Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Various

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.

 

Black Friday Gift: Free copy of the vSphere 6.7 Clustering Deep Dive, thanks Rubrik (ebook)

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Many asked us if the ebook would be made available for free again. Today I have the pleasure of announcing that Frank, Niels and I have worked once again with Rubrik and the VMUG organization to make the vSphere 6.7 Clustering Deep Dive book available for free! Yes, that is 0 USD / EURO, or whatever your currency is. As the book signing at VMworld was wildly popular, which resulted in the follow up discussion about the ebook.

You want a copy? All that we expect you to do is register on Rubrik’s website using your own email address. Anyway, register and start your download engines, pick up a fresh copy of the vSphere Clustering Deep Dive here!

vSAN 6.7 U1 Deep Dive book coming soon!

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Cormac and I decided to update the vSAN Essentials book. We added a whole bunch of extra info and also decided to rebrand it. “Essentials” did not really cut it, it is much more than that. Considering I just finished the Clustering Deep Dive with Frank and Niels, we figured this could be a nice addition to that series, complementing both the Host Deep Dive as well as the Clustering Deep Dive. We’ve received all the feedback from our reviewers, Frank Denneman and Pete Koehler, and spend various evenings digesting and processing it. Now it is just a matter of adding the foreword to the book, and then we can simply press: Publish. Hopefully, within 2 weeks, I will have a new article that details how you can buy the book!

The plan is right now to release the paper copy and the ebook at the same time, we will link the books, so those who buy the paper copy can buy the ebook at a discounted price. We will also make sure the ebook is priced very attractive, as we feel it should be the format of choice for everyone!

Audio stops working on MAC / OSX

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I have this issue where my sound / audio just stops working on my Mac / OSX. Very annoying, and as I find myself searching for the command every time I have this issue I figured I would simply drop it on my blog as a reminder, much easier to find, at least for me. How do I get my audio working again? Well I simply open a terminal and kill the service responsible for it. It is then auto restarted and it starts working again (you can also kill it through the UI):

sudo killall coreaudiod

I have this problem in OSX 10.14.1, but also had it in 10.14 and 10.13.x. if anyone knows how to solve the problem please leave a comment!

ESXi on ARM/Raspberry Pi for vSAN Witness purposes or for?

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I was just catching up on a couple of VMworld sessions. One session that stood out to me was most definitely once again the session by Chris Wolf and Daniel Beveridge. I am not going to write up a full coverage of it, as it is mostly very similar to the session they did in the US which I posted about here.

However, what is interesting in the European edition is that Regis Duchesne comes up on stage after about 38 minutes in and he starts discussing and demoing ESXi on ARM, but more impressively ESXi on top of a Raspberry Pi. Note that these machines have very limited memory (1GB) and little CPU (64-bit SoC @ 1.4GHz) resources, and are low powered! Gotta love an intro as well that includes “been at VMware for about 20 years”.

Very interesting to see that Regis and the team managed to get ESXi booting on an RPI 3b, but also that it only uses about 500MB of the memory, which would leave room to boot one VM as Regis points out if you are lucky. One example of a use case is to use this machine as a physical vSAN Witness host for 2 host configurations. This was the immediate use case I had in mind as well for this! (Although preferably a configuration with a bit more CPU power and memory would be preferred!)

Regis also mentions the option to run 1 VM on an RPi3, but you could, of course, have multiple RPi’s running and connect them using a 1GbE switch so the VMs can communicate with each other, you could even create a cluster and move VMs between RPi’s when you are doing maintenance at the edge. Or even more VMs could potentially run on an RPi and you could use it as an IoT gateway. As Regis points out, what is great about ESXi is that it already provides isolation and QoS for VMs, which ensures that all apps running on an IoT gateway would get their fair share of resources. (Eliminate the noisy neighbor problems) Note that this is a project and very much at an alpha stage, nowhere close to being available for customers or partners, but as Regis points out… if you are a customer or partner doing things at the edge and interesting in this please let us know. The team is looking for design partners to better understand the different use case, to ensure they build something which can be useful for customers! (You can leave a comment here, let us know what you are looking to do with it and I will connect you with the right folks.)