Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Blogging

VMworld Sessions, which should I attend?

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With the enormous amount of sessions scheduled at VMworld Europe you are bound to miss out on some of the excellent ones. I browsed through the schedule and decided to write down 6 sessions which you should attend in my opinion, and which I will attend if I can escape the labs:

  • Chad Sakac – Sr Director VMware Strategic Alliance EMC  – Best Practices to Increase Availability and Throughput for the Future of VMware
  • Adam Young – Senior Member Technical Staff – DC08 – vCenter Server for Linux
  • Carter Shanklin – Product Manager – TA01 – Managing VMware With PowerShell
  • Kit Colbert – Senior Staff Engineer – TA07 – Understanding “Host” and “Guest” Memory Usage and Other Memory Management Concepts
  • David Friedlander – Senior Product Manager – Chosing a Solution for vCenter Server Availability(vCenter Server Heartbeat!)
  • Scott Baker – vStorage integrations – TA17 – End-to-End Disaster Recovery Approach with Automated SRM Failback

Three of these six sessions contain information on yet to be released products, vCenter on Linux, vCenter Server Availability and vStorage integration and possibly SRM Failback(Just a rumor). The other three sessions are hosted by subject matter experts which I highly respect for their level of expertise and of which I’m certain that it will be mind blowing!

Write them down and don’t miss out on them!

SRM Failback?

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I get this question a lot:Does SRM have Failback capabilities? The answer is short but not simple, yes it does. Keep in mind that there’s no big red button labeled “Failback” which is the “not simple” part of the answer. Luckily for us the VMware Uptime Blog Team wrote an extensive article on how to do a failback with the current version of Site Recovery Manager. In short this is what one needs to do to failback:

  1. Reverse the replication direction in the storage layer to be from Site B to Site A
  2. Clean up the shadow virtual machines and protection groups on Site A
  3. Clean up the Recovery Plans configured on Site B
  4. Configure the protection group(s) on Site B
  5. Configure the Recovery Plans on Site A
  6. Test recovery from Site B to Site A
  7. Perform the recovery from Site B to Site A

Read the complete article on the Uptime Blog for all the details and show the article to your manager. It includes a table with an the estimated amount of time a failback would normally take manual vs SRM.

Meet the VMTN Experts

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Tom and Eric already broke the news… VMworld Europe will also have a “Meet the VMTN Experts” session:

Tom Howarth already spread the word. Richard Garsthagen has confirmed, the VMworld Europe VMTN Panel gets green light. It’s not going to be a break-out session, VMware choose another format for this year’s VMTN Panel. It will be more like a meet and greet. Richard is working out the details. In the picture you can get a glimpse of the VMworld Europe Community Lounge. Looks cool, doesn’t it. The attendees so far are:

Duncan Epping of Yellow Bricks fame
Alan Renouf of powershell fame
Steve Beaver of Tripwire
Eric Sloof of NTPRO.NL
Tom Howarth The community King and the driving force behind PlanetVM.

This was a shameless copy and paste from ntpro.nl. If you want to meet the VMTN Community Experts or some of the PlanetV12n bloggers keep looking here for more details soon. It will not only be a meet and greet. You will have the chance to ask questions to specific individuals on specific topics. Discuss your current or future design. Maybe you’ve got some weird problem that you just can’t seem to fix. Or well maybe you just want to shake hands… All is possible. More details soon on when, where and who. (A couple more Experts will be announced in the upcoming days.)

Well where, it will be held in the Community Lounge, which looks awesome:

Update your bookmarks: Dave Graham

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Update your bookmarks or add the following blog to your RSS Reader: Flickerdown.com by Dave Graham!

Dave is a technical consultant with EMC. As you can imagine Dave’s blog articles mainly deal about Storage and storage related topics like FCoE and 10GbE. But Dave also writes about the Cloud, which is also heavily tied to Shared Storage of course.

I just grabbed a couple of outtakes to give you an example of what Dave writes about:

source blog article
Storage within the cloud is meaningless without a measurable level of performance that it can be compared against. Since there are no established benchmarks that determine performance of storage within a cloud infrastructure, it is reasonable to apply tiering metrics to storage based on content valuation and service level agreements (SLAs) and utilize this as an overarching methodology to judge COSS storage capabilities based on application set.

source blog article
Policy is enacted on this movie object such that it is automatically moved from Tier 1 to Tier 2 after a fixed period of time and again to Tier 3 based on similar time constraints. Globally, policy is additional set for compression, encryption, deduplication, and optimizations and this is applied for content at rest as well as incoming data. Once data has been moved from tier to tier, there is no really process for retrieving that data and promoting it to a different tier based on access or usage patterns.

Now head over to Dave’s blog and start reading and commenting!

Compare specific ESX configuration items

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Hugo posted a great script. It will compare configuration items between a given set of hosts. This can especially come in handy when you’ve got a huge amount of datastores, portgroups or a huge amount of ESX hosts for that matter. Hugo’s post contains a set of excellent examples. Just check his post for more details and the script, heres what the outcome would look like for now:

InputObject                         SideIndicator
———–                                ————-
esxServer1_Local               <=
esxServer2_Local               =>
DATASTORE_TEST1            =>

Update: Hugo just posted a follow up to his original blog. This new script creates a CSV file, which can be imported in to Excel for example and the result will look like this: