Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Guess the VMworld band aka #VMworldBand

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It is that time of the year again, guess the VMworld band! So lets join the fun, the “first” correct guess will be rewarded with the opportunity to meet the band that you choose before the VMworld party on Wednesday August 28th at AT&T Park aka home of the Giants!

https://twitter.com/DuncanYB/status/358229465190502401

https://twitter.com/DuncanYB/status/358232140699271169

Want to attend PuppetConf 22/23 August in San Francisco for free?

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Do you want to attend PuppetConf 22/23 August in San Francisco for free? The Puppet Labs folks were so kind to provide me with 2 registration codes, if you want to attend their conference in San Francisco this year just drop a comment with why you love Puppet and I will randomly pick two winners.

I hoped I would be able to attend myself but unfortunately it clashes with another conference for me. I believe they will have over 70 sessions and they have labs. So a great way to get to learn about Puppet and meet like minded people! More info can be found on PuppetConf.com. Anyway, if you like to go but haven’t secured your ticket yet, drop a comment here and maybe you will win one of the two tickets I have available. Good luck.

For those who aren’t lucky enough to win a ticket… I have a discount code which gives you $ 200,- off, just use “DuncanEpping” when you register!

Deadline: July 25th 2013

Testing your infrastructure!

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Last week I was helping someone on the VMTN community forums. They were hitting what appeared to be strange HA behavior. After some standard questions this person told me that all VMs were powered down after a network outage. Sounds like a familiar problem? Yes I can hear most of you think: Isolation response set to “power off” and no proper network redundancy?

Well yes and no. They had the isolation response indeed configured to “power off” all VMs when the host is isolated. They did however have proper network redundancy, so how on earth did this happen? With 2 physical NICs and 2 physical switches and only 1 being impacted this should not have happened right?!?

Wrong! In this case the fail-over from a “vmkernel” perspective worked fine. The first “path” went down, so the second was used for this management vmkernel. All VMs were up and running until this point, and they remained running until… network connection was restored and the vmnic returned to the original physical NIC. Meaning that the mac address that showed up on port 1 popped up on port 2 and then went back to 1 again. The switch was not impressed and went through the spanning tree process and traffic was blocked instantly as a result of it. Now when traffic is blocked bad things can happen, especially when you configure HA to “power off” VMs. Basically what caused this issue to happen was the fact the spanning tree was not set to the recommended “port fast”, more details here.

I knew instantly that this was the reason for this problem, not because I know stuff about HA but because I had seen this many times in the past while testing environments I configured and designed. Not just testing after implementing a new infrastructure, but also testing after making changes to an infrastructure or introducing a new version / feature. I guess this kind of comes back to the “disaster” scenario as well, test it if you want to know if it works as expected. Just a simple example, I want to introduce QoS for my vMotion network and make changes to my physical network. Now what? How do I test these changes? How many times do I run through my test scenarios? What kind of “problems” do I introduce during my tests?

So I guess by now some might wonder why on earth I brought this up… well the problem above could have been prevented by simply testing the infrastructure when implemented and after changes have been introduced, and maybe even on a regular basis. If HA / Networking was tested properly, those VMs would not have been powered off…

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