Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

Changing your dvPortgroup settings? (need your input!)

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I am just wondering if I am the only one who doesn’t understand this. I had a discussion with our vDS team around changing the dvPortgroup settings. This can only been done after the dvPortgroup has been created. On top of that it gets created with standard values of which some don’t really follow my general best practices. (For instance Forged Transmits is set to Accept by default instead of Reject.)

With a regular vSwitch you could just set all your preferences on the vSwitch. The Portgroups that you would create would inherit the properties of the vSwitch. Of course when needed you could always override these properties on a per Portgroup level. However with a dvSwitch this isn’t possible as you cannot set these properties on the dvSwitch level. A dvPortgroup however is created with default settings which you can’t change during the creation.

Apparently this decision has been made after many customer complained about the complexity of the vSwitch / Portgroup inheritance concept. I have never found this a problem, or even complex to be honest and I was wondering what you think about this?

Do you prefer the current method or would you for instance like to have the option to change the defaults? I think having a “default dvPortgroup template” would be a nice enhancement. Please leave a comment and I will, if needed, contact our Product Manager to discuss this and will do my best to get it on the roadmap.

VMworld San Francisco Run 2010

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In 2009 I was one of the people who came up with the idea to run the Golden Gate Bridge during VMworld. This idea got a little out of hand and we ended up with roughly 200 runners and 4 Sponsors. It was probably one of the best social events I ever attended during VMworld.

This year we expected that a lot more people wanted to join and as such the VMworld Organization is running (:-)) the event this year.

src

What: 5k out-and-back course
When: Sunday, August 29th at 5:00 p.m.
Where: Crissy Field, San Francisco
Who: VMworld 2010 attendees and spouses
How: Registration and further information to come out next week.

VMware related acronyms

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We were just talking about some random VMware acronyms during a lab day and I thought I would write the ones down which some of us didn’t know. (Even google did not have the answer to some) I guess the most difficult one to figure out was VPXA/VPXD, which refers to VPX which was the official name for vCenter back in the days….

  • FDM = Fault Domain Manager
  • CSI = Clustering Services Infrastructure
  • PAE = Propero Application Environment
  • ESX = Elastic Sky X
  • GSX = Ground Storm X or Ground Swell X
  • VPX = Virtual Provisioning X
  • VPXA = Virtual Provisioning X Agent
  • VPXD = Virtual Provisioning X Daemon
  • VMX = Virtual Machine eXecutable
  • AAM = Automated Availability Manager
  • VIX = Virtual Infrastructure eXtension
  • VIM = Virtual Infrastructure Management
  • DAS = Distributed Availability Service
  • ccagent = Control Center agent
  • vswif = Virtual Switch Interface
  • vami =Virtual Appliance Management Infrastructure
  • vob = VMkernel Observation
  • MARVIN = Modular Automated Rackable Infrastructure Node
  • WCP = Workload Control Plane

How about code names for releases? Well we had a couple, note that the first name usually refers to ESX and the second to vCenter, so for KL “Kadinsky” was the code name for ESX and Logan for vCenter:

  • DM = Dali/McKinley = VI 3.0
  • NP = Neptune/Pluto = VI 3.5
  • KL = Kadinsky/Logan = vSphere 4.0
  • KL.next = vSphere 4.1
  • MN = Matisse/Newberry = vSphere 5.0
  • OP = Oliveira/Pikes = vSphere 5.5

Of course the big question is where the “X” comes from in ESX, GSX etc. To be honest I don’t know but according to VMware old-timer Mike Di Petrillo (source is this interview (21:30) by Rodney Haywood) the X had been added by an Engineer to make it sound technical and cool!

If there are any to VMware related acronyms that you feel should be on the list which are not too obvious… leave me a comment. (And too obvious would be something like vDS.)

Storage Migrations?

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On an internal mailing list we had a very useful discussion around storage migrations when a SAN is replaced or a migration needs to take place to a different set of disks. Many customers face this at some point. The question usually is what is the best approach? SAN Replication or Storage vMotion… Both have its pros and cons I guess.

SAN Replication:

  • Can utilize Array based copy mechanisms for fast replication (+)
  • Per LUN migration, high level of concurrency (+)
  • Old volumes still available (+)
  • Need to resignature or mount the volume again (-)
    • A resignature also means you will need to reregister the VM! (-)
  • Downtime for the VM during the cut over (-)

Storage vMotion:

  • No downtime for your VMs (+)
  • Fast Storage vMotion when your Array supports VAAI (+)
    • If your Array doesn’t support VAAI migrations can be slow (-)
    • Induced cost if VAAI isn’t supported (-)
    • Only intra Array not across arrays (-)
  • No resignaturing or re-registering needed (+)
  • Per VM migration (-)
    • Limited concurrency (2 per host, 8 per vmfs volume) (-)

As you can see both have its pros and cons and it boils down to the following questions:

How much down time can you afford?
How much time do you have for the migration?

VCDX Prep Workshop Powerpoint published…

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Just got noted that the Presentation of the VCDX 3 Preperation Workshop has been published. This Powerpoint presentation was given by John Arrasjid and Pang Chen during Partner Exchange and got a lot of great feedback. For everyone aiming to become a VCDX over the course of the upcoming months this is definitely a must read!

VCDX Defense Preparation

Preparation time
  • Plan on working a minimum of 30-40 hours to complete the application and supporting documentation.
Mandatory VDCX documentation
  • Architectural design document with diagrams and blueprints
  • Implementation and next steps documentation
  • Validation/test plans
  • Operational plan/guide
  • Installation and configuration instructions