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Schedule it today, VMworld Europe 2011, sign up for #VSP1682 and #GD43

Duncan Epping · Sep 29, 2011 ·

I just looked at the VMworld website and it seems that most sessions are filling up quickly, including my sessions. If you want to to attend these sessions make sure you schedule them rather sooner than later! These are my sessions:

Tuesday 13:30 – EXPERTS-01 – Knowledge Experts One-on-One
These are 15 minute one-on-one session where you will get the chance to ask me anything. So if you want to sit down and discuss something make sure to schedule / book it!
Wednesday 15:00 – VSP1682 VMware vSphere Clustering Q&A (Twitter hashtag: #VSP1682)
Our Q&A session… Frank Denneman and I will be answering anyone question related to HA, DRS, DPM or Storage DRS. Chris Colotti will be moderating it! We will be giving away a bunch of signed copies of our book again to those who manage to ask a question which stumps us. As Chris likes to call it stump the chumps.
Thursday 11:00 – GD43 vSphere Clustering with Duncan Epping (Twitter hashtag: #GD43)
This is a true group discussion. Room for roughly 50 people and I will ask several questions around HA / DRS / SDRS and we will discuss scenarios / environments / challenges. Make sure to sign up quickly as there are only 50 spots available!

Frank and I are also planning a book signing session, as soon as we have the details we will fill you in!

Cloud Computing with VMware vCloud Director on Kindle for $ 9.99

Duncan Epping · Sep 22, 2011 ·

In May of 2011 we published our book through Usenix as part of the short topics series. When this book was released as an ebook, shortly after the paper version, it originally was more expensive than the paper copy. I contacted the people responsible within Usenix and asked them if they could do anything about it. As Frank and I went through the same procedure for our own book I explained what some of the benefits were of using a $ 9.99 price and Usenix told me they would discuss it internally. I just received the great news that the book has a new price of just 9.99 and is available on Kindle through the Amazon store. I hope everyone appreciates the effort we’ve put in to it and the fact that Usenix decided to lower the price to $ 9.99!

Here are the details:

Book #24, Cloud Computing with VMware vCloud Director, by John Arrasjid, Duncan Epping, Steve Kaplan Ben Lin, Michael Haines and Raman Veeramraju. This Short Topics book provides use cases, design considerations, and technology guidance to answer your questions about cloud computing. The primary intended audience is those interested in learning about VMware cloud computing products and solutions, but content on third-party technologies is also included where appropriate. Without diving overly deeply into specific design patterns, it provides insight into the tools to fit your design criteria and it explains the concepts used by vCloud ranging from Organization Virtual Datacenters to External Networks.

Authors: John Arrasjid, Duncan Epping, Michael Haines, Steve Kaplan, Ben Lin and Raman Veeramraju
Paperback: 136 pages
Publisher: Sage/Usenix (May, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-1-931971-83-6

Buy Now | eBook (Kindle)

vSphere HA Deepdive page update

Duncan Epping · Sep 21, 2011 ·

I just finished overhauling the vSphere HA Deepdive page. It now includes details about all versions of HA but is specifically split up in two sections:

4.1 and prior
5.0

I also cleaned up all comments. Although there were a lot of useful details in there the amount of comments made it impossible to maintain. With all changes in 5.0 I wanted to make sure the page was a single source of truth and no myths/rumors would start floating around based on the outdated comments. Please note that I will clean up the comments every once in a while and update the page when needed based on these comments. If there are any questions / comments or things you feel should be explained in this deepdive, feel free to drop them here.

vSphere Storage Appliance – Why I think it is cool

Duncan Epping · Sep 19, 2011 ·

While doing some workshops and presentations for some of our partners and customers one of the comments I usually here when discussing the vSphere Storage Appliance is “Why not just buy a cheap NAS device”? Well there are a couple of arguments:

Support, many lower end cheap devices are not on the HCL
Management, most storage devices require specific knowledge and can be difficult to setup
Resiliency, yes resiliency..

Resiliency is what I want to expand on. I like the vSphere Storage Appliance because of the resilience it offers. Many lower end storage devices have a single storage processor and some even a single power-supply but that is different for the VSA. Lets assume you have a 3 node cluster with each of these three serving up their local storage. What will it look like?

I hope this image is clear but what we see above is a three node cluster. Each node holds 2 volumes. One “active” volume and a Replica volume. Now the Replica volume is where the resiliency comes in to play. If one of the nodes would fail one of the other nodes, depending on which holds the replica, picks up! Yes indeed the VSA volumes are RAID-1 and the failure is literally detected in seconds. Note that this is a synchronous technique, so an acknowledgement is required from both the active and replica of the datastore.

In my example above when ESXi-1 (on the left) would fail then ESXi-2 (middle) would pick up as it is holding the replica. Note that this is a seamless fail-over if the VM is running on a node other than ESXi-1. The amount of time it takes for the fail-over to occur is literally second and the replica will be available through the same ip-address. If the VM happened to be running on ESXi-1 than vSphere HA would restart that virtual machine is in any other scenario.

This video demos what it looks like when a host fails:

For more details on the VSA I would like to recommend the following articles by Cormac Hogan:

CDP Information using the commandline…

Duncan Epping · Sep 18, 2011 ·

I was doing some troubleshooting this week and needed the CDP network info. I did not have access to a vSphere client, only HP iLO access. I remoted into the ESXi box and enable ESXi Shell. I knew that I could dig up the info using esxcfg-info but the amount of details provided are overwhelming and I would rather get only the info back I need without too much hassle. I figured there was another way:

vim-cmd hostsvc/net/query_networkhint

The one thing that I find it very useful for is to check the configured VLAN(s) on the port. Below is the result of the above command:

(vim.host.PhysicalNic.NetworkHint) [ (vim.host.PhysicalNic.NetworkHint) { dynamicType = , device = "vmnic0", subnet = (vim.host.PhysicalNic.NetworkHint.IpNetwork) [ (vim.host.PhysicalNic.NetworkHint.IpNetwork) { dynamicType = , vlanId = 3001, ipSubnet = "10.91.34.1-10.91.35.254", }, (vim.host.PhysicalNic.NetworkHint.IpNetwork) { dynamicType = , vlanId = 2912, ipSubnet = "10.91.32.1-10.91.32.63", } ], connectedSwitchPort = (vim.host.PhysicalNic.CdpInfo) null, lldpInfo = (vim.host.PhysicalNic.LldpInfo) null, }, ]