Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

Running your VSAN witness for a 2 node cluster on a 2 node cluster

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A week ago we had a discussion on twitter about a scenario which was talked about at VMworld. The scenario is one where you have two 2-node clusters and for each 2-node cluster the required Witness VM is running on the other. Let me show you what I mean to make it clear:

The Witness VM on Cluster A is the witness for Cluster B, and the Witness VM on Cluster B is the witness for Cluster A. As it stands today this is not a supported configuration out of the box. For ongoing support, it is required that users go through the RPQ process so VMware can validate the design. Please contact your VMware representative for more details.

A knowledge base article should be published on this topic soon, if and when it is published I will update this post and point to it.

Going to VMworld and want to #GiveBack? Buy a shirt!

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Joe Baguley pointed me to something cool this week. An intern team in the UK has joined the Million Makers entrepreneurial fundraising challenge and will be selling cool shirts at VMworld of which proceeds will go to the Prince’s Trust.

The Prince’s Trust is a charity in the United Kingdom founded in 1976 by Charles, Prince of Wales to help young people aged 13 to 30 get into jobs, education and training. Many of the young people they help are in, or leaving, care, facing issues such as homelessness or mental health problems, or have been in trouble with the law. Their free programmes give young people the practical and financial support they need to stabilise their lives.

About the challenge, the Million Makers is an entrepreneurial fundraising challenge set by the trust which sees teams of employees from companies across the UK competing to raise at least £10,000 or more over a period of six months. The competition is a learning and development tool proven to build essential business skills and motivate your employees. Teams are invited to pitch their business plan in a Dragons’ Den-style panel of senior business leaders. Presentation skills are put to the test in order to secure £1,500 seed funding from The Prince’s Trust (this has already been secured).

How can you help? Below is the design of the shirt that will be sold through the VMworld store. The cost is going to be 20 Euro and there will only be 120 available at VMworld, so make sure you get one on day 1 as I suspect these will sell out fast, this is how you can GiveBack! I’ve been told that they will also be made available somehow online soon, so for those who are not going to VMworld there will be an option soon to buy one, I will let you folks know where I hear how/where/what. For now, make a mental note and pick one up!

SPBM integration with vRealize Automation

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Last week a new vRealize Automation plugin was released. The plugin enables the use of storage policies within vRealize Automation, or as the Solutions Exchange page says:

Integrating storage policy consumption model into vRealize Automation. This integration enables VM-granular control based on the Storage policy based management framework. This solution exposes vSphere VM Storage policies to vRealize Automation service catalog allows the ability to dynamically assign individual VM storage polcies to virtual disks based on their storage requirements characteristics (performance, availability, security, etc).

Pretty neat solution which was shown also during the VMworld keynote. More extensive demos around the capabilities can be viewed below, and more details around the plugin and how to install / use it can be found here.

 

Sharing VMworld slides

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I know the VMworld team will share them as well over time, but I figured I would do the same thing through my blog. Here are two decks. First deck is the deck for “VMworld – sto7650 -Software defined storage @VMmware primer”. This session I presented with Lee Dilworth. I presented VSAN and Lee did the VVol and VAIO section. Second deck is the deck for “VMworld 2016 – INF8036 – enforcing a vSphere cluster design with PowerCLI automation” which I presented with Chris Wahl. I added the youtube video that the VMworld team shared to the second deck as well. Hope you folks find it useful.

download / comments for “sto7650 -Software defined storage @VMmware primer”

download / comments for “INF8036 – enforcing a vSphere cluster design with PowerCLI automation”

download / comments for “INF7875 – A day in the life of a VSAN IO.”

Want to watch a VMworld 2016 session?

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I had a long discussion with the VMworld team about this the past editions and I am happy to say that ALL sessions have been made available to the public straight after the event. VMware made all VMworld 2016 session available to the public. You can find them here: http://www.vmworld.com/en/sessions/2016.html. And also, if you want a more “limited” list, you can go for the top ranked sessions. You can find the top-10 session of each VMworld day here: http://www.vmworld.com/en/sessions/top-10-us.html.

There is one session I want to call out, I wasn’t able to do a live blog on it, mainly because it went deep, and it went deep fast. Ravi R. is one of the best deep tech speakers I have seen: INF8108 – Extreme Performance Series: vCenter Performance Deep Dive.

Thanks VMworld team for doing this. Time for some binge watching 🙂