I got a question on my post about the Customer Experience Improvement Program (ceip) demo, the questions boiled down to the following:
- What is being send to VMware
- Where is the data stored by VMware
- When is the data send to VMware (how often)
The “what” question was easy to answer, as this was documented by John Nicholson on Storagehub.vmware.com for vSAN specifically. Realizing that it isn’t easy to find anywhere what ceip data is stored I figured I would add a link here and also repeat the summary of that article, assuming by now everyone uses a VCSA (if not go to the link):
- SSH into VCSA
- Run command:
cd /var/log/vmware/vsan-health/ - Data collected by online health checks is written and gzipped to files
"<uuid>cloud_health_check_data.json.gz"and"<uuid>vsan_perf_data.json.gz - You can extract the json content by calling
"gunzip -k <gzipped-filename> "or view the contents by calling"zcat <gzipped-filename> "
So that is how you view what is being stored, John also posted an example of the dataset on github for those who just want to have a quick peek. Note that you need an “obfuscation map” (aka key) to make sense out of the data in terms of host-names / VM names / ip-addresses etc. Without that you can stare at the dataset all you want, but you won’t be able to relate it back to a customer. I would also add that we are not storing any VM/Workload data, it is configuration data / feature usage / performance data. Hopefully that will answer the “what” question for you.
Where is the data stored? The data is send to “https://vcsa.vmware.com” and it ends up in VMware’s analytics cloud, which is hosted in secure data centers in the US. The frequency is a bit difficult to answer, as this fully depends on which products are in use, but to my knowledge with vSAN/vSphere it is on an hourly basis. I have asked the VMware team who owns this to create a single page/document with all of the required details needed in it so that security teams can simply be pointed to it.
Hopefully I will have a follow up soon.