Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

PSO

Job openings -> vCloud Consultants!

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Here I am again. VMware Professional Services has four openings at the moment. All these are EMEA based roles. Preferably UK/France/Germany/Netherlands. Notice the “Cloud Services” part of it! This is a brand new team:

As part of VMware’s strategic vCloud initiative, VMware is developing a new Cloud Services team that is 100% focused on deploying VMware-based “clouds” at Service Providers as well as enterprises. The Cloud Services team is organized centrally within the WW Technical Services Organization and will work directly with the VMware Cloud sales and architecture teams to help customers implement a VMware-based cloud. The Cloud Services team will focus initially on Cloud Service Providers, but will also be involved in developing the services model for bringing cloud computing to enterprise customers.

So if you are interested and are looking for a new challenge take a look at the following openings:

If you need more info about Professional Services, VMware as an employer or whatsoever please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. (duncan at yellow-bricks.com)

It’s a sad day…

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For me personally it’s a sad day because my colleague, Yvo, has just resigned. Yvo is part of the VMware PSO Benelux team as a Senior Consultant and Operational Readiness Practice Lead and besides a great guy also one of the best consultants I ever worked with. Of course I am happy for Yvo and fully understand his decision as this is a great career opportunity and wish him all the best in the world at Cisco. (Get me a box UCS will you?!?! ;-))

As you can imagine we will more than likely need someone to fill Yvo’s spot as a Senior Consultant. So for one of you this might just be what you have been waiting for. If you are fluently Dutch and English, willing to travel, flexible and an expert on virtualization and have got solid consultancy skills you might just be the person we need. If you think you are or if you want more info, drop me an email and I will get you in contact with the right people or we can have an informal chat about the position. (duncan at yellow-bricks.com)

First Success of VMware’s Performance Service Offering

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Scott Drummonds just posted a new blog article which deals about an upcoming VMware PSO offering. When Scott Drummonds is involved you know the topic of this offering is performance. In this case it’s performance related to SQL databases and I/O bottlenecks, which is probably the most reported issue. As Scott explains briefly they were able to identify the issue rather quickly by monitoring the physical servers and the virtual environment.

I guess the quote of Scott’s article captures the essence:

In the customer’s first implementation of the virtual infrastructure, both SQL Servers, X and Y, were placed on RAID group A. But in the native configuration SQL Server X was placed on RAID group B. This meant that the storage bandwidth of the physical configuration was approximately 1850 IOPS. In the virtual configuration the two databases shared a single 800 IOPS RAID volume.It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that users are going to complain when a critical SQL Server instances goes from 1050 IOPS to 400. And this was not news to the VI admin on-site, either. What we found as we investigated further was that virtual disks requested by the application owners were used in unexpected and undocumented ways and frequently demanded more throughput than originally estimated. In fact, through vscsiStats analysis (Using vscsiStats for Storage Performance Analysis), my contact and I were able to identify an “unused” VMDK with moderate sequential IO that we immediately recognized as log traffic. Inspection of the application’s configuration confirmed this.

Thanks vSphere, you will cost me my job!

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As some of you know I did a health check in Saudi Arabia a couple of weeks ago. A health check is a relatively short engagement. A couple of days on-site and a day off-site for a report. When vSphere went GA I started thinking about all the things I discovered during this particular health check. Now some might say that the things I discovered were low hanging fruit. The truth is that during health checks the things discovered are usually low hanging fruit. Usually it is not because the Sys Admins don’t have enough knowledge, but because they either don’t get any time to manage their environment properly or they’ve been doing it for so long they don’t see the obvious anymore… Don’t get me wrong, there is more to a health check than just the obvious stuff, but I merely want to point out the improvements vSphere brought us in terms of consistent installation / configuration and alarms / actions.

Here’s a short list of the obvious things I usually discover during a health check:

  • Snapshots
  • Lack of redundancy on Service Console or VMkernel
  • Inconsistent naming schemes(Port groups)
  • Inconsistent configuration
  • DNS configuration issues
  • Missing advanced HA settings
  • Faulty hardware
  • Free space on VMFS volumes

Unfortunately for me vSphere will catch most of these issues.

  • Snapshots
    Storage view
  • Lack of redundancy on Service Console or VMkernel
    HA will not configure correctly
  • Inconsistent naming schemes(Port groups)
    Host Profiles or Distributed vSwitch
  • Inconsistent configuration
    Host Profiles
  • DNS configuration issues
    Host Profiles (partly)
  • Missing advance HA settings
    currently not addressed
  • Faulty hardware
    Alarms
  • Free space on VMFS volumes
    Storage view & Alarms

Thanks vSphere, you will cost me my job… Only thing left is “DNS configuration issues” and “missing advanced HA settings”.

Join VMware Professional Services NOW!

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Most of you know that I’m a VMware employee. To be more precise I’m a VMware PSO Senior Consultant. PSO stands for “Professional Services Organisation”:

The global VMware Professional Services Organization (PSO) influences the success of each VMware implementation. The PSO team is dedicated to the success of the customer and their virtualization strategy and implementation. The PSO team ensures that VMware customers are successfully implementing their business plans from adoption all the way to a fully functioning virtualized data center. The VMware PSO team includes Implementation/Managed Services, Project/Engagement Management, Education Services, Partner Management and Technical Account Management (TAM) Services.

Our department is responsible for delivering custom projects, jumpstarts, training and more. As you can imagine it’s a real challenge, and it’s exciting to work for a company like VMware.

Where most companies are cutting down on workforce VMware PSO is still expanding. We are looking for Technical Account Managers and (Senior) Consultants. If you are curious what a Consultant or a TAM does visit this section of the PSO website on the VMware.com website.

Here we go:
Technical Account Manager – Russia
Technical Account Manager – Belgium (Must speak French and English)
Technical Account Manager – Norway
Senior Consultant – Russia
Consultant – Austria
Senior Consultant(VDI) – Italy
Senior Consultant – Italy
Senior Consultant – Italy
Senior Consultant – Sweden
PSO Manager – Eastern Region

If you think you are up for the challenge, are looking for a new job and want to work for one of the best and fastest growing Technology Companies in the world send me an email and I will get you in contact with the right people within VMware.