Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Introducing vSphere+ and vSAN+

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VMware just announced vSphere+ and vSAN+ today. I was reading up on the offering and personally was very intrigued about it. I have to be fair, at first I was under the impression that vSphere+ and vSAN+ was only about subscription-based licensing, but it is not, it is much more than that. If you like to head more about it, Frank and I invited Himanshu Singh to the podcast to provide us a quick overview, in ~20 minutes you know everything you need to know at this stage, make sure to listen to it below or open up the podcast in your favorite podcast app.

I am not going to type up a summary of the podcast, but I do briefly want to share my thoughts. First of all, as mentioned already, vSphere+ aka Project Arctic is about much more than just subscription-based licensing. Yes, the platform is subscription-based, but it also delivers additional capabilities to your on-prem environment. Details of pricing and packaging is still to be announced, but Himanshu mentioned to us that VMware will provide an upgrade path from perpetual licenses to vSphere+ taking into account that you have already bought licenses. Mind, most of you renew SnS every X years, this would be also included in vSphere+. But that is not what excited me, what excited me is that you get access to the Cloud Console, which basically provides a holistic overview of your VMware estate, with today a focus on vSphere and vSAN, and the extra capabilities the platform provides.

This Cloud Console is, no surprise I guess, running in the cloud and connects your on-prem VMware environment to cloud services. In order to do so, you will need to deploy a Cloud Gateway and connect your vCenter Server instances to the gateway, do note that each Cloud Gateway in the initial release can manage up to 4 vCenter Server instances. You can, however, deploy multiple Cloud Gateway of course if you want to manage more vCenter Server instances.

Now, when you get access to the Cloud Console, it immediately shows you what the value is, you will get an instant overview of all resources available in your VMware environment. Not only that, but you will also get centralized alerts and events, a global inventory, VM provisioning capabilities, and enhanced vCenter upgrade capabilities, which is my favorite feature! This upgrade capability is very useful as it shortens the downtime/maintenance window for vCenter to roughly 5 minutes. It also provides the ability to do a rollback if needed. There’s much more, but I will leave that for a follow up podcast with one of the vSphere+ specialists!

The two last things I want to point out is the fact that additional services will also be provided through this platform. There are the Developer Services and there are Add-On Services. The Developer Services are included, the Add-On services are not included in the price, but are fully integrated and can be subscribed to individually. A great example of an add-on service is VMware Disaster Recovery as a Service solution. Of course, developer services is all about Kubernetes as it includes Tanzu Standard Runtime, and Tanzu Mission Control Essentials!

Hopefully this provides a decent enough overview of what vSphere+ is. Make sure to listen to the podcast episode, it is only ~20 minutes and it provides a bit more background and detail!

Nested Fault Domains on a 2-Node vSAN Stretched Cluster, is it supported?

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I spotted a question this week on VMTN, the question was fairly basic, are nested fault domains supported on a 2-node vSAN Stretched Cluster? It sounds basic, but unfortunately, it is not documented anywhere, probably because stretched 2-node configurations are not very common. For those who don’t know, with a nested fault domain on a two-node cluster you basically provide an additional layer of resiliency by replicating an object within a host as well. A VM Storage Policy for a configuration like that will look as follows.

This however does mean that you would need to have a minimum of 3 fault domains within your host as well if you want to, this means that you will need to have a minimum of 3 disk groups in each of the two hosts as well. Or better said, when you configure Host Mirroring and then select the second option failures to tolerate the following list will show you the number of disk groups per host you need at a minimum:

  • Host Mirroring – 2 Node Cluster
    • No Data Redundancy – 1 disk group
    • 1 Failure – RAID1 – 3 disk groups
    • 1 Failure – RAID5 – 4 disk groups
    • 2 Failures – RAID1 – 5 disk groups
    • 2 Failures – RAID6 – 6 disk groups
    • 3 Failures – RAID1 – 7 disk groups

If you look at the list, you can imagine that if you need additional resiliency it will definitely come at a cost. But anyway, back to the question, is it supported when your 2-node configuration happens to be stretched across locations, and the answer is yes, VMware supports this.

Unexplored Territory 018: Not just artificially intelligent featuring Mazhar Memon

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In this week’s Unexplored Territory Podcast we have Mazhar Memon as a guest. We mainly talk about why Mazhar co-founded Bitfusion, what VMware’s strategy is for AI/ML workloads, and what we can expect from Project Radium in the future. Warning, this episode is DEEP! Listen to the full Unexplored Territory Podcast episode via Spotify – https://spoti.fi/3QdnXlX , Apple – https://apple.co/3O7TsMj , your favorite podcast app, or the embedded player below!

Unexplored Territory 017 – A day in the life of a CTO with Joe Baguley

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In this week’s Unexplored Territory Podcast we VMware’s CTO Joe Baguley as a guest. We talk about various topics like how Joe became the CTO of VMware, what the McLaren announcement means, why Joe is passionate about ESG, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, and much much more. Listen to the full Unexplored Territory Podcast episode via Spotify (https://spoti.fi/3ajyyuS), Apple (https://apple.co/3zazXyj), your favorite podcast app, or the embedded player below!

VMUG Advantage Homelab Group Buy Discount offer 2022!

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Yes, here we go again, the VMUG Advantage Homelab Group Buy Discount offer is available again! I’ve had multiple folks asking throughout the year if I had a code, and unfortunately I don’t have codes to distribute, but I do know that if you fill out this survey, you will get access to a code. The minimum discount you get is 12% and this can go up to 15% when the number of participant goes above 300. What do you get when you sign up and buy a 12 months subscription?

  • 365-day Evaluation Licenses
    • Including vSphere, vCloud Foundation, vSAN, NSX, vRealize, Workstation, Horizon, and more!
  • 20-35% discount on training
  • Access to “test drive“
  • Advantage members receive a $ 100 USD VMware Explore discount (not stackable)

The VMUG Advantage Program comes at a cost of 200 USD. Last year the discount was 15%, which means the price ended up being 170 USD for a full year. If you have just one training course planned per year, the VMUG Advantage Program will have already paid for itself (20% discount on a 3000+ USD training course). Yes, I have been talking about USD so far, but of course, this offer is available to all our community members globally (Europe, APJ, Africa, Middle East, etc). Now, again, the discount percentage you get will depend on the number of people signing up for this year’s promotion. The ranges look as follows:

Quantity Discount Cost
1-199 12% $176
200-299 14% $172
300+ 15% $170

If more than 1000 people sign up, VMUG HQ will also do a raffle and give away some cool VMUG Advantage “swag”. Can’t wait? Sign up for the discount code here, and join the program!