Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

report

Startup update: Runecast

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A while ago I introduced Runecast on my blog. I have known these guys for a while and this week I had to pleasure to be briefed on their new release: Runecast 1.7. The big ticket item in this release for sure it the vSAN Support. You may ask yourself why you would need Runecast when you have things like the health check and the “online” health check, well it seems that Runecast’s implementation covers more detail. Anyway, what is Runecast? As a company they refer to themselves as the knowledge automation experts, and I think that is a fair statement.

Runecast has developed an appliance which can be connected to one or multiple vCenter Server instances. After linking these you can “scan” the environment and Runecast will tell you about the risks. Not just from a security perspective, but it will also assess logs, configuration and even best practices. Your whole environment will be assessed in a report will be provided in a simple HTML-5 interface, or in the Web Client or the vSphere H5 client even. I said “simple”, but the information provided and the detail is far from simple… When I say simple I refer to their user interface. It is slick, and very easy to use.

Since I discussed Runecast last they added some additional features, like for instance a VRO plugin, full rest API, improved log search, Web Client and H5 client plugins but more importantly for many government agencies: DISA STIG compliancy checks. Yes, Runecast can check your environment against DISA STIG and report on any potential issues. Nice right?

This new release, version 1.7, now brings vSAN support. It also includes a new dashboard widget, which provides faster insights in how your environment is behaving. For vSAN in particular they didn’t only include KB article checks, but also implemented all best practices from the Design and Sizing guide, Network Design guide and the Stretched Cluster white paper. And they even hinted about adding best practices which are listed in the Essential vSAN book Cormac and I wrote, how cool is that? What is also nice is that their appliance is supported with vSAN 5.x and 6.x, and requires no direct access to the internet. You can simply download the appliance and install, and then update with the latest dataset by downloading an ISO.

Oh and before I forget, of course they also provide all the guidance and info needed around Spectre/Meltdown. Where normally their trial is limited, they actually do provide ALL info needed for Spectre/Meltdown as they realized that this is very valuable to customers and felt they could not hold this back.

For the Runecast blog on the 1.7 release go here.

Day 3 and 4 report #VMworld

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I was planning on writing up a Day 3 at the end of Wednesday but ended up at the VMworld party instead. Lets start off with Wednesday by itself though. I had a couple of sessions scheduled. A session on VMware EVO:RAIL in a slightly bigger room than the session on Tuesday (6x as big) and a panel session. The EVO:RAIL session went great in my opinion. Lots of good feedback after the session and a couple of great questions. It looks to me that everyone understands the value of a Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance offering from VMware and OEM partners. The simplicity of management and configuration, the “one stop shop” approach for procurement and support, and the auto-scale out functionality are just some of the key things that were mentioned as value add! Judging by the number of people that showed up to the session and did the lab and visited the zone… VMware EVO:RAIL will be a success.

After this session I walked around the solutions exchange for a bit just to wind down and then I had the panel session with Rick, William, Scott and Chad. Funnily enough the category of questions we received was different this time. Still many EVO:RAIL questions, but a bit less NSX and a bit more generic questions around home labs etc. Derek was there again and he did a great job of capturing most of the Q&A, make sure to read that.  Good attendance, good audience participation… Lets hope it will be the same in EMEA!

VMworld party… What can I say other than: I am not a big fan of the Black Keys. All songs sounded the same, and I only really liked Lonely Boy. Judging though by the crowd going wild it probably is just me.

Thursday was a busy day for me with customer meetings. Some great conversations around the future of the datacenter, the state of converged infrastructures, practical discussions around distributed switch failure domains, stretched clustering and of course containers. I also managed to sit in on a session by Christian Dickmann on troubleshooting Virtual SAN. If you missed that one, make sure to watch the video as it had some interesting tips. Especially some of the troubleshooting commands for RVC. At the end of the day I hung out with Cormac, Fred Nix and Rawlinson, had a couple of drinks and somehow ended up at the DNA Lounge watching Corrosion of Conformity. Nice way to end VMworld to be honest, away from everything related to technology… just some nice noisy music too unwind 🙂

Now what? Well I am going to take a couple of days off just to get some rest… and then the preparation for VMworld EMEA will start I guess. If you have not registered yet, do so before it is too late. I promise it will be an interesting event!

I want to thank everyone who took the time to say “hi” at VMworld, I truly appreciate it and always love to hear feedback on material I wrote or just have a general conversation about what challenges people are having in their datacenters. It is always nice to know who reads your stuff. Also, it was great meeting up with many friends whom I had not seen in a long time.

Once again, great event… Thanks VMworld team for putting up another great show, and lets repeat this in Barcelona!

Day 2 #VMworld Report

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Day at VMworld, today was going the be the first of 2 EVO:RAIL sessions for me… but before we get there first the keynote. The keynote was great in my opinion. It felt a bit more loosened up than last year and it looked like they were having fun up on stage and that seemed to resonate well with the crowd. There were a couple of things which stood out to me: CloudVolumes, Project Fargo (VMFork), EVO:RAIL and of course the awesome integration of vCAC an NSX / VVOL / VSAN.

After the keynote I had to go straight to my session on EVO:RAIL. I presented with Dave Shanley, the lead engineer, and the room was packed. This session was a repeat which unfortunately ended up being scheduled in a room which was way too small. They managed though to let 50 extra people in, standing room only! However, there were still people waiting in the hallway all the way too the end and around the corner. I hope that those who did not get in will be able to make the session today in Salon 7 in the Marriott at 11:30 as it fits way more people. It was a good session in my opinion and we received some excellent feedback. The best feedback came from two of our direct competitors who both acknowledged they loved the user experience and the simplicity that EVO:RAIL offers.

After my session I went straight to the EVO ZONE. Wow, that place is packed every minute of the day, and when I say packed I mean packed. Great interest from customers and partners around what it is, what it does, and how they can buy one. Some awesome conversations with a customer who had a use case for ROBO deployments, 1500 sites, he said: No longer will I need skilled IT people to manage those site because of the simplicity of this interface but also the deployment mechanism. You inject a “JSON files” with all configuration attributes and then click “just go” and you are done in minutes.

At the end of my booth visit I walked around the solutions exchange and met a lot of great folks. After that it was time for the Office of CTO party. It was great to see a lot of people at the party I had not seen at the event yet. It was definitely a well organized event, with great food, music and people.

Day 1 #VMworld Report

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It is Monday evening and this morning the madness started, VMworld 2014. Pat Gelsinger’s keynote was of course up first and the highlight for me was definitely the unveiling of the project (EVO:RAIL) I worked on for the last 18 months or so. It is just amazing to see everything come together, a huge engineering effort, the architectural aspects, business development and alliances work etc etc. So many things going, a truly unique experience to take a something from conception to release. I am glad I was provided the opportunity to have this experience and be part of this team. What I personally found interesting about the keynote, and also Carl’s talk, was the customer angle. Many different testimonies from customers who have been deploying SDDC in their datacenters with explanations of how it simplified their life. Also the vCloud Air announcements were interesting, that is definitely a space I will be watching in the future. I can’t wait for Ben Fathi’s keynote tomorrow, as we will get more tech detail and cool demos. I am hoping I will have a wifi connection tomorrow, so I can do some tweeting or life blogging etc.

After the keynote I had my first session… Well not really “my session” but a nice collaborative effort of many people, but the father of it all was Vaughn Steward. Vaughn invited me to be part of the VMware team on a Gameshow. The gameshow was a bit chaotic to be honest, there were some challenges with the slidedeck which is a shame, still I hope people enjoyed it though. I thought it was entertaining, but there is definitely room for improvement.

Second session of the day was with fellow bloggers/vExperts: Rick Scheerer, Chad Sakac, William Lam, Scott Lowe and I. As expected a fair amount of questions on NSX and EVO:RAIL. If you weren’t there, Derek Seaman managed to write down most questions and answers, thanks Derek! I always like these sessions as you do not know what people will ask and it is always a mix of technical to even personal questions. Early scores of this session are off the charts! I hope our repeat Wednesday will just be as good!

I am still heavily jetlagged, looking forward to tomorrow though, although I hope I will get a couple hours of sleep at least today.

Day 0 #VMworld report

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I arrived yesterday in San Francisco, still jet lagged from my previous trip (came back home from SFO on Tuesday). After a nice walk we had some dinner and stopped by at vBeers… Was nice to talk to some folks I have never met before and an interesting conversation around VCDX for networking and storage. Also bumped in to some EMC and NetApp friends, and a bunch of Coho Data guys at the hotel. After that I called it quits and went to bed early, only to wake up early again due to jet lag, doze off again and then woke up because my whole room was shaking. I have never experienced an earth quake before, the 6.1 earth quake in Napa was a strange way of being welcome to SF for VMworld. Judging by the tweets around the time I wasn’t the only who was freaked out. I guess being on the 15th floor of a hotel doesn’t help either as it only amplifies the experience. Anyway, after that it was time for a run with some of my European colleagues, 15.5KM is not bad for a jetlagged earthquacked Sunday morning.

I didn’t have much planned for today, originally my schedule was booked but due to some changes around when we could start talking about upcoming products things got cancelled. So I got registered… received my nice shiny badge, and prepped for my upcoming sessions.

I guess for me the madness starts on Monday. For those who want to attend one of my sessions, here is the list:

  • Monday 12:30 – The vExpert Storage Game Show – STO2996-SPO
  • Monday 5:30 – Ask the Expert vBloggers – SDDC1176
  • Tuesday 11:00 – VMware Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (EVO:RAIL) Technical Deepdive – SDDC1337
  • Wednesday 11:30 – VMware Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (EVO:RAIL) Technical Deepdive – SDDC1337
  • Wednesday 4:00 – Ask the Expert vBloggers – SDDC1176

Some of the sessions are not fully booked yet as they were added to the scheduler late (SDDC1337), so you can still sign up… some of the sessions seem to be full right now.