Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Various

Vote now for your fav VMworld sessions and Virt Blogs!

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Time to get voting again. Eric Siebert just published the new list of Top Blogs to vote for. I’ve been honoured to have won a couple of years in a row, but with so many great blogs on the list that is never a given. Personally I just put in my votes, I am not going to tell you who I voted for this year as I don’t want to influence anyone. I hope I produced sufficient useful content again this year for you guys to considering voting for me. I am not going to point you to my articles, as most of you will have fav articles and know what you appreciate and don’t appreciate. Vote here: http://vsphere-land.com/news/voting-now-open-for-top-vblog-2016.html

Also, voting for VMworld is open. I would like to ask you guys to considering voting for the sessions I will be part of. Here is a list of the sessions, and if they sound interesting please consider voting:

  • Ask the Expert vBloggers [7515] (Rick Scherer, Chris Wahl, Chad Sakac, Derek Seaman, Duncan Epping)
    Back for it’s 9th year at VMworld, Ask the Experts is back with an awesome panel of the industries top bloggers. In this session there are no powerpoints, no sales pitches and no rules! Experts in the industry are here to answer the audiences questions while having some fun in the process. Bring your topic, anything from Software-Defined Data Center, End-User Computing, Cloud Native Applications to Hybrid Cloud…Storage, Networking, Security, Applications. No Holds Barred and No Questions are Off Limits!
  • Enforcing a vSphere Cluster Design with PowerCLI Automation [8036] (Chris Wahl – Duncan Epping)
    The amount of vSphere data center, cluster, storage, and network options available to an administrator are massive. Even specific features such as High Availability (HA) and the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) have a ton of different configuration settings provided to meet the needs of your specific virtualized workloads. It can be a challenge, however, to audit the settings and best understand why they were set in the first place – especially as other administrators join and leave your organization! Join VMware’s Duncan Epping, author of the infamous Cluster Deep Dive series, along with Rubrik’s Chris Wahl, PowerShell MVP and author of Networking for VMware Administrators, as they take a look at how to abstract vSphere configuration settings into declarative configuration files. Learn how to audit, track, and enforce consistent settings – with notes and comments – to ensure the availability and standardization of your vSphere environment.
  • Software Defined Storage @ VMware Primer [7650] (Lee Dilworth – Duncan Epping)
    In this session Lee and Duncan will give an overview of the different VMware Software Defined Storage initiatives and how these fit in to the broader SDDC picture. They will cover Virtual Volumes, Virtual SAN and the vSphere APIs for IO Filtering. For each of these 3 they will explain customer use cases and go over some of the basic concepts providing you with a good understanding of how to apply this to your environment.
  • A day in the life of a VSAN I/O [7875] (John Nicholson – Duncan Epping)
    In this session Duncan and John will discuss what a typical day looks like in the life of an I/O (on a VSAN based solution). How does network based RAID-1 or RAID-5 work? Where does checksumming occur? When and how are blocks deduplicated or compressed? What about caching, are there different layers? Can I control where blocks are stored? And how does all of this influence availability and performance of my I/O?
  • Hyperconverged Infrastructure Panel – Deep Dive Review of Solutions [7765] (Stu Miniman, Steve Poitras, Jesse St Laurent, Duncan Epping)
    The hyperconverged infrastructure market has exploded over the last few years. The good news is there’s lots of choice; the bad news is there’s lots of choice. How do you navigate the vendors and solutions landscape? What are they key evaluation criteria? Join us for a moderated panel discussion with a distinguished group of hyperconvergence experts to examine and discuss the challenges IT organizations are facing with virtualization infrastructure and how hyperconverged infrastructure is playing a dramatic role in the evolution of the data center. The panel will answer your questions on topics such as what constitutes hyperconvergence in the converged infrastructure landscape; business and technical benefits of this data center technology; scenarios to leverage hyperconvergence in your organization; how to avoid traps that could derail hyperconvergence implementation; and others posed by the audience.

Thanks and hope to see you guys at the event, either US or EMEA!

Virtually Speaking Podcast Episode 7 – VSAN Customer Use Cases

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The Storage and Availability Tech Marketing team runs a podcast called Virtually Speaking Podcast every week. This week it was my turn to be a guest on their show. We spoke about VSAN / use cases / all-flash and various other random topic that came up. It was a fun conversation, and I am going to try to tune in more often for sure. (Although I do listen to it every week, I haven’t been able to join live…) Make to sign up, so you don’t miss out on an episode. Listen to Pete Flecha, John Nicholson and I through the below player. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.

Online Technology Forum – Wednesday the 25th – Free!

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This week I flew to Staines (that is where VMware’s European HQ is these days) to record a video for the Online Technology Forum. For those who don’t know what it is, it is similar to a vForum but in this case you don’t even need to get out of your comfortable chair… you can attend it from home / the office. My session was all about Software Defines Storage, where we are today and where we will be tomorrow. In my session I will discuss things like VSAN, VVols and VAIO. Primarily around what was announced at VMworld, but also with a hint of what is coming for all three of these in the future.

Of course it isn’t just my session. During the Online Technology Forum, which is held on Wednesday the 25th of November, there are many great sessions held by folks like Joe Baguley (keynote), Paul Nothard (vSphere), Mike Laverick (EVO:RAIL), Lee Dilworth (VVol/VSAN) and folks like Robbie Jerrom who is going to tell you all about Cloud Native Apps and those container thingies. And that is not it, Automation / Orchestration / EUC / Networking etc… All part of the agenda.

On top of that, during the sessions you have the ability to ask your questions to a panel of experts who will answer them live online. After my session there also is a live Q&A panel where you can ask your questions directly to one of the experts one the panel (I am one of them, and I believe Joe Baguley is the moderator.)

This event was a huge success 6 months ago, and I don’t expect anything less this time around. Make sure to sign up today and tune in next week.

Soon at a VMUG near you…

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I have a whole bunch of VMUGs on the agenda in the upcoming month that I wanted to inform you about. For those who have never been to a VMUG, they are “user group” meetings where usually you see community people presenting and vendors presenting. The setting is a bit more informal which allows you to have discussions with fellow users during breaks, ask questions during session and meet up with people from VMware and other vendors who attend. In the upcoming weeks I will be delivering sessions at my favourite VMUGs in the world, if you are in the neighbourhood make sure to attend. These are free events, so you just need to free up some time from work to attend. If you do attend, don’t hesitate to stop by to say hi!

  • Thursday November 12th – Italy VMUG – Milan / Italy
    • Awesome event in a great city with people like Lee Dilworth, Chad Sakac and Vaughn Stewart. I can ensure you that this is going to be a great event. A lot of the sessions will be in English by the way, judging by the people who are presenting. Also, what I love about Italy is the passionate community they have, one of those events where I spend talking to users/partners/customers and bloggers most of my time.
  • Thursday November 26th – Scottland VMUG / Edinburgh
    • Although this is a “smaller” event it doesn’t mean the agenda isn’t top notch. With Joe Baguley delivering the keynote and people like Paul Nothard, Robbie Jerome and Andy Jenkins from VMware presenting this is going to be a great day.
  • Tuesday December 1st – Nordics VMUG (Denmark) (Usercon)
    • Keynote by Paul Strong and a line-up of great speakers like William Lam, Paudie O’Riordan, Cormac Hogan, Ole Agesen, Christian Mohn and Joerg Lew. Strongest line-up I have seen in a very very long time at an event with a very interesting closing speaker which is the first Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen. I expect this event will fill up, so register today! Most sessions will be in English, so whether you are from Sweden, Finland, Norway or Germany… you can’t miss out on this one!

So if you live close to any of these VMUGs, I expect to see you there. I will be delivering a session on VSAN at each of these events and are more than happy to talk about anything else before or after my session. I will also bring some cool Captain VSAN stickers for those who want to pimp their laptops / office etc. Hope to see you all there.

Running vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 in Fusion

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I am doing some simple tests at home and I am running the vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 in Fusion. In order to get it working there are a couple of tricks I have to perform, I find myself resorting to the same blogs over and over again so I figured I would just put it all on my own blog in a single location so I can simply copy/past where needed and don’t need to hit multiple sources.

First, deployment of vCenter Server in Fusion:

  • Download the vCenter Server Appliance ISO
  • Mount the appliance in OSX
  • Copy the file “vmware-vcsa” from the folder “vcsa”
  • Add “.ova” to the file by renaming it
  • Open fusion go to “File” and “Import” the OVA but don’t start it
  • Edit the “vmx” file of the VM you just created
    • Typically stored under Documents –> Virtual Machines
    • I edit them using vi through the terminal as that is what I’ve used for the last decade or so. The path for me looks something like this:
    • /Users/depping/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized/vmware-vcsa-2800571.vmwarevm
  • You will need to add a bunch of entries, I lifted these from William’s site of course… Thanks William
    guestinfo.cis.deployment.node.type = “embedded”
    guestinfo.cis.vmdir.domain-name = “vsphere.local”
    guestinfo.cis.vmdir.site-name = “vsphere”
    guestinfo.cis.vmdir.password = “VMware1!”
    guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.addr.family = “ipv4”
    guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.addr = “192.168.1.5”
    guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.pnid = “192.168.1.5”
    guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.prefix = “24”
    guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.mode = “static”
    guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.dns.servers = “192.168.1.1”
    guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.gateway = “192.168.1.1”
    guestinfo.cis.appliance.root.passwd = “VMware1!”
    guestinfo.cis.appliance.ssh.enabled = “true”

Now I want to update vCenter Server, 6.0 in this instance, was described by Ryan Johnson recently, I tweaked it to meet my own needs

  • Download the patch: https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/patch#search
    • Note that this isn’t the regular ISO file, the filename should look something like this: VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-6.0.0.10000-3018521-patch-FP.iso (6.0U1)
  • Mount the ISO through Fusion
  • SSH in to the vCenter Server:
    • ssh root@192.168.1.5
  • Now from the command run the “software-packages” command and let it use the ISO you just mounted
    • software-packages install –iso  –acceptEulas
  • This upgrade  will take a couple of minutes usually, in my case it took about 7 minutes to complete, next you will need to reboot the vCenter Server:
    • shutdown reboot -r updates

That’s it… easy right.