Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Various

VMworld Expert Program, get with it!

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For the last couple of years we had an Expert Program at VMworld. I was designated as an “knowledge expert” in 2012 and 2011 and as part of the expert program I delivered various “Group Discussion” sessions and did 1:1’s with customers. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, this program is typically opened up for scheduling after the regular sessions hence I want to inform everyone that the ability to schedule group discussions will be there again this year.

Those of you who were fortunate enough to be able to plan one of the Group Discussions can acknowledge this, Group Discussions are the most exciting sessions there are. Although typically the designated expert (VMware employee)  will guide the discussions and there is a set topic, within those boundaries anything goes. So typically you will hear a lot of “customer problems / solutions / experiences” in these sessions, but also futures…

Just to give an example, for my group discussion I have invited Keith Farkas. Keith is the lead developer on HA and we will be talking HA futures, but primarily looking for your feedback to ensure that what the developers are building actually meets your needs! So if you want the scoop, make sure to sign up for our Group Discussion as soon as it opens up.

But not just my group discussion, there are a whole bunch of other awesome and knowledgeable  guys part of this program, just to name a few: Lee Dilworth, Ken Werneburg, Cormac Hogan, Alan Renouf, Ray Budavari, Massimo Re Ferre and many many others. Make sure to sign up as soon as you can, as these Group Discussions typically fill up fast, and for a good reason!

My VMworld San Francisco session recommendations

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Every year I do this blog post with recommendations, I hadn’t yet this year and several people started asking for it so I figured it was about time. People always complain sessions aren’t technical enough, and my answer typically is: then you have been attending the wrong sessions… So if you were one of those folks last year, make sure to include some of the sessions below in to your schedule as I will personally guarantee you will get something out of each of these. These are not the average marketing sessions, but rather sessions by deep technical people, or just plain awesome presenters. Note that I tried to limit myself to just 20 / 30 sessions, so some awesome sessions might be missing, don’t shoot me for that as when going through the list I figured I could easily get to 50… but then I might as well just link the content catalog.

This is my top 30, in no particular order:

  1. VSVC5511 – Deploying vSphere with OpenStack: What It Means to Your Cloud Environment by Scott Lowe and Dan Wendlandt
  2. VSVC5364 – Storage IO Control: Concepts, Configuration and Best Practices to Tame Different Storage Architectures by Sachin Manpathak and Ajay Gulati
  3. VSVC5280 – DRS: New Features, Best Practices and Future Directions by Aashish Parikh and Ajay Gulati
  4. VSVC4966 – vSphere Distributed Switch – Technical Deep Dive by Jason Nash
  5. VSVC4944 – PowerCLI Best Practices – A Deep Dive by Luc Dekens and Alan Renouf
  6. VSVC4886 – Innovations in vMotion: A Technical Preview by Jennifu Wu, Gabe Tarasuk-Levin, Sreekanth Setty and Min Cai
  7. VSVC4830 – vCenter Deep Dive by Ameet Jani and Justin King
  8. VCM5477 – Integration Deep Dive: Cloud Service Automation with NSX and vCloud Automation Center by Somik Behera and Thomas Kraus
  9. VCM5008 – vCenter Operations and the Quest for the Missing Metrics by Eric Sloof and Duco Jaspars
  10. VAPP4683 – Maximize Database Performance in Your Software-Defined Datacenter by Mark Achtemichuk and Michael Webster
  11. VAPP4679 – Software-Defined Datacenter Design Panel for Monster VM’s: Taking the Technology to the Limits for High Utilisation, High Performance Workloads by Andrew Mitchell, Mark Achtemichuk, Mostafa Khalil and Michael Webster
  12. STO5638 – Best Practices with Software Defined Storage by Vaughn Stewart and Chad Sakac
  13. STO5636 – Storage DRS: Deep Dive and Best Practices to Suit Your Storage Environments by Mustafa Uysal and Sachin Manpathak
  14. STO5559 – Storage Industry Trends by Alex Jauch and Vijay Ramachandran
  15. STO5027 – VMware Virtual SAN Technical Best Practices by Cormac Hogan and Kiran Madnani
  16. STO4798 – Software-Defined Storage: The VCDX Way by Wade Holmes and Rawlinson Rivera
  17. STO4791 – Just Because You Could, Doesn’t Mean You Should: Lessons Learned in Storage Best Practices (v2.0) by Patrick Carmichael
  18. SEC5891 – Technical Deep Dive: Build a Collapsed DMZ Architecture for Optimal Scale and Performance Based on NSX Firewall Services by Ranga Maddipudi and Shubha Bheemarao
  19. SEC5828 – Datacenter Transformation with Network Virtualization: Today and Tomorrow by Martin Casado
  20. SEC5582 – Multi-site Deployments with Network Virtualization by Pepe Garcia and Kamau Wanguhu
  21. PHC5640 – The Story Behind Designing and Building a Distributed Automation Framework for vCloud Hybrid Services by Nick Weaver
  22. PHC4750 – How to Build a Hybrid Cloud in Less than a Day by David Hill
  23. NET5716 – Advanced NSX Architecture by Bruce Davie
  24. NET5521 – vSphere Distributed Switch – Design and Best Practices by Ray Budavari and Venky Deshpande
  25. NET5184 – Designing Your Next Generation Datacenter for Network Virtualization by Ray Budavari and Ben Basler
  26. EUC5291 – Horizon View Troubleshooting: Looking under the Hood by Matt Coppinger and Pat Lee
  27. EUC5238 – Horizon Workspace: Data Deep Dive by Rasmus Jensen and Marcello Golfieri
  28. EUC4546 – Architecting VMware Horizon Workspace for Scale and Performance by Kit Colbert, Jared Cook and Andrew Johnson
  29. BCO4977 – VMware vSphere Replication: Technical Walk-Through with Engineering by Aleksey Pershin and Ken Werneburg
  30. BCO4756 – VMware vSphere Data Protection (VDP) Technical Deep Dive And Troubleshooting Session by Jacy Townsend and Darryl Hing

 

Network port diagram for vSphere 5.x

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Somehow I missed this one, but as I reviewed the diagram and helped selecting the right format I figured I would still share it. This Network port diagram for vSphere 5.x is one awesome resource for those folks who want to get to the bottom of how components interact with each other.

I don’t think there is a lot more I can say about it, those who love diagrams and like to know the details make sure to hit: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2054806

You don’t need any brains to listen to music pt IV

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It has been a while since I have done one of these articles (1, 2, 3). Last one was in 2010 and it started in 2009. (If you only want to read technical / IT related articles, don’t bother continuing reading this one…) Let me quote my first post in 2009 so those who are recent followers understand where this is coming from:

Luciano Pavarotti once said, “You don’t need any brains to listen to music”, and he’s right… that’s why I love music. Whenever I need to clear my head I pick up my mp3 player iphone and go outside for run.

Every once in a while a “new song / album / band” comes along that helps me clear my mind. That helps me take three steps back when I can’t see the solution to a difficult problem. [Read more…] about You don’t need any brains to listen to music pt IV

(ab)using vSphere advanced settings?

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Almost on a daily basis, I get questions from colleagues and customers about specific advanced settings. Somehow they spotted a vSphere advanced setting and wonder if they should set it. They go on a hunt to figure out what it is this specific vSphere advanced setting does and typically find a description on a random website that makes it sound like it is a good idea to configure it. I even had someone asking if I could give a list of all optimized values for the advanced kernel parameters recently. My answer was short and maybe a bit blunt, but I think it was clear:

I hope the sign above makes it clear you should not randomly set advanced settings. Some of you will laugh and say “well that is obvious” while others probably will scratch their head and open their vSphere client and check the advanced settings section. I know I discuss advanced settings every once in a while, but you should only apply these settings when:

  1. You have a requirement to implement this advanced setting, do not tweak them “just because you can”. An example would be in a stretched cluster you set “disk.terminateVMOnPDLDefault” because of the infrastructure implemented.
  2. The advanced setting solves a problem in your environment (and preferably, in that case, see 3)
  3. When recommended by VMware Global Support Services

If you have implemented an advanced setting, document it and with every update or upgrade validate it is still applicable to that specific version or not. (If you are aspiring to be a VCDX, this is key.) If it no longer applies, remove revert to default!