Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vmworld

VMworld Public Voting

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As Mr Sloof already revealed VMworld Public Voting started today… I have submitted multiple sessions, some which are directly job related and others which are more community focused. As I was part of the voting committee for the Technology and Architecture track I know how many great sessions were submitted and how difficult it will be to get your session approved. (almost 400 submissions for that track alone and less than 40 slots) There are two particular sessions which I will need YOUR help with and I hope you guys are willing to vote on these. These are not the typical powerpoint slide sessions, yes you can get a lot out of those but after seeing slide 8326th of the day you tend to get a bit bored. This is your chance to change VMworld and vote for something different:

  • TA 1956 – The ESXi Quiz Show
    Join us for our very first ESXi Quiz Show where teams of vExperts and VMware engineers will match expertise on technical facts, trivia related to all VMware ESXi and related products. You as the audience will get 40% of the vote. We will cover topics around ESXi migration, storage, networking security, and VMware products. As an attendee of this session you will get to see the experts battle each other. For the very first time at VMworld you get to decide who leaves the stage as a winner and who does not.
  • TA 1682 – vSphere Clustering Q&A
    Frank Denneman and Duncan Epping will answer any question with regards to vSphere Clustering in this session. You as the audience will have the chance to validate your own environment and design decisions with the Subject Matter Experts on HA, DRS and Storage DRS. Topics could include for instance misunderstandings around Admission Control Policies, the impact of limits and reservations on your environment, the benefits of using Resource Pools, Anti-Affinity Rules Gotchas, DPM and of course anything regarding Storage DRS. This is your chance to ask what you’ve always wanted to know!

http://www.vmworld.com/cfp.jspa

The vSphere Clustering Q&A is obvious I guess. Frank and I did this session at the Dutch VMUG and the place was packed and it a cool very informative session with many great questions some which literally had our heads spinning.

The Quiz Show is kind of my baby. I came up with the Quiz Show before VMworld 2010 but as I was working on the VMworld Labs it slipped my mind and I was too late to enter it in to the system. This year however I contacted my friends Pablo Roesch and John Troyer and we had a couple of conference calls about this one… I promise you, if we can pull this one off it is going to R O C K. vExperts battling VMware employees on virtualization knowledge! Just imagine who could reach the finals, who could get eliminated during the pre-rounds… Wouldn’t it be cool if Chad Sakac and Vaughn Stewart make it in to the finals, or how could would it be when Eric Sloof gets eliminated during the pre-qualifying rounds? Yes, it is going to be EPIC, the battle of the year…

There’s another community session, and this not only has multiple top bloggers but also 4 VCDX’s : TA 1425 Ask the Expert vBloggers (Chad Sakac, Scott Lowe, Rick Scherer, Frank Denneman and I). Vote!

VMworld esxtop advanced session

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During my flight from Boston back to the Netherlands I listened to the VMworld esxtop session “Troubleshooting using ESXTOP for Advanced Users, TA6720“. As always an excellent session with a lot of in-depth info. Most of it was already documented, however there were a couple of key points that I hadn’t documented yet. I just added those to my esxtop page which I wanted to stress as I personally believe it is very useful info. It seems pretty random but it rolled up nicely into the esxtop page in my opinion.

  • %SYS should be less than 20, %SYS is the percentage of time spent by system services on behalf of the world. The possible system services are interrupt handlers, bottom halves, and system worlds.
  • -b = batch mode, adding “-a” will force all metrics to be gathered
  • Limit display to a single group (l)
    • enables you to focus on a specific VM
  • Limiting the number of entities (#)
    • this enables you for instance to watch the top 5 worlds for

I have also added thresholds for ZIP/s, UNZIP/s and CACHEUSD. These should of course be 0 from a performance perspective as anything larger than 0 means the host was overcommitted on memory and had to resort to memory compression.

If anyone has more metrics/thresholds to contribute which they used in the past to troubleshoot issues let me know!

A price winners view on VMworld…. (by Jason C)

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When I entered the competition on yellow-bricks, I showed a list of the sessions and labs I would like to do as my reason for going. I think it is only fair to show what I actually did whilst I was there. I was able to do the majority of the breakout sessions I wanted to and all the labs I hoped to complete. You do need to remain flexible on the breakout sessions some clash with each other and others fill up quick so you may not get a seat thankfully all the breakouts are recorded so can be viewed later.

ESXi / Performance / Troubleshooting and storage
SS8222 Transitioning to ESXi, Architecture for Next-Generation vSphere
TA6720 Troubleshooting using ESXTOP for Advanced Users
TA7171 Performance Best Practices for vSphere
TA8129 A Beginner’s Guide to Performance Troubleshooting with vSphere
TA8133 Best Practices to Increase Availability and Throughput for VMware
LAB23 VMware ESXi Remote Management Utilities
LAB24 VMware vSphere™ Performance & Tuning
LAB25 VMware vSphere™ Troubleshooting*
TA7805 Tech Preview: Storage DRS
Group Discussion Storage with Chad Sakac
Group Discussion Storage Performance with Scott Drummonds

SRM
LAB11 VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager—Basic Install & Config
LAB12 VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager— Extended Config & Troubleshooting
BC6703 How To Be Successful with SRM Implementations
BC7773 VMware Site Recovery Manager: Misconceptions and Misconfigurations

Just for fun:
LAB13 VMware vCloud Director—Install & Config (Had to see what it was all about)
LAB17 VMware vCenter™ Orchestrator (Hidden Gem)
LAB20 VMware vCenter™ vShield
LAB26 VMware vSphere™ PowerCLI (Yes still trying to get the hang of it Alan)

I enjoyed the group discussions they came as a bit of a surprise as I did not see them on the schedule originally. Groups of 20-30 people led by industry leaders answering a selection of multiple choice questions in a specific area with an open discussion about the answers. Unfortunately not all these were taped which I think is a shame as I am sure many would find them useful.

When I met Duncan he said try to focus on one thing to write about from a technical view if you can. Slight problem I found at least one thing in each breakout session , lab or discussions that I have written down to take away. Not sure where to begin I was hoping to review the recordings to check what might be most useful. In a way I’d like to talk about it all but that could take more than one article. Talking of the breakout session I found every single one informative and well presented.

Most of you have already read other articles on the labs and I guess there is not much more for me to add. I never had to queue though I did tend to get there first thing. They were well organised and generally easy to follow with plenty of time. Two screen set up one for working on and one for following the instructions. Like others I thought it would be nice to have access to them outside the event, not sure how they would have worked though on my laptop in practice.

One of the things that I wanted to call out which is not on the agenda is having the ability to chat with your peers, listen to other people’s thoughts. Have the ability to talk through your thoughts and ideas, see if they make sense and receive constructive feedback. This on its own is priceless.

The solutions exchange is an experience by itself and as it was my first time a pleasant one at that. Though when the same company scanned me every day I was starting to wonder what the heck is going on. It is in the solutions exchange where I think I found my one thing , I had a chance to play with the EMC hands on labs just the Unisphere bit and VAAI. Very impressed with Unisphere can’t wait to upgrade the EMC Clariion planned for after New Year going to make my job so much easier. Talking about VAAI, wow what a difference a clone of a 20GB VM was 5 times quicker using VAAI, I was impressed!

So what’s that one topic Duncan told me to pick…. drum roll please…. STORAGE ….. It seems to be a recurring theme one way or the other in every session. Started to think about the most difficult thing for me to manage and measure performance of and it is again storage.

Quote from one of the sessions:

most performance issues related to storage

Another quote which interested me was the following:

What does the amateur do find the VMFS volume with the most space and put the new VM on that storage.

Guilty as charged. I am that amateur, but than again in my defense if the people developing these apps or services could give me any indication of the IO and its profile I would eat my hat.

But wait there is a savior on the horizon did you see ” TA7805 Tech Preview: Storage DRS”? I have searched for people talking about this after VMworld but have not found much. For me hands down the most important thing discussed at VMworld. If I could have one wish for the next version on vSphere this would be it, ideally on the Enterprise sku at the very highest that would be great. The presentation was given by the same engineer who talked about SIOC last year so I have high hopes for it being included in the next version.

It does what it says on the tin, DRS for storage.

  1. Helps with virtual disk placement
  2. Load balances IO
  3. Takes care of Out of space issues.
  4. Monitors over time so if VM’s get hotter they can be moved
  5. Data store maintenance auto move VM’s to maintain balance.
  6. Add data stores move VM’s

One caveat I foresee, I hope they speak to the SRM team as I know SRM is not to happy when you go around moving the data store a VM is stored on.

In conclusion would I go again? Absolutely! I may have to pay for it myself but I reckon I can do it all for less than the cost of a 3 day training course and it is a worthwhile investment, both for myself and for the council. I have already started to apply some of the knowledge gained from the sessions I went to back at work. It is a gift that keeps on giving as I now have access to 170 hours worth of VMworld 2010 sessions to look at over the coming year.

Last thing I promise. Did you know you can now get access to all the sessions from 2009 for free? Me neither but you can and some of them are pretty much the same as this years from what I have seen especially the esxtop and performance. I think there is something in there for everyone. You do have to register but let me say again they are free so go Enjoy…

http://www.vmworld.com/community/sessions/

To Duncan, VMware, the Bella Centre and the wonderful City of Copenhagen.

Until next time, Tak for alt.

Jason C

Final lab results VMworld Europe 2010

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I just received the final numbers on the VMworld Europe Labs. I am really excited that the vCloud Director Lab came in as first as I was one of the Captains for that Lab. Great improvement compared to the US where we came in as 4th. Other Labs that went up a couple of places are VMware vShield and of course PowerCLI!

We managed to hit both of our targets and I must say that the Labs were well organized and I was extremely impressed by the fact that all of it was hosted in the Cloud! Don’t let me keep you waiting much longer, here are the numbers:

Total Labs completed: 5,948
Total VMs deployed: 56,435

The Top 10 labs were:

  1. VMware vCloud Director Install & Config (646)
  2. VMware View 4.5 Install and Config (623)
  3. VMware vSphere Perf & Tuning (491)
  4. VMware vShield (364)
  5. VMware View 4.5 Advanced (341)
  6. VMware ESX 4.1 new features (326)
  7. VMware vSphere PowerCLI (290)
  8. VMware vSphere Troubleshooting (286)
  9. VMware ESXi Remote Management Utilities (275)
  10. VMware ThinApp 4.6 (242)

Thanks everyone for attending VMworld and making it a success and hope to see you next year!

VMware High Availability – Futures (part of BC7803)

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First of all need me start by thanking everyone who attended our session at VMworld Copenhagen. First session filled up quick and 5 minutes before we were supposed to start they had to close the doors as the place was packed. I can tell you that is the best compliment you can get! I know a bunch of people took pictures of the session, if you did we would appreciate it if you could sent me a copy! (Eric Sloof shot a video, thank Eric!)

There is something that was discussed during the presentation and actually mentioned on the very last slide which I wanted to share with all of you and that is around some of the HA futures. Now I am not going to fully elaborate on these as I don’t want to get into any NDA related issues, but I will try to add a bit more detail as soon as I have the whole video of the session. (I need to know the boundaries.)

  • All New Architecture, a single lightweight HA agent process
  • Eliminate concept of “Primaries”
  • Storage heartbeating as backup communication channel
  • Automatic resolution of network partitions
  • VMs still protected during partitions, no “fighting” for VM control
  • Greater scalability, extensible
  • Ability to deal with any number of simultaneous host failures
  • New lightweight communication model
  • All state required to recover from any failure is persisted
  • Improved isolation actions (VMs left running and restarted as needed via storage subsystem monitoring)
  • No dependencies on DNS

All the people rounding up after the session with questions (Thanks Jannie Hanekom!) …

duncan epping vmworld 2010 copenhagen
And of course a big thanks to Eric Sloof for this picture:
duncan epping vmworld 2010 copenhagen