2011 was a great year for me from a career / blogging perspective. I moved over from the delivery side (PSO/Cloud Practice) to the “marketing” side. I used quotes as it is technical marketing and our focus is technical enablement. I was a speaker at both VMworld Las Vegas and VMworld Copenhagen. Of course the publication of our new book, vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive. Especially during VMworld Las Vegas the book was a hot topic. It seemed that everyone wanted to either buy it or get it signed… Crazy times. Nice fact about the book is that the e-book is outselling the paper version currently, I guess the price might have something to do with it!
2012 is going to be crazy as well, Partner Exchange in February and of course VMworld in San Francisco and in Barcelona. On top of that I will be working on a lot of collateral around Cloud Infrastructure integration. All in all it was a great year and there’s a lot of cool stuff already planned for 2012! Before I sign off for a couple of days, I wanted to share a couple of cool facts with you:
- 40% Traffic growth compared to 2010
- Busiest Day: July 13th 2011 – 12,089 unique views
- Busiest Month: September 2011 – 185,345 unique views
- Top 3 articles:
- Top 3 referrers (left google (1) / twitter (2) out):
- Top 3 outbound clicks:
- Jetpack 2011 Yellow-Bricks fact: “Most visitors came from The United States. The United Kingdom & Germany were not far behind.”
- Jetpack 2011 Yellow-Bricks fact: ”Some visitors came searching, mostly for yellow bricks, esxtop, alua, yellowbricks, and high availability.”
Once again, thank you for participating in the discussions. Thank you for email me your ideas / thoughts. Lets make 2012 at least as successful!
The four randomly picked winners of the free book are:
- Greg Hetrick - comment 30876
- Kalle Lund – comment 30929
- Fernando - comment 31170
- Adam Eckerle - comment 31230
Each of you will receive an email from me shortly asking for your address. I will still need to get Frank to sign them but promise I will ship them asap!
Once again, thanks everyone for the kind word! Much appreciated and keep coming back and don’t forget to comment. Bloggers love feedback / interaction!
This month four years ago I created my own blog. Yes indeed, Yellow-Bricks.com had its 4th birthday this month. I want to thank all of you for contributing to the success of Yellow-Bricks by commenting / emailing / tweeting etc. As a token of my appreciation I want to give away 4 copies (paper version) of the vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive.
What do you need to do? Not much! Just leave a comment with a valid email address! On the 30th of this month I will announce the 4 winners who will be randomly picked, they will get a signed copy of the book!
Last but not least, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to each and everyone of you! Enjoy the holiday… I know I will.
I just noticed that my friend Bilal over at cloud-buddy.com has a nice Christmas challenge up on his blog! You can win a free VMware Workstation license and a 365 day eval license and a couple of e-books! Worth checking out in my opinion, give it a shot… you might be the lucky one.
Free vSphere 5 goodies for vGeeks – Cloud Contest
I had a question from one of my colleagues last week about Isolation Response and IP Storage. His customer has an ISCSI storage infrastructure and recently implemented a new vSphere environment. When one of the hosts was isolated virtual machines were restarted and users started reporting strange problems.
What happened was that the HA Isolation Response was configured to “Leave Powered On” and as both the Management Network and the iSCSI Network were isolated there was no “datastore heartbeating” and no “network heartbeating”. Because the datastores were unavailable the lock on the VMDKs expired and HA would restart the VMs. Although HA will power off the “ghosted VM” which lost the lock when it detects the lock cannot be re-acquired, this will happen when the lock cannot be re-acquired. This means that the time between when the restart happens and the isolation is solved the IP Address and the Mac Address of the VM will pop up on the network and as you can imagine this is not desired.
I had a question last week about multi NIC vMotion. The question was if multi NIC vMotion was a multi initiator / multi target solution. Meaning that, if available, on both the source and the destination multiple NICs are used for the vMotion / migration of a VM. Yes it is!
It is complex process as we need vMotion to able to handle mixes of 10GbE and 1GbE NICs.
When we start the process we will check, from the vCenter side, each host and determine the total combined pool of bandwidth available for vMotion. In other words, if you have 2x1GbE NICs and 1x10GbE NIC, then that host has a pool of 12GbE worth of bandwidth. We will do the same for the source and the destination host. Then, we will walk down each host’s list of vMotion vmknics, pairing off NICs until we’ve exhausted the bandwidth pool.
There are many combinations possible, but lets discuss a few just to provide a better idea of how this works:
- If the source host has 1x1GbE NIC and the dest 1x1GbE NIC, we’ll open one connection between the these two hosts.
- If the source has 3x1GbE NICs and the destination 1x10GbE NIC, then we’ll open one connection from each source-side 1GbE NIC to the destination’s 10GbE NIC – so a total of three socket connections all to the dest’s single 10GbE NIC.
- If the source has 15x1GbE NICs and the destination 1x10GbE NIC and 5x1GbE NICs, then we’ll direct the first 10 source-side 1GbE NICs to connect to the dest’s 10GbE NIC, then the remaining pair of 5 1GbE vmknics will connect to each other – 15 connections in all.
Keep in mind that if the hosts are mismatched, we will create connections between vmknics until one of the sides is “depleted”. In other words if the source has 2 x 1GbE and the destination 1 x 1GbE only 1 connection would be opened.
A couple of weeks back I received the news that one of the sessions I submitted was accepted for VMware Partner Exchange 2012. PEX is held in Las Vegas from the 13th til the 16th of February. There’s an excellent program again. Make sure to check the full list here. If you haven’t signed up yet, do it quick as the early bird discount has been extended with a couple of weeks, it will save you $ 400,-.
This is the session that I submitted:
Session 1359: Architecting a Cloud Infrastructure
Abstract: This session will discuss the various design considerations when architecting the foundation for every solid cloud environment: vSphere 5.0. We will start with sizing and scaling and end with some operational guidance. Different examples will be used to show the impact design considerations can have on the availability of your services.
Presenters: Duncan Epping and David Hill
Just added:
Session 1262 (Wednesday 2/12 @ 12:30pm): DR of the Cloud and to the Cloud
This session will look at DR and the cloud. Two different DR scenarios will be presented in depth – DR of the cloud and DR to the cloud. DR to the cloud is how end consumers fail over resources to a cloud provider. DR of the cloud is how you fail over cloud resources from one site to another. This session will go in depth on the consumer and provider side of the architecture. We’ll look at how to replicate the data, what applications are primary targets, how to size environments, how to maintain multi-tenancy, and what to avoid when architecting these solutions. This session is a must for anyone considering tier 1 applications for the cloud.
Presenters: Chris Colotti and Duncan Epping
I glanced over the list of sessions at PEX and I definitely highly recommend adding the following to your schedule. I tried to keep the list limited by forcing my self to only list 15, too many great sessions at PEX.
- Emad Benjamin – (1187) Virtualizing Latency Sensitive Workloads and vFabric GemFire
- Thomas Kraus – (1206) vCloud Director 1.5 solution integration
- Cormac Hogan - (1231) vSphere Storage Appliance Deep Dive
- Rob Randell - (1248) Using vShield and vCenter Configuration Manager to Achieve Better Than Physical Security for Business Critical Applications
- Mike DiPetrillo - (1260) Multi-Site Cloud Deployment How-To
- Clive Wenman - (1265) SRM 5.0 & vSphere Replication – Understanding the Use cases and Implementation Options
- Chris Colotti - (1269) Upgrading the vCloud Solution Stack in an End to End Environment
- Kamau Wanguhu - (1276) vCloud Director Networking and where VXLAN fits in
- Carter Shanklin - (1316) Using Elastic Memory for Java to pool application server memory, improve consolidation ratios, and increase app server reliability.
- Kyle Gleed - (1328) Upgrading to vSphere 5.0
- Grant Suzuki - (1349) VMware vShield App and Data Security Deep Dive
- Ken Werneburg - (1363) SRM 5 Demo – New Features in Action and Q&A
- Tom Stephens - (1374) The Last Mile in HA: Application Availability
- Justin King - (1388) Up and Running with vSphere vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA)
- Alex Fontana - (1466) Design, Deploy and Optimize Exchange 2010 on vSphere
See you in Las Vegas!
