Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Various

My favorite VMware Explore 2025 sessions!

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Yes, it is that time of the year again… VMware Explore season! As I write this, I am in the middle of developing the content for Explore, as I have two sessions approved myself. I created a so-called targeted agenda, so if you want to attend any of the below sessions, just go here.

The two sessions I am presenting can be found here. But for those who don’t want to click, they are:

  • Three Times the Performance, Half the Latency: VMware vSAN Express Storage Architecture Deep Dive for VMware Geeks [CLOB1067LV] Featuring Pete Koehler and Duncan Epping
  • Six Innovations Redefining Storage and Disaster Recovery for VMware Cloud Foundation [CLOB1028LV] Featuring Rakesh Radhakrishnan and Duncan Epping

If you are attending Explore, and are planning on attending those sessions, make sure to register as soon as you can as they were “sold out” in previous years!

Now, for the rest of the content catalog, these are the sessions I hope to be able to attend:

  • Deploying Minimal VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Lab [CLOB1201LV] hosted by Alan Renouf and William Lam
  • The Isolated Clean Room Blueprint for On-Premises Based Cyber Recoveries [CLOB1267LV] hosted by Michael McLaughlin
  • A Deep Dive into Memory Tiering with NVMe [CLOB1122LV] hosted by Dave Morera
  • Bridging the Gap: Managing Virtual Machines in a Kubernetes World [CLOB1938LV] hosted by Kat Brookfield
  • Design and Architect: Multi-cluster Management for Kubernetes at Scale with VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 [CLOB1471LV] hosted by Kris Inglis and Hugo Phan
  • 10 Amazing New Things with VMware Live Recovery [CLOB1943LV] hosted by Jatin Jindal and Nabil Quadri
  • Building Secure Private AI Deep Dive [INVB1432LV] hosted by Chris McCain
  • 5 Key Capabilities of Next-Gen Data Protection and Ransomware Recovery with vSAN for All VCF Workloads [CLOB1265LV] hosted by Rakesh Radhakrishnan and Sazzala Reddy
  • Design and Architect: Best Practices for Deploying VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 [CLOB1427LV] hosted by Prak Kalra and Sushil Suvarna
  • Design and Architect: Managing and Operating at Scale with VCF 9.0 [CLOB1487LV] hosted by Ivaylo Ivanov and Michael Kolos
  • Real-World Lessons in Rightsizing VMware Cloud Foundation for On-Premises AI Workloads [INVB1300LV] hosted by Frank Denneman and Johan van Amersfoort

If you feel that a session is missing, feel free to leave a comment!

#095 – Event Season Kickoff: NVIDIA GTC, KubeCon, and Dutch VMUG with Johan van Amersfoort

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⁠⁠For this episode I decided to invite Johan van Amersfoort to discuss with us his experiences at NVIDIA GTC, Kubecon London, and of course the Dutch VMUG. Or should we say, the start of event season? Johan ⁠shared countless of updates and videos on LinkedIn⁠, make sure to check those out while you are at it! Also, make sure to check out the “When Shit Hits The Fan” Episode I was featured on, which is hosted by Johan and Jeffrey! The Unexplored Territory Podcast episode with Johan can be found on Spotify (https://bit.ly/42TbMTp), Apple (https://bit.ly/42F14Pk), or just listened to below. 

New vCLS architecture with vSphere 8.0 Update 3

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Some of you may have seen this, others may have not, as I had a question today around vCLS retreat mode with 8.0U3 I figured I would write something on the topic quickly. Starting with vSphere 8.0 Update we introduced a new architecture for vCLS aka vSphere Cluster Services. Pre-vSphere 8.0 Update the vCLS architecture was based on virtual machines with Photon OS. These VMs were there to assist in enabling and disabling primarily DRS. If something was wrong with these VMs then DRS would also be unable to function normally. In the past many of you have probably experienced situations where you had to kill and delete the vCLS VMs to restore functionality of DRS, for that VMware introduced a feature called “retreat mode” which basically killed and deleted the VMs for you. There were some other challenges with the vCLS VMs and as a result the team decided to create a new design for vCLS.

Starting with vSphere 8.0 Update 3 vCLS is now implemented as what I would call a container runtime, sometimes referred to as a Pod VM or PodCRX. In other words, when you upgrade to vSphere 8.0 Update 3 you will see your current vCLS VMs be deleted, and these new shiny vCLS VMs will pop up. How do you know if these VMs are created using a different mechanism? Well you can simply just see that in the UI as demonstrated below. See the “CRX” mention in the UI?

New vCLS architecture with vSphere 8.0 Update 3

So you may ask yourself, why should I even care? Well the thing is, you should not indeed. The new vCLS architecture uses less resources per VM, there are less vCLS VMs deployed to begin with (two instead of three), and they are more resilient. Also, when a host is for instance placed into maintenance mode while it has a vCLS VM running, that vCLS instance is deleted and recreated elsewhere. Considering the VMs are stateless and tiny, that is much more efficient than trying to vMotion it. Note, vMotion and SvMotion of these new (Embedded as they call them) type of vCLS VMs isn’t even supported to begin with.

Normally, vCLS retreat mode shouldn’t be needed anymore, but if you do end up in a situation where you need to clean up these instances, Retreat Mode is still fully supported with 8.0 U3 as well. You can find the Retreat Mode option in the same place as before, on your cluster object under “Configure –> vSphere Cluster Services –> General –> Edit vCLS Mode”. Simply select “Retreat Mode” and the clean up should happen automatically. When you want the VMs to be recreated, simply go back to the same UI and select “System managed”. This should then lead to the vCLS VMs being recreated.

I hope this helps,

 

VMware Explore 2024 Las Vegas, my top sessions!

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I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember, creating a list of my personal favorite sessions for our yearly event, VMware Explore. Of course, I created one for 2024 in Las Vegas as well. Typically these are the sessions I am going to try to attend personally, that is if they are not full. Yes, the list is focussed on areas I am interested in, and is not necessarily a representation of the broad diversity in terms of topics discussed at the event. But I am sure a few others will produce a similar list at some point, which may (or may not) be more balanced.

Normally I would have a list of sessions on my page, but the cool thing is that on the Explore website, I was now able to create a “targeted agenda”, so that you can simply go there and favorite those sessions from your account straight away. This makes things a lot easier than previous years where I actually had to copy and paste all the details, create the links, and then have you go back and forth between the various pages to favorite what you also find interesting. So if you are going to Explore, and you are a bit geeky like I am, the sessions in the following link may be of interest to you!

https://myevents.vmware.com/widget/vmware/explore2024lv/1718781547715001Ezh2

Unexplored Territory Episode 065 – Jatin Purohit discussing Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

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For episode 065 of the Unexplored Territory Podcast I invited Jatin Purohit to discuss Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, and what was introduced since we had Richard Garsthagen on as a guest. Jatin went over all the details, and shared some great use cases with us. Make sure to listen to the episode via your favorite podcast app, or the embedded player below. We are now starting to plan for the upcoming episodes, if you want to be a guest and have an interesting story, or solution, to share, then do not hesitate to reach out.