Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Various

Top 25 VMworld US 2019 sessions to attend (or watch online)

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I do this every year, list my favorite 25 VMworld sessions which you definitely should try to attend in person. Or if you are not going, watch online. Most of these sessions are by folks I know, or folks I have seen presenting, or topics which I find interesting for various reasons. Make sure to register for these sessions as soon as possible, as these are the sessions which tend to fill up extremely fast. I also have couple of sessions, 3 to be precise, make sure to register for those as well. You can find them through this link. HCI1870BU is the HA best practices for vSAN customers, HBI2186BU is the vSphere HA and DRS Hybrid Cloud Deep Dive which I will be presenting with Frank, and HCI3551KU is the HCI Keynote.

Now that I got that out of the way, let’s take a stab at my top 25, these are in random order! if your session is not on the list it is not because I think it was not good enough to be on there, it is because there are simply too many awesome sessions to select from. Here we go!

  1. 60 Minutes of Non-Uniform Memory Architecture [HBI2278BU] by Frank Denneman
    I am sure this session will go extremely deep, everything you always wanted to know (and more) about NUMA and vSphere. I don’t think I need to say much more.
  2. A Practitioner’s Guide to vCenter Server Architecture [HBI2227BU] by  Emad Younis and Sandeep Byreddy
    Of course, you don’t need to understand the vCenter Architecture to use vSphere, but we are all geeks, right? So this is probably the perfect session to understand more about the internals, services, modules etc.
  3. HCI Management: Current and Future [HCI1207BU] by Junchi Zhang and Christian Dickmann
    This is a great session where product management and engineering talk (and demo) new HCI management features. It typically contains at least 2-3 cool demos, and I watched the session previous years and it was well worth it.
  4. “If This Then That” for vSphere – The Power of Event-Driven Automation [HCI1379CU] by William Lam and Michael Gasch
    I found the abstract of this session very interesting, event-driven automation is definitely something that should of interest for most of you. And when it happens to have William and Michael speaking, you know you will be in for something good.
  5. Hyperconverged Infrastructure: Present and Future [HCI2733BU] by Vijay Ramachandran
    Another forward-looking session, this one by the VP of Product Management, and a bit more generic than the HCI Management session. Previous editions of this session showcased vSAN Data Protection for instance. So expect insights of what the future holds for vSAN/HCI.
  6. VMware CTO Panel: What’s Over the Horizon? [OCTO2899PU] by Ray O’Farrell, Pere Monclus, Greg Lavender and Christos Karamanolis
    The CTO panel has always been interesting, typically they will start with a discussion about where VMware stands and where VMware is going, followed by audience questions and deep (forward-looking) answers/statements. Very entertaining and worth the time!
  7. The Virtually Speaking Podcast Live: The Future of Storage [HCI1894PU] by Pete Flecha, John Nicholson, and Ken Werneburg
    A VMworld session which at the same time will be a live podcast, by your favorite podcast team. Not only are all three great speakers, I suspect they will have some amazing guests and I suspect it will be very entertaining at the same time.
  8. PowerCLI Deep Dive [HBI1729BU] by Kyle Ruddy and Luc Dekens
    These guys are the PowerCLI guru’s, if you want to get your mind blown and learn more about PowerCLI and automation, then this is the session to attend. I can guarantee that you will walk out with new ideas and knowledge.
  9. vSphere Virtual Volumes: Technical Deep Dive [HBI2853BU] by Jason Massae and Thiruvengada Govindan Thirumal
    Adoption of VVols is going up fast, and there’s a good reason for it. Find out what is so special about VVols and why you should consider it. Jason and Thiruvengada are experts on the topic, and will be able to go deep!
  10. VMware Cloud on AWS: SDDC Availability Deep Dive [HBI1924BU] by Jeremiah Megie and Glenn Sizemore
    VMware Cloud on AWS has some very appealing availability features which you won’t find anywhere else. Want to understand how VMware and AWS are working together to improve your uptime and resource availability? Make sure to attend this one by Glenn and Jeremiah!
  11. Zero to DR in 60 Minutes: VMware Site Recovery DRaaS Technical Deep Dive [HBI1229BU] by Stefan Tsonev and Cato Grace
    One of the use cases for public cloud, of course, is disaster recovery, in this session, Stefan and Cato will do a deep dive on the VMware DR as a Service solution.
  12. Extreme Performance Series
    Yes, I am cheating as this is actually 5 separate sessions, but these are simply a must attend/watch! I’ve learned a lot about vSphere internals over the past years by watching these sessions, they cover things like persistent memory, schedulers, best practices etc.
  13. How GPU-Assisted ML for Medical Research Proved to Be a Force for Good [HBI1546BU] by Niels Hagoort and Johan van Amersfoort
    Very interesting use case explained by Johan and Niels. They will discuss how a vSphere environment is used machine learning and deep learning. Worth attending!
  14. One Storage Platform for Thousands of Cloud Providers [HBI2537PU] by Ari Paul, Rawlinson Rivera, and John Toor
    In this session, they will discuss the availability of S3 compatible object storage in vCloud Director based platforms and the use cases. It will feature Rawlinson from Cohesity and John from Cloudian. Hosted by Ari Paul from VMware.
  15. Core Storage Best Practices: Ensuring Your Storage Is Reliable [HBI2751BU] by Jason Massae and Cody Hosterman
    This session has been in the top VMworld sessions for the past couple of years. Jason and Cody have a wealth of knowledge to share with you on the topic of core storage (VMFS, NFS, VAAI etc)
  16. Optimizing vSAN for Performance [HCI1757BU] by Paudie O’Riordan
    Paudie is one of the most technical guys in our team, if anyone understands vSAN (and performance) inside out it is him. Make sure to attend this one to get a good understanding of how to tweak vSAN to get the best performance out of it.
  17. Showcase Keynote: Hybrid Cloud Architecture – The New Standard from the Data Center [HYB3544KU] by Kit Colbert, Raghu Raghuram and Mark Lohmeyer
    I always enjoy these showcases as they discuss what we have today, but more importantly what is coming in the future. Kit, Raghu and Mark are excellently equipped to bring you up to speed!
  18. vSphere Networking in the Data-Centric Future [HBI2136BU] by Sudhansu Jain and Disha Chopra
    I am not a networking guy, but this sounds very interesting as in this session the future of networking will be discussed. What are the current trends, where is the market moving towards?
  19. Innovations in vMotion: Features, Performance, and Best Practices [HBI1421BU] by Sreekanth Setty and Arunachalam Ramanathan
    vMotion is the most used vSphere feature, and it continues to evolve. Over the years the vMotion innovations/futures session has always been very interesting, and I suspect it will be again this year!
  20. VMware Cloud on Dell EMC: Technical Deep Dive [HBI1975BU] by Mike Hall and Sridevi Ravuri
    This session will provide a deep dive on what was formerly called Project Dimension. A very interesting concept where VMware and Dell will join forces to deliver and manage an SDDC as a Service on premises.
  21. Encrypting VMs on Standalone Hosts: Tech Preview [HBI1947BU] by Mike Foley and Samyuktha Subramanian
    A session title with “tech preview” always has my interest! In this session they will also be discussing very interesting use cases for this potential future feature.
  22. Diversity and Inclusion Tech Panel: You Can Drive Success for Women in Tech [PD2632U] by Jodi Shely
    An interesting topic, and an important topic as well, definitely one I will be attending or watching!
  23. Accelerating Intra-Host PVRDMA Storage Traffic in a Future Dell AMD Server [OCTO2718BU] by Richard Brunner and Shyamkumar Iyer
    I’ve attended various sessions by Richard, and they are always excellent and very deep and typically forward-looking. I know this one will also be, and I am sure they will go deep fast!
  24. Edge Computing Innovations in Office of the CTO and Dell Technologies [EIOT2715BU] by Chris Wolf and Daniel Beveridge
    This session was one of my favorite sessions last year, although the title has slightly changed, I am sure it will be packed with cool demos, industry insights, and futures!
  25. How to Become the Platform Engineer of the Future [PD2248U] by Martijn Baecke and Matthew Steiner
    The last session on this list and I think it is an important one. How do you evolve as an IT practitioner, what kind of opportunities are out there and what types of skills would you need for those opportunities? Martijn and Matt will guide you through a fast evolving IT world.

That was it for now, enjoy the show. (Early bird tickets will end the 21st of June, so get them now!)

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.