Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

VMworld Session Summary: #HCI1207BU HCI Management: Current and Future

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I wasn’t able to sit in this session in person, but fortunately, the recording was out within a day. This session has been one of my favorite vSAN related sessions in the past couple of years, and it definitely is one of my favorite sessions this year. Again presented by Christian Dickmann and JunChi Zhang.

In this session, JunChi and Christian will go over some of VMware’s ideas around what HCI Management should look like in the future (HCI1207BU). Christian started by providing an overview of what HCI/vSAN is about today. Christian explained that the world of vSAN was relatively simple in the early years, but today the infrastructures where vSAN is being deployed, and the use-cases, are getting more complex. More and more customers are deploying in various locations and want to manage these solutions in a consistent and efficient way.

The topics which were covered in the session are Lifecycle Management, Intelligent Operations and Cloud Native Apps. JunChi started with Lifecycle Management. JunChi talked about what the vSAN team developed to make life easier when it comes to deploying vSphere. For instance, it is possible to specify in the vCenter Installer that vCenter needs to run on a new vSAN cluster and then the installer will create a single node vSAN cluster to ensure this is possible. Also, the Cluster Quickstart Guide was added, a great way to create and configure a vSphere cluster end to end. [Read more…] about VMworld Session Summary: #HCI1207BU HCI Management: Current and Future

Cool fling: vSAN Performance Monitor

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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!

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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

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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??

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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!