Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Various

VMware RADIO Fun Run 2019

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William Lam and I have been organizing a “running” event at a VMware internal event called RADIO. RADIO is our yearly R&D Innovation Offsite and is usually held in San Francisco. What is this run? Well basically it started many years ago (7 or 8?) with a group of 4-5 runners meeting up at 6:00 AM to go for a run. The group organically grew the next year to about 7 or 8 and I figured I could potentially do something similar to the VMworld RUN I organized many years ago. So the year after we asked the RADIO team if we could have it listed on the agenda officially, they looked at us a bit strange as they didn’t expect anyone to wake up at 05:30 to go for a 5KM or 10KM run at 06:00 AM. I guess they forgot that many of us fly in from a different country, and as such are jetlagged and will be awake for hours by then. The first official run had 15-20 runners, followed by 25 the next year and it steadily grew. It wasn’t just William and I, of course, organizing this, we had folks like Chris Wolf, for instance, helping out.

The past two years we stepped up our game, as the numbers started growing, and we managed to get funding for running shirts and hats and started working with the event team to get it a bit more structured. Why? Well, when there are 75-80 people running in a city like San Francisco you need to stand out and you can’t just walk outside and run, things need to be a bit more structured. This year we had about 120 people joining on the run. VMware employees from different business units and different countries. A great way to meet people you normally wouldn’t meet, especially not in a setting like this. For instance, we had our Chief People Officer joining last year, we bumped into Michael Dell this year and of course our global field CTO Chris Wolf also joined again. But that is not the goal, the goal is to get to meet people you normally would not meet. I for instance also happened to run next to a developer who worked on VASA and we got to discuss an issue I was experiencing, which subsequently then got fixed. Pretty cool.

Anyway, I just wanted to share some pictures of the run, as it may get you thinking about organizing something like this as well for a company event! It is fun and worth the effort! If you participated and are reading this, thanks for joining, hope to see you next year! And of course, everyone who helped to organize, thanks!

Present Powerpoint slides in window instead of full screen

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I just had to do a Zoom presentation (on a Macbook by the way) and one thing which always bugs me is that I need to run the presentation in full screen and can’t see the chat or Q&A. I like to address questions as I go during the presentation. I was going through the Powerpoint interface and noticed an option I had not noticed before. If you click on “Slideshow” and then “Set Up Slide Show” you can select “Browsed by an individual (window)”, this allows you to run the presentation within a window and have your chat and Q&A open next to the window. Very useful if you ask me. Figured I would share as it doesn’t seem common knowledge

MS Office autoupdate in constant loop on OSX / Mac

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Oh man, this was driving me insane. I found myself in a situation where MS Office Autoupdate was in a loop, I think it ran about once an hour at least for 2 days. Each time, of course, it would tell me there were no updates. Frustrating for sure. I place it in to “Manual” mode but it would still open up every hour. This Autoupdate loop started to begin after an upgrade to MS Office 16.24 for Mac. I ended up doing the following to solve the problem. So far I have not seen the Autoupdate window anymore, so let’s hope it indeed solved it:

Open a terminal window and do the following:

cd ~/Library/Preferences

rm -rf com.microsoft.autoupdate*.plist

After the files have been deleted, manually run Autoupdate once. This solved the problem for me. One of my colleagues solved the problem by simply downloading the autoupdater for Mac from the MS website and manually update it. Just sharing this in case others are hitting the same problem.

DQLEN changes, what is going on?

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I had a question this week on twitter, it was about the fact that DQLEN changes to values well below it was expected to be (30) in esxtop for a host. There was latency seen and experienced seen for VMs so the question was why is this happening and wouldn’t a lower DQLEN make things worse?

My first question: Do you have SIOC enabled? The answer was “yes”, and this is (most likely) what is causing the DQLEN changes. (What else could it be? Adaptive Queueing for instance.) When SIOC is enabled it will automatically change DQLEN when the configured latency threshold is exceeded based on the number of VMs per host and the number of shares. DQLEN will be changed to ensure a noisy neighbor VM is not claiming all I/O resources. I described how that works in this post in 2010 on Storage IO Fairness.

How do you solve this problem? Well, first of all, try to identify the source of the problems, this could be a single (or multiple) VMs, but it could also be that in general, the storage array is running at its peak constantly or backend services like replication is causing a slowdown. Typically it is a few (or one) VMs causing the load, try to find out which VMs are pushing the storage system and look for alternatives. Of course, that is easier said than done, as you may not have any expansion possibilities in the current solution. Offloading some of the I/O to a caching solution could also be an option (Infinio for instance), or replace the current solution with a more capable system is another one.

Free E-Book: Operationalizing VMware vSAN

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A while ago my colleague and friend Kevin Lees reached out to me and asked me if I could go over some material he wrote together with Paul Wiggett. He also asked me if I would be willing to write a foreword. When Kevin send the document over I literally finished it within a day. What I enjoyed most about this vSAN book was the fact that it wasn’t a deep dive, it wasn’t drilling down on technology, instead the people/process aspect of things are being discussed. This is an area which is often overlooked, and definitely an area that deserves more attention when people are looking to adopt software-defined storage, or the software-defined data center for that matter. Thanks Paul/Kevin for providing me the opportunity to write the foreword, I just downloaded my free copy and I have to say it looks great.

If you are interested, the book can be downloaded for free through the VMware Virtual Blocks blog, simply go here and download your copy.