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Duncan Epping

Unexplored Territory #049 and #050, all about multi-cloud and cloud native workloads!

Duncan Epping · Jul 12, 2023 · Leave a Comment

I was working on my VMware Explore presentations so I forgot to post #049, figured I would post both at the same time for those who hadn’t seen these yet. In episode 049 we had two guests for the very first time, Gerrit Lehr and Andrea Siviero. Andrea and Gerrit talked us through the Multi-Cloud Adoption Framework and explained why customers are interested in this service and how it helps them meet their business goals. Listen to the full episode via Spotify (https://bit.ly/3Ny1EXE), Apple (https://bit.ly/449s2xA), or via the embedded player below.

Episode 050 focusses on Self-Managed Tanzu Mission Control, and we had Corey Dinkens as our guest. Corey discussed what Tanzu Mission Control is about, what the use case is, how customers are consuming it today, and why a self-managed solution makes sense for some customers compared to the SaaS offering. Interesting stuff if you ask me. Listen via Spotify (https://bit.ly/3XHU3dE), Apple (https://bit.ly/3XLm7g5), or use the embedded player below.

Six fundamentals for advancing your career (Virtual VMUG Keynote) recording!

Duncan Epping · Jul 5, 2023 · Leave a Comment

I recorded this keynote presentation for the Virtual VMUG which was in June 2023. In this presentation, I discussed my career path at VMware and my personal journey in the world of IT (and computers in general) and share with you the six fundamental learnings which accelerated my personal development and career growth. I didn’t see the recordings shared more broadly so I figured I would share the video through my blog and on youtube. Just go to youtube and watch it over there. If you have any comments/feedback just leave a message on my blog, youtube, or on any of the social media platforms you can find me on.

PS: I have always felt uncomfortable sharing my career journey and learnings, I am not a career or personal development coach, nor have I had any education or training on this topic, this is purely my experience and I am sharing this with the broader audience as the VMUG team asked me to present on this topic twice now. I hope this is useful.

Seeing unexpected error messages during ISL failure with Stretched Cluster for secondary site

Duncan Epping · Jun 22, 2023 · Leave a Comment

I had a question this week from one of our field specialists, he ran into a situation where he saw lots of error messages about the fact that vSphere HA could not restart a certain workload during an ISL failure. Let me first explain the scenario, and also explain what vSAN does and doesn’t do. Let’s take the below situation.

Let’s assume Datacenter A is the “preferred site”, and Datacenter B is the “secondary site”. In case the ISL between Datacenter A and Datacenter B fails, the Witness (in a 3rd location) will bind itself automatically with Datacenter A. This means that VMs in Datacenter B will lose access to the vSAN Datastore.

From an HA perspective Datacenter A will have a primary (previously called master), and so will Datacenter B. The primary will detect that there are VMs that are not running, and it will try to restart these VMs. It will try to do this on both sides, and of course the site where access to the vSAN datastore is lost will see the restart fail.

Now here is the important aspect, of course depending on where/how vCenter Server is connected to these locations, it may, or may not, receive information about successful and unsuccessful restarts. I’ve seen situations where vCenter Server could only communicate with the primary in Datacenter B, and this would just lead to unsuccessful failover messages, while in reality all VMs were restarted in Datacenter A. The UI can give a hint by the way when you are in that situation, it will provide you the info on which host is the primary, and it will also tell you that there’s a “network isolation” or a “network partition”, and in this case of course that would be a “network partition”.

Unexplored Territory #048: Introduction to Runecast with Stan Markov!

Duncan Epping · Jun 20, 2023 · Leave a Comment

I have mentioned Runecast a fair amount on my blog, dating back to 2017, but somehow I forgot to blog our episode with Stan on the topic of Runecast on the Unexplored Territory Podcast. I just noticed it, so I figured I would share the episode with you folks. I have been a fan of their solution from day 1, and I would encourage people to look and what they have to offer, and of course listen to the episode. Listen via Spotify (https://bit.ly/3Nr16nz), Apple (https://bit.ly/43AlZlB) or the embedded player below!

Performance Management Object reduced availability on stretched cluster

Duncan Epping · Jun 15, 2023 · Leave a Comment

I created a new lab environment not too long ago and I ran into this situation where the Performance Management Object showed up as Reduced Availability with no Rebuild in vSAN Skyline Health. This happened in my case because I created a Stretched Cluster configuration after I had already formed a cluster, which means that the performance management object was randomly placed across hosts without taking those “failure domains” into account. I completely forgot about it until someone on VMTN reminded me about this. I had two options, fix the existing perf database, or simply disable/enable the perf service to it is recreated.

As I had no data stored in the database I figured disable/enable is the easiest route. I looked for the option in vSphere 8.0 U1 but could not find it, it seems that the UI option no longer exists for whatever reason. How do I now disable/enable the service? Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) to the rescue!

When you log in to RVC you can simply run the following commands on the cluster object you want to disable/enable the performance service for. Fairly straight forward, and fixed the issue within a minute or so:

vsan.perf.stats_object_delete <cluster>
vsan.perf.stats_object_create <cluster>

I also documented this in the vSAN 8.0 ESA Deep Dive Book by the way, you can buy a paper copy or ebook on Amazon.

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About the Author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of the CTO in the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. Besides writing on Yellow-Bricks, Duncan co-authors the vSAN Deep Dive book series and the vSphere Clustering Deep Dive book series. Duncan also co-hosts the Unexplored Territory Podcast.

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