Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Various

What happens to powered off VMs when a host fails?

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I had the question today what happens to a powered off VM when the host they are registered against fails? This customer always has multiple powered off VMs and was afraid their VMs would show up as orphaned. I was pretty confident that the VM would be re-registered against one of the remaining hosts in the cluster, but I validated it just in case and this is what the events section of the VM shows:

Relocating from cs-tkmt-h08, emc-vnx-fcoe to cs-tkmt-h05, emc-vnx-fcoe

In other words, the VM is relocated from my ESXi host cs-tkmt-h08 to cs-tkmt-h05. No need to worry about orphaned VMs and manually registering them against the remaining hosts… vSphere does it for you.

vShield App and layering your design

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I started diving in to vShield App and one thing that I like about vShield App is that it allows you to use different types of objects to apply your policies to. Never really put too much thought in to it, but considering the world is more and more changing to policy based management this fits right in. I just wanted to share something that I was working on, any feedback / thoughts are welcome…

The VMware Cloud Infrastructure aims to reduce operational overhead and lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by simplifying management tasks and abstracting complex processes. The focus of this architecture, as indicated by our customer requirements, is resource aggregation and isolation through the use of pools for each of the crucial pillars: network, storage and compute. Each of the three pillars will be carved in to multiple units of consumption with priority allocated based on their service level agreement. This will be achieved by leveraging core functionality offered by vSphere 5.0. Subsequently vShield App will be used to isolate each of the different type of workloads. As a hypervisor-based application-aware firewall solution, vShield App allows defining policies to logical, dynamic application boundaries (security groups) instead of physical boundaries.

This resource and security layering method will allow for a fast and safe deployment of new workloads.

Each of the different types of resources are carved up in to different groups for each of the respective workload types. A virtual machine, or vApp, will be deployed in one of the three different compute and security groups after which a specific networking group will be selected and a storage tier. Compute, Security and Network  group types are currently defined based on the different type of workloads this virtual infrastructure will host. In the future additional blocks may be added based on the requirements of the internal customers and the different types of workloads being deployed…

Cool tool: RVTools 3.2 released

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Today Rob de Veij released an update of his excellent tool called RVTools. We are up to version 3.2 already. You can find the update on the RVTools website. RVTools is an essential tool for every vSphere Admin. It allows you to report on the most important aspects of your virtual infrastructure, but probably the most important ones are limits / reservations / VMware tools. Seriously give it a try and you will be surprised with what you might find. I have used it in many environments and always managed to discover inconsistencies… Thanks again for the great work Rob!

These are the changes in version 3.2:

  • New tabpage with distributed switch information
  • New tabpage with distributed port information
  • It’s now possible to export a single tabpage to an excel file from the command line
  • It’s now possible to save the filter. The next time RVtools is started it will use the filter automatically.
  • Bugfix: On vSnapshot tab the displayed filename and filesize are not always correct
  • Bugfix: Improved exception handling on vPort tab

Spotted at VMworld

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I had this post sitting in my “Draft” box for a week and didn’t notice it never got published. Although a bit late here it is. At VMworld Copenhagen I tried to spot a whole bunch of rockstar Bloggers / Tweeps. I tweeted their pics during the show but I figured not everyone of you is online all of the time so I thought I would post them here as well. Note that they didn’t know I took this picture at the time :-). I added a link to their twitter account just in case you aren’t following them yet.

Alan Renouf (left) and Frank Denneman (right)… always working on a new blog article

Carter Shanklin (left) and Simon Long (right)… yes it was a very long day

Luc Dekens

Massimo Re Ferre’ watching his back in the train… I guess he is used to Italy.

Kyle Gleed

Mike Laverick

Fabio Rapposelli

Bouke Groenescheij

Chris Colotti and David Hill

Jason Boche (left) wondering what Frank Denneman (right) is talking about…

VMworld Europe 2011 wrap-up

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I was asked to speak at VMworld Europe in Copenhagen and before I flew out I planned on writing daily wrap-ups again. It usually helps me to wind down, but this time I never really got around to it. I figured I would at least write this article at the end of the week to summarize some of my personal highlights.

First of all, let me say that I love the city of Copenhagen. I like the fact that it is clean, they have great public transportation and in most restaurants the food is great and the service okay (for European standards). The Bella Conference Center is an excellent location in my opinion. The rooms are nicely setup, to be honest the lights and audio were much better than in Las Vegas. Surprising in my opinion as you would expect that in Las Vegas they are better equipped for conferences like these.

I also love the fact that it is relatively “small” show compared to VMworld US and for some reason it also seems that the audience is different. Definitely one thing I noticed during the sessions I attended is that it is difficult to break the ice. Even at the end of the sessions I noticed far less people asked questions then during the sessions I attended in Las Vegas. This had me worried for a while as Chris Colotti, Frank Denneman and I were scheduled for a Q and A. As Chris stated on twitter, without Qs there will be no As. Besides a couple of sessions I had a lot of meetings scheduled, the week before VMworld my schedule looked fairly empty but it completely filled up with meetings the days before it started, but I cannot complain as I learned a lot from these meetings as well. Every customer has a different use case / perspective and that helps me again when writing articles or when providing feedback to the Product Managers and Engineers.

We started on Monday at the TAM day with a technical discussion panel on Cloud and all challenges around it. We had a lot of questions around security, availability, compliance, networking, storage and resource management. It was definitely an interesting session as it gave a good perspective of the challenges our customers are facing and the things people care about when it comes to cloud infrastructures or offerings.

On Tuesday I had my Experts One on One session scheduled and I actually managed to attend some sessions. The Experts One on One was great, particular one 15 minute slot as that person showed up with a full diagram of his environment and we discussed some design considerations around his metro clustering solution. My vSphere Q&A session, which I co-presented with Chris Colotti and Frank Denneman was scheduled on Wednesday at 15:00. It was scheduled  in one of the larger rooms and the place filled up. Chris Colotti kicked off with a short introduction of the session and himself after which Frank and I followed. This was the point at which the audience needed to start asking questions… luckily the first person got up and our lovely assistant David Hill ran up and handed the microphone. We were off and it did not stop until the very last second. Great questions and in my opinion it was a very entertaining and educational session. Considering our survey scores I would say that the audience fully agreed. I could not be happier about the outcome (see below).

  • How would you are the session: 4.72 out of 5
  • How likely are you to recommend this session: 9.14 out of 10
  • How likely are you to implement what you’ve learned: 4.61 out of 5
  • How would you rate the speakers overall effectiveness: 4.78 out of 5

For everyone who attended the Q and A please feel free to leave your comments here on how we can improve it in the future, or if there is something you would like to see different. (Different topic, different panel members, different format, etc etc.) I am open to all suggestions.

On Thursday I had my Group Discussion (GD43) planned. Again I did not know what to expect as many had told me that some of the Group Discussions were more a monologue because the audience did not speak up. I might have been lucky or I phrased my questions differently, but whatever was the reason is besides the point… It was GREAT again, just like in Las Vegas we ran out of time, but the interaction was awesome! Excellent discussions and great use cases provided by the audience. I hope they will do these at VMware Partner Exchange as well and of course next year at VMworld!

One of the other things that was definitely a highlight for me was the show down between the Dutch vMaffia and Matt of VMworld TV and the Monster VM. I think all of us had a huge laugh. Things like this is what makes VMworld fun and it is the reason I love working for VMware.

I want to thank a couple of people for an excellent time this week, Chris and Julie Colotti, David Hill, Alan Renouf, Raymon Epping, Mark Erica, Luc Dekens and Frank Denneman. I really enjoyed your company. See you at Partner Exchange or VMworld 2012 in San Francisco or Barcelona!