Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

#115 – GPU resource management for AI workloads with Frank Denneman!

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Recently, Frank published a series of blog posts on GPU resource management. I invited Frank to the show to explain why GPU resource management is different than CPU and memory management in vSphere. Frank goes over all the intricate details, and as always, dives deep into the various constructs involved. I highly recommend reading the articles which are part of the following series, and make sure to also check the tool Frank developed, as this helps visualizing the challenges you may face today, or potentially in the future!

You can listen to the episode on Spotify (bit.ly/4th0Jhs), Apple (bit.ly/47wcGHH), or via the below embedded player, and I also posted it on Youtube with video!

#114 – vSAN Storage Clusters with Kalyan Krishnaswamy!

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Recently there was a ⁠big announcement⁠ about the adoption of vSAN Storage Clusters by Audi. All the reasons for me to invite Kalyan back to the show. During this episode, Kalyan not only discusses what was announced specifically with Audi, but also goes over some of the recently introduced functionality like vSAN traffic separation, vSphere only clusters support for stretched with vSAN Storage Clusters, and much more!

Some of the discussed papers and blogs:

You can listen to the episode on Spotify (bit.ly/4lBkM7K), Apple (apple.co/4lzCjwX), the embedded player below, or simply watch the youtube version!

vSAN ESA Witness memory and CPU resources?

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Not sure when this happened, but somehow the resource requirements for the vSAN Witness VM disappeared. Someone asked me last week how much memory is allocated to a VM, and how many vCPUs. Now, of course, this depends on the profile you select as the Witness VM has an M, L, and XL profile. The profile you select is determined by the number of VMs you will be provisioning, yes it is smart to take a growth factor into account. Now, when you deploy the VM, it doesn’t give a hint either, but you can figure out the size by simply looking at the OVF descriptor file. So this is what I got from the vSAN ESA Witness OVF:

  • vSAN ESA Witness XL – 8 vCPUs – 64 GB memory
  • vSAN ESA Witness L – 4 vCPUs – 32 GB memory
  • vSAN ESA Witness M – 4 vCPUs – 16 GB memory

And for those who were wondering, with vSAN OSA the requirements are:

  • vSAN OSA Witness XL – 6 vCPUs – 32 GB memory
  • vSAN OSA Witness L – 2 vCPUs – 32 GB memory
  • vSAN OSA Witness Normal – 2 vCPUs – 16 GB memory
  • vSAN OSA Witness Tiny – 2 vCPUs – 8 GB memory

I hope that helps, and also please do note… if you read this article a few years from now, things may have changed!

#113 – Procuring hardware for a vSAN based VCF infrastructure – featuring John Nicholson!

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I’ve been on the Virtually Speaking podcast several times, so it was time to invite one of the hosts to the Unexplored Territory Podcast and discuss his favorite topic, hardware configurations, and the bill of materials! John Nicholson goes over all the ins and outs of procuring new hardware and talks about ordering components for existing hardware. We discuss NICs, Switches, Ready Node configurations, Emulated Ready Node configurations, NVMe devices, and much more.

Especially in todays world of ever increasing memory prices, and difficulty to procure hardware, the suggestions John makes around re-using existing hardware with vSAN ESA are very valid. Also, the use of Memory Tiering is definitely something every customer should consider. But before I share all the nuggets, just listen to the episode on Spotify (bit.ly/4r66flp), Apple (apple.co/4raF5Kj), the embedded player below, or watch it on Youtube.

During the discussion, various blogs and videos were mentioned, make sure to check those as well!

#112 – Introducing VMware vDefend featuring Chris McCain!

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A few episodes ago we had Yves Hertoghs on the show to discuss networking, so I decided it was also time to discuss security. As Chris McCain has been at the forefront of networking and security at VMware for over a decade, it only made sense to reach out and invite him to introduce vDefend! As always the episode is available on Spotify (https://bit.ly/46aiOog), Apple (https://bit.ly/4kCOsk9), the embedded player below, or if you want to watch it on youtube that is also an option!

Not only was Chris part of the Explore keynote, but he also delivered various excellent sessions on networking and security in the past couple of years, and I would highly encourage you to watch those as well!