Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

VMkernel Observations (VOBs)

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I never really looked at VOBs but as this came up last week during a customer meeting I decided to look in to it a bit. I hadn’t realized there was such a large number of them in the first place. My conversation was in the context of vSAN, but there are many different VOBs. For those who don’t know VOBs are system events. These events are logged and you can create different alarms for when they are being logged.

You can check the full list of VOBs on ESXi, SSH in to it and then look at this file:

  • /usr/lib/vmware/hostd/extensions/hostdiag/locale/en/event.vmsg

When they are triggered you will see them here:

  •  /var/log/vobd.log

And as stated when you want to do something with them you can create a customer alarm. Select “specific event occuring on this object” and click next:

Now you add an event, simply click the “+” and remove the current value and simply copy/paste the VOB string in, the string will look something like this: “esx.problem.vob.vsan.pdl.offline”. Hit enter when you added it and then click “Next” and “Finish”.

I find the following useful myself:

  • esx.problem.vsan.net.redundancy.reduced
  • esx.problem.vob.vsan.lsom.componentthreshold
  • esx.problem.vob.vsan.lsom.diskerror
  • esx.problem.vob.vsan.pdl.offline
  • esx.problem.vsan.lsom.congestionthreshold
  • esx.problem.vob.vsan.dom.nospaceduringresync

There are many more, and I just listed those I found useful for vSAN, for more detail check the following links:

 

VMworld 2017 is around the corner, which sessions should you attend? My tips!

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Every year I go over “all” accepted VMworld sessions which are publicly listed and provide my top 15 / 20 / 25 / 30 list of VMworld sessions. (Some sessions won’t be revealed until the day before as they could be on the topic of certain announcements) I have had comments in the past around my selection and I hope it is clear that this is my opinion based on the subject and speaker. In some cases they may be familiar names like Cormac Hogan, in some cases it may be a less known person which I’ve seen presenting in the past. I am looking for mostly deep technical sessions, or sessions which I know will simply be enjoyable to attend. Considering there are only a couple of weeks between VMworld US and EMEA I will only do a single post this time. Some sessions may not be accepted for EMEA unfortunately.

Here we go, my top 15 sessions!

  1. VMware CTO Innovation Panel: What’s Next? [FUT3025PU] with Ray O’Farrell, Christos Karamanolis, Chris Wolf, Shawn Bass and Mike Wookey
    I always enjoy panel sessions, and when there’s one with our CTOs it is definitely worth attending. I hope there will be some nice hints in this session of what to expect from VMware in the upcoming years and some good discussion around which directions the industry is heading towards.
  2. Storage at Memory Speed: Finally, Nonvolatile Memory Is Here [FUT3040BU] by Rajesh Venkatasubramanian and Richard Brunner
    NVM is going to change the world of memory and storage, if you want to be prepared for the future then make sure to register. I’ve seen Rajesh present a couple of times and there’s always something to learn, haven’t had the pleasure of seeing Richard live yet, but that is about to change!
  3. vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive: Part 2 [SER1872BU] by Frank Denneman and Niels Hagoort
    The book was thorough, deep… extremely deep, and both are excellents presenters. So this session has to be on the list. If you want to know more about NUMA, overlays etc then this is a must.
  4. Migrate to the vCenter Server Appliance You Should [SER2958BU] by William Lam and Emad Younis
    I am big fan of the vCenter Server Appliance, and anytime you can learn how to migrate from the Windows version to the appliance you should. Plus, William and Emad are great speakers!
  5. vSAN 6.6: A Day in the Life of an I/O [STO1926BU] by John Nicholson and Pete Koehler
    Considering all the changes in vSAN and considering the speakers this is a must attend for everyone interested in what the IO path for vSAN looks like. Are you using Dedupe/Compresssion, RAID-1 or RAID-5 or maybe even Encryption? John and Pete will explain what the IO path will look like!
  6. The Power Hour: vSphere PowerCLI 10th Birthday Edition [SER1875BU] by Luc Dekens and Alan Renouf
    The dynamic duo of PowerCLI. I will let it up to you guys to decide who is Batman and who is Robin though. I think I have seen a dozen sessions by these guys and they never disappoint. Usually a large number of demoes and a level of detail that you don’t see often.
  7. Virtual Volumes Technical Deep Dive [STO2446BU] by Patrick Dirks and Pete Flecha
    I have attended various sessions by Pete and Patrick and they were excellent every single time. Patrick is a senior manager in R&D managing the VVol development team, so if you have any in-depth questions… bring them!
  8. vCenter Performance Deep Dive [SER1504BU] by Ravi Soundararajan and Priya Sethuraman
    This was by far the best session at VMworld last year, do I need to say more?
  9. VMware Cloud on AWS: Storage Deep Dive [STO1890BU] by Ben Meadowcroft and Matthew Amdur
    Very interesting topic, Ben is the PM and Matt the lead engineer, so I expect it to be deep!
  10. vSAN Management Today and in the Future [STO1378BU] by JunChi Zhang and Christian Dickmann
    Last year Christian had various tech previews that showed the potential future of vSAN. I think every single demo became reality in the 2 releases that followed. So if you want to know where we stand today and where we will be in the future with vSAN then make sure to attend this one!
  11. VMware Cloud on AWS: A Technical Deep Dive [LHC2384BU] by Frank Denneman and Ray Budavari
    Interesting topic, haven’t heard too much (in-depth) on VMware Cloud on AWS so this would be a great session to dive deep and get more familiar with the offering and the architecture behind it!
  12. A Deep Dive into vSphere 6.5 Core Storage Features and Functionality [SER1143BU] by Cody Hosterman and Cormac Hogan
    Probably my two fav storage bloggers. Cody and Cormac jointly wrote a white paper on this topic and have been the go to people for anything on core storage for the past years, and great speakers. You can’t go wrong!
  13. Advanced Troubleshooting of ESXi Server 6.x for vSphere Gurus [SER2965BU] by Ragavendra Kumar and Abhilash Kunhappan
    I don’t know the presenters, but the topic alone makes me want to attend this one…
  14. Extreme Performance Series – ALL
    Not listing a specific session in this case, the performance team has many sessions, just search for “extreme performance series” and they will pop-up. They will all be deep, and most likely very educational.
  15. Sustainability as a Competitive Advantage [FUT2051BU] by Rob Glanzman and Nicola Acutt
    This is the odd one in the mix. Not a deepdive, and I don’t even think it is a technical session. I know Rob and Nicola well though, and I know what Nicola has been working on and this session caught my attention as it is something different for a change. How can you get a competitive edge through sustainability?

And for those who care, here are my own two sessions:

Must have book: Host Resources Deep Dive

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Yesterday I was fortunate enough to receive a copy of a new book by Frank Denneman and Niels Hagoort. This new book is titled Host Resources Deep Dive and is available as of today in the US through Amazon. As most of you know I wrote the Clustering Deepdive series together with Frank, which means I kinda knew what to expect in terms of level of depth. Kinda, as this is a whole new level of depth. I don’t think I have ever seen (for example) topics like NUMA or NIC drivers explained at this level of depth. If you ask me, it is fair to say that Frank and Niels redefined the term “deep dive”.

Some fun facts before I write a bit more about the book:

  • Started writing in March 2016
  • 122.543 words
  • 5217 paragraphs
  • 23 chapters
  • 569 pages
  • 311 screenshots and diagrams
  • ISBN-10: 1540873064
  • ISBN-13: 978-1540873064

569 pages and 120k+ words… that is a lot. Especially considering this is “only” covering “host resources” and not things like HA and DRS. It is thick, this is a proper book, I took a quick pic, just to give you an idea.

As mentioned, the topic is Host Resources, but what does that mean? The book is carved up in 4 sections: CPU, Memory, Storage and Networking. The book starts with a great foreword by VMware’s CTO Kit Colbert. And then each section starts with a prologue. Frank and Niels managed to ask 4 industry titans if you ask me to write these prologues. VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger wrote the CPU prologue. Carl Waldspurger, the inventor of TPS and DRS, wrote the Memory prologue. The CTO for Storage & Availability, Christos Karamanolis, wrote the Storage prologue. Last but definitely not least, Andrew Lambeth (VMware Fellow), who was responsible for the ESX network stack and was part of the team who developed NSX (in the Nicira days!), wrote the Network prologue. A great addition if you ask me to excellent content.

Now that you know the book discusses CPU, Memory, Storage and Networking, what kind of topics can you expect? Well this is what Amazon states, which is spot on: This book explains the concepts and mechanisms behind the physical resource components and the VMkernel resource schedulers, which enables you to:

  • Optimize your workload for current and future Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) systems.
  • Discover how vSphere Balanced Power Management takes advantage of the CPU Turbo Boost functionality, and why High Performance does not.
  • How the 3-DIMMs per Channel configuration results in a 10-20% performance drop.
  • How TLB works and why it is bad to disable large pages in virtualized environments.
  • Why 3D XPoint is perfect for the vSAN caching tier.
  • What queues are and where they live inside the end-to-end storage data paths.
  • Tune VMkernel components to optimize performance for VXLAN network traffic and NFV environments.
  • Why Intel’s Data Plane Development Kit significantly boosts packet processing performance.

What is unique about this book, in my opinion, is that it contains details on various topics which I have not been abled to find anywhere else. I guess the fact that Frank had various conversations with the lead architect for the Intel Xeon CPU Microarchitecture helped (Chris Gianos). Some of the diagrams on NUMA for instance, I could easily see Intel wanting to use them for their documentation.

One more quote from Frank and Niels on the book, which I think describes the essence:

The idea is to debunk long-lived myths and reinvigorate the extraordinary world of virtualization. We hope to wake them up, and get them to shy away from the statement that the hypervisor is commodity. While the customers and partners where focusing on creating platforms that run on top the hypervisor, they have lost sight of the improvements of hardware and software made the last 5 years. Revealing these features allow them to create better performing systems that are easier to manage. The book is all about the focus on host level building blocks that helps you to create and operate a consistent infrastructure layer that runs modern and future compute, network and storage platforms.

What more can I say? Just go out and pick it up! Now it is time for me to relax in my chair and get educated! (Don’t tell my daughter though I am relaxing in her chair :))

Vote for your fav bloggers / podcast etc!

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The time has come again, vote for your top blog / podcast etc! Just a heads up, I decided to have my blog removed from the list. I have been listed in the top 10 for the past 9 years and had the number 1 spot for the past 8 editions. I felt it was time for new blood to enter the top 10. It was time for a big change. Eric’s blog lists what he feels people should be basing their votes/ranking on. I sincerely hope though that people will look at the list in a different way this year. Last year I strongly felt that William deserved to win, but I suspect a lot of people voted for me for “longevity” reasons and what I produced in the years before.

I would like to ask people to look at the list in a different way this year and vote based on what people produced over the past 12 months. Who stood out the past 12 months, who produced those awesome deep dives, who had unique material and didn’t just copy the release notes, or produced just “next next finish” type blogs, or just copied/pasted the slides from blogger briefings. I know frequency is part of Eric’s list. Personally I rank a person with 10 high quality deep dives higher than someone with 100 ‘next next finish’ posts. (While the ‘next next finish’ posts may get more google clicks, it has hardly any value in my opinion.)

Let me list a couple of blogs that stood out to me for various reasons, I am not going to list the full top 12 I voted for, just 5 people I wanted to call out for various reasons:

  • Cormac Hogan – Currently listed as number 3, high quality and high quantity, always love to read his insights / opinion on startups etc! Having worked with Cormac on papers / books, I know how fast he knocks out material, it is insane.
  • William Lam – Currently listed as number 2, high quality and high quantity number of blogs, with really unique content. Is there anyone sharing more unique info than William these days? I don’t think so.
  • Cody Hosterman – Currently listed as number 54. What stood out to me, Cody is not a VMware employee, but the level of depth and detail in his blogs are astonishing. Hence he got a place in my top 12!
  • Myles Gray – One of the “newer” bloggers. Some great networking blogs on there with content I have not seen anywhere else, it is time for some new folks to bubble up!
  • Luc Dekens – He has been around for ages. Hasn’t really received the respect, from a top bloggers point of view, he deserves. The undisputed king of PowerCLI and VMTN response time, and a great blogger.

Honourable mention: Brian Graf aka vTagion. His blog posts on HA/DRS last year around the release were awesome, but than again he was the PM for those products so I didn’t expect anything else.

Oh and before I forget, my fav podcast: Virtually Speaking with Pete Flecha and John Nicholson for sure. Only one I tune in to every week! Anyway, I hope you folks all go over the list in a similar way. Think about the past 12 months and which blogs helped you the most, which were unique, which stood out consistently. Think outside the box, don’t vote on someone simply because he was in the top 25 last year. Vote for them based on what they have produced the past 12 months!

http://topvblog2017.questionpro.com/