Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

monitoring

CloudPhysics adds functionality: VM reservations/limits and Snapshots

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CloudPhysics just announced two new cards. One card is titled “Snapshots Gone Wild Card“, the other is titled “VM Reservations & Limits Card“. This is the direct result of the contest that CloudPhysics held right before VMworld US. I guess that is the nice thing about being a start-up, being able to respond to community / customer requests quickly. However, it is also due to the nature of the CloudPhysics solution.

All the cards CloudPhysics will be offering are objects by itself, making it easy to add new cards or changing cards based on customer requests without the need to QA the whole platform. Flexibility / Agility right there.

So what exactly was added? The first card “Snapshots gone wild” is all about … yes you guessed it VMware snapshots. Which virtual machines have snapshots? How many snapshots? How old is the snapshot? That is the kind of data it reveals. Considering the many problems I have seen out in the field with snapshots, I would say that this is one you will want to check regularly.

The second card is all about VM Reservations and Limits. Frank and I wrote about this many times, and warned people about the impact many times. I guess most of you are aware of the impact by now, but you would be surprised to see what comes up when you run this card in your environment. I have done many many health checks in the past, and VM limits always kept popping up randomly. Definitely highly recommend to take a look at.

Of course besides these two new cards there are various others which are very useful like the Cluster Health card or the VMware Tools cards. I suggest you head over to CloudPhysics.com and sign up and give it a try.

CloudPhysics #VMworld challenge, win a Mac Pro/Air or Google Nexus

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CloudPhysics just launched their website and with it a beta version of their product. As a great incentive to get people started with their product they came up with a contest where you can earn points by describing your virtualization problems. You can win some nice prices (retina Mac Pro, Google Nexus 7, Mac Air), so make sure to get started soon.

Your score is a calculation of the number of Cards you propose, plus a sum of the amount of activity you spend in the CloudPhysics portal. To achieve the best possible score, be sure to install a CloudPhysics Observer vApp, propose several new cards, vote on cards, and try out all the features of the portal. The greater the amount of activity and engagement, the higher your score can grow.

If you want to get started, go over to app.cloudphysics.com/login and login. Make sure to download the appliance! Now when you have downloaded it and got it up and running you should see data coming in soon. But where you really start collecting points is when you  start suggesting Cards. Look at the Card below, this is where you can start making suggestions, just hover over the lower right of the card to get in to the system…

Each of your suggestions will result in points. On top of that you also get points awarded for using their appliance  and commenting on suggestions from other users. A simple, but very cool challenge. The cool thing about this challenge is that these suggestions could  make it in to the product. In other words, if there is a problem you have faced many times and would like to prevent others from hitting the same thing… Report it and challenge the CloudPhysics people to make it part of their offering!

Current top-3 (after the first day):

  1. Jake Robinson
  2. William Lam
  3. Alan Renouf

Surely you can beat these 3 guys and collect your price at #VMworld. Go for it 🙂

CloudPhysics, not so much stealth mode start-up anymore…

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<disclaimer: I am a technical advisor for CloudPhysics>

cloud physics logoToday at the New England VMUG CloudPhysics has their first official “public appearance”. Yes some of you have heard the name a couple of times before and some of you might even know who the brains are behind this new start-up… for those who don’t let me give a brief introduction.

CloudPhysics was recently founded by John Blumenthal and Irfan Ahmad. Some of you might recognize their names as they used to work at VMware, John was a Product Manager for storage and Irfan was the person who was responsible for awesome features like Storage DRS and Storage IO Control. Together with several other brilliant people, including no one less than Carl “TPS / DRS” Waldspurger acting as an advisor and consultant, they founded a new company.

So what is CloudPhysics about? CloudPhysics is about big data, about centralized data, about analytics, about modeling data. CloudPhysics is essentially about helping you! How? Well let me try to explain that without revealing too much.

We’ve all monitored and managed environments, some of you are responsible for 3 hosts and some might be responsible for 80 hosts in different sites and in different companies. We all face several challenges and in many cases these are similar… How do you find common themes? How do you validate best practices are applied on all levels in your environment? How do you validate if your practices are actually used by others, and do you benefit from them? How do you know if you sized correctly? How do I solve specific problems? Would I benefit from a different storage platform or SSD? All of these are questions or problems you probably face daily and that is where CloudPhysics aims to come in to play.

CloudPhysics will enable you to find common best practices and problems in your environment. CloudPhysics will provide you guidance, this could be custom but also generic through for instance a link to a VMware KB article. They will enable you to compare and explore performance results. Find patterns in your environment… See trends and provide you with meaningful statistics about your environment. Sounds amazing right and probably something you wouldn’t mind testing today… The CloudPhysics product will come as a virtual appliance. The data gathered will go up to the cloud and all of the analysis will happen outside of your environment, of course with various degrees of anonymity.

CloudPhysics is constructing an analytics platform for vSphere for the application of collective intelligence to individual, local vSphere environments and users.  At the same time the platform is intended to service the needs of consulting companies, customers and the blogging community by providing APIs to enable unique exploration and discovery within the dynamic, changing dataset CloudPhysics continuously generates. Access to this dataset enables them to transform qualitative discussions into quantitative views of vSphere design and operation. CloudPhysics is not seeking to build a community; rather, it exists to empower the engineer and architect in all of us, particularly the commentators and critics essential to the industry.

For those who can’t wait, sign up at www.cloudphysics.com now for announcements and news on the beta. I am excited about CloudPhysics and I hope you all are as well.

Managing availability through vCenter Alarms

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Last week a customer asked me a question about how to respond to for instance a partial failure in their SAN environment. A while back I had a similar question from one of my other customers so I more or less knew where to look, and I actually already blogged about this over a year ago when I was showing some of the new vSphere features. Although this is fairly obvious I hardly ever see people using this and hence the reason I wanted to document one of the obvious things that you can implement…. Alarms

Alarms can be used to trigger an alert, and that is of course the default behavior of predefined alarms. However you can also create your own alarms and associate an action with it. I am showing the possibilities here and am not saying that this is a best practice, but the following two screenshots show that it is possible to place a host in maintenance mode based on degraded storage redundancy.

First you define the alarm:

And then you define the action:

Again, this is action could have a severe impact when a switch fails and I wouldn’t recommend it, but I wanted to ensure everyone understands the type of combinations that are possible. I would generally recommend to send an SNMP trap or even a notification email… and I would recommend to at least define the following alarms:

  • Degraded Storage Path Redundancy
  • Duplicate IP Detected
  • HA Agent Error
  • Host connection lost
  • Host error
  • Host warning
  • Host WWN changed
  • Host WWN conflict
  • Lost Network Connectivity
  • Lost Network Redundancy
  • Lost Storage Connectivity
  • Lost Storage Path Redundancy

Many of these deal with hardware issues and you might already be monitoring for them, if not make sure you monitor them through vCenter and take appropriate action when needed.

Alarm Actions, exploring the new version of ESX/vCenter

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Eric Sloof(1, 2, 3) already explored the new “alarms and actions” capabilities. There’s one that really stands out in my opinion in the next release of ESX/vCenter(vSphere):

Indeed, “Enter maintenance mode“. Now you might wonder when you would want to use this. Wouldn’t it be nice that when your hardware is degraded, for instance memory status changed or hardware power changed, the host enters maintenance mode. I wouldn’t want to run virtual machines on a host that has a memory error or runs on only one power supply. Of course this action only applies to the “host” objects: