)
  4. Create a timeline for completing the chapters
  5. Think about who you would like to ask as a technical reviewer, you may want more than 1
  6. Think about asking someone for editing/grammar, it helps to have someone focus on pure readability of the content!
  7. Think about which platform you will use to publish, Lulu vs Amazon (KDP) vs ?

Now when you have the above done, you can start writing, but what kind of tools should you use? I personally have used MS Word as the main tool to write books. When working with multiple authors we typically create a file per chapter and divide the chapters between the authors and work on them individually and store them in a shared dropbox folder. When you are done you can simply share the files with reviewers and editors. When you are done, you simply combine all the chapters and create a PDF. Now before you even do, make sure to check the publishing platform you will use and check whether they provide templates or not. These templates will be very helpful when you start the work to create a PDF. Amazon (KDP) will provide you various types of templates for different sized books. Also, when you create a PDF consider buying Adobe Acrobat DC. Not a requirement, but may help to produce usable PDFs, although KDP can also help with this.

The above is the print part, but of course, you may also want to create an ebook, typically this means you will need to redo all the formatting. KDP can do this for you, typically at a cost, or you can do it yourself. I have done this myself for most books (where Frank typically did the formatting for the paper copy), and for the ebook I have used various tools. I have a Macbook and I used both Vellum and Scrivener. Scrivener is a combination of a word processor/authoring tool and an ebook creator. Vellum was purely developed to create clean ebooks. That is why I moved from Scrivener to Vellum, as we do all our writing in MS Word, the only thing I need is the ability to create clean Kindle files. Vellum does that extremely well. It comes at a cost, but it was worth it! I tried importing the MS Word doc by the way various times, but I ended up doing copy/paste in the end, was much easier as it allowed me to also verify the formatting per copy/paste action.

Last but not least the tools used for the diagrams, it doesn’t really matter what you use. Visio, Powerpoint, Omnigraffle, it all works well. As long as you are consistent in terms of style and icons used. I would definitely recommend having one author create, or edit/verify all the diagrams. It just provides a more consistent look and feel and will make your book look more professional.

Before I forget, then of course when you are finished you will need to set a price. Now, when self-publishing I have always released the ebook at a fraction of the cost of the paper book. Simply because it allows you to reach more people, and of course because it is better for the environment. Yet is will cut into your royalties, but if you are considering writing a book to make money then you probably should rethink things. In most cases, tech books won’t make you a lot of money, put in the same amount of hours at the local MacDonalds and you probably make more money, but hopefully that is not what you were trying to achieve. Hopefully, your goal is to learn from the experience, share your knowledge and expand your horizon.

Anyway, if anyone has any questions, feel free to leave a comment.