Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vmworld

VMworld Run 2019??

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A few folks had asked me if I will be organizing a VMworld RUN again in San Francisco this year. I organized one in 2009 and then after that, the VMworld team took over. In Las Vegas running wasn’t really an option considering the heat. But now that we are back in San Francisco the question popped up again. I briefly considered it, but then I came to my senses and realized that it wouldn’t be the smart thing to do. It would be too big and risky. After some discussions, I found out that there’s a run organized called the Bridge to Bridge run on the 25th of August. (https://bridgetobridge.com/) Why organize something yourself when you can potentially work with a professional organization? I reached out to the VMworld team, the VMworld team reached out to the Bridge to Bridge organization, and they came back with the following:

Looking for a fun and active way to kick off your VMworld experience? We’ve partnered with the Bridge to Bridge run in San Francisco to offer VMworld attendees $15 off registration for their annual run supporting the Special Olympics of Northern California on August 25th. Just enter the code INNOVATEVM750 during registration to save.

Register here if you want to join a great run, and take advantage of a 15 dollar discount, while supporting the Special Olympics: https://raceroster.com/events/2019/16196/bridge-to-bridge-run

Sign up!

Top 25 VMworld US 2019 sessions to attend (or watch online)

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I do this every year, list my favorite 25 VMworld sessions which you definitely should try to attend in person. Or if you are not going, watch online. Most of these sessions are by folks I know, or folks I have seen presenting, or topics which I find interesting for various reasons. Make sure to register for these sessions as soon as possible, as these are the sessions which tend to fill up extremely fast. I also have couple of sessions, 3 to be precise, make sure to register for those as well. You can find them through this link. HCI1870BU is the HA best practices for vSAN customers, HBI2186BU is the vSphere HA and DRS Hybrid Cloud Deep Dive which I will be presenting with Frank, and HCI3551KU is the HCI Keynote.

Now that I got that out of the way, let’s take a stab at my top 25, these are in random order! if your session is not on the list it is not because I think it was not good enough to be on there, it is because there are simply too many awesome sessions to select from. Here we go!

  1. 60 Minutes of Non-Uniform Memory Architecture [HBI2278BU] by Frank Denneman
    I am sure this session will go extremely deep, everything you always wanted to know (and more) about NUMA and vSphere. I don’t think I need to say much more.
  2. A Practitioner’s Guide to vCenter Server Architecture [HBI2227BU] by  Emad Younis and Sandeep Byreddy
    Of course, you don’t need to understand the vCenter Architecture to use vSphere, but we are all geeks, right? So this is probably the perfect session to understand more about the internals, services, modules etc.
  3. HCI Management: Current and Future [HCI1207BU] by Junchi Zhang and Christian Dickmann
    This is a great session where product management and engineering talk (and demo) new HCI management features. It typically contains at least 2-3 cool demos, and I watched the session previous years and it was well worth it.
  4. “If This Then That” for vSphere – The Power of Event-Driven Automation [HCI1379CU] by William Lam and Michael Gasch
    I found the abstract of this session very interesting, event-driven automation is definitely something that should of interest for most of you. And when it happens to have William and Michael speaking, you know you will be in for something good.
  5. Hyperconverged Infrastructure: Present and Future [HCI2733BU] by Vijay Ramachandran
    Another forward-looking session, this one by the VP of Product Management, and a bit more generic than the HCI Management session. Previous editions of this session showcased vSAN Data Protection for instance. So expect insights of what the future holds for vSAN/HCI.
  6. VMware CTO Panel: What’s Over the Horizon? [OCTO2899PU] by Ray O’Farrell, Pere Monclus, Greg Lavender and Christos Karamanolis
    The CTO panel has always been interesting, typically they will start with a discussion about where VMware stands and where VMware is going, followed by audience questions and deep (forward-looking) answers/statements. Very entertaining and worth the time!
  7. The Virtually Speaking Podcast Live: The Future of Storage [HCI1894PU] by Pete Flecha, John Nicholson, and Ken Werneburg
    A VMworld session which at the same time will be a live podcast, by your favorite podcast team. Not only are all three great speakers, I suspect they will have some amazing guests and I suspect it will be very entertaining at the same time.
  8. PowerCLI Deep Dive [HBI1729BU] by Kyle Ruddy and Luc Dekens
    These guys are the PowerCLI guru’s, if you want to get your mind blown and learn more about PowerCLI and automation, then this is the session to attend. I can guarantee that you will walk out with new ideas and knowledge.
  9. vSphere Virtual Volumes: Technical Deep Dive [HBI2853BU] by Jason Massae and Thiruvengada Govindan Thirumal
    Adoption of VVols is going up fast, and there’s a good reason for it. Find out what is so special about VVols and why you should consider it. Jason and Thiruvengada are experts on the topic, and will be able to go deep!
  10. VMware Cloud on AWS: SDDC Availability Deep Dive [HBI1924BU] by Jeremiah Megie and Glenn Sizemore
    VMware Cloud on AWS has some very appealing availability features which you won’t find anywhere else. Want to understand how VMware and AWS are working together to improve your uptime and resource availability? Make sure to attend this one by Glenn and Jeremiah!
  11. Zero to DR in 60 Minutes: VMware Site Recovery DRaaS Technical Deep Dive [HBI1229BU] by Stefan Tsonev and Cato Grace
    One of the use cases for public cloud, of course, is disaster recovery, in this session, Stefan and Cato will do a deep dive on the VMware DR as a Service solution.
  12. Extreme Performance Series
    Yes, I am cheating as this is actually 5 separate sessions, but these are simply a must attend/watch! I’ve learned a lot about vSphere internals over the past years by watching these sessions, they cover things like persistent memory, schedulers, best practices etc.
  13. How GPU-Assisted ML for Medical Research Proved to Be a Force for Good [HBI1546BU] by Niels Hagoort and Johan van Amersfoort
    Very interesting use case explained by Johan and Niels. They will discuss how a vSphere environment is used machine learning and deep learning. Worth attending!
  14. One Storage Platform for Thousands of Cloud Providers [HBI2537PU] by Ari Paul, Rawlinson Rivera, and John Toor
    In this session, they will discuss the availability of S3 compatible object storage in vCloud Director based platforms and the use cases. It will feature Rawlinson from Cohesity and John from Cloudian. Hosted by Ari Paul from VMware.
  15. Core Storage Best Practices: Ensuring Your Storage Is Reliable [HBI2751BU] by Jason Massae and Cody Hosterman
    This session has been in the top VMworld sessions for the past couple of years. Jason and Cody have a wealth of knowledge to share with you on the topic of core storage (VMFS, NFS, VAAI etc)
  16. Optimizing vSAN for Performance [HCI1757BU] by Paudie O’Riordan
    Paudie is one of the most technical guys in our team, if anyone understands vSAN (and performance) inside out it is him. Make sure to attend this one to get a good understanding of how to tweak vSAN to get the best performance out of it.
  17. Showcase Keynote: Hybrid Cloud Architecture – The New Standard from the Data Center [HYB3544KU] by Kit Colbert, Raghu Raghuram and Mark Lohmeyer
    I always enjoy these showcases as they discuss what we have today, but more importantly what is coming in the future. Kit, Raghu and Mark are excellently equipped to bring you up to speed!
  18. vSphere Networking in the Data-Centric Future [HBI2136BU] by Sudhansu Jain and Disha Chopra
    I am not a networking guy, but this sounds very interesting as in this session the future of networking will be discussed. What are the current trends, where is the market moving towards?
  19. Innovations in vMotion: Features, Performance, and Best Practices [HBI1421BU] by Sreekanth Setty and Arunachalam Ramanathan
    vMotion is the most used vSphere feature, and it continues to evolve. Over the years the vMotion innovations/futures session has always been very interesting, and I suspect it will be again this year!
  20. VMware Cloud on Dell EMC: Technical Deep Dive [HBI1975BU] by Mike Hall and Sridevi Ravuri
    This session will provide a deep dive on what was formerly called Project Dimension. A very interesting concept where VMware and Dell will join forces to deliver and manage an SDDC as a Service on premises.
  21. Encrypting VMs on Standalone Hosts: Tech Preview [HBI1947BU] by Mike Foley and Samyuktha Subramanian
    A session title with “tech preview” always has my interest! In this session they will also be discussing very interesting use cases for this potential future feature.
  22. Diversity and Inclusion Tech Panel: You Can Drive Success for Women in Tech [PD2632U] by Jodi Shely
    An interesting topic, and an important topic as well, definitely one I will be attending or watching!
  23. Accelerating Intra-Host PVRDMA Storage Traffic in a Future Dell AMD Server [OCTO2718BU] by Richard Brunner and Shyamkumar Iyer
    I’ve attended various sessions by Richard, and they are always excellent and very deep and typically forward-looking. I know this one will also be, and I am sure they will go deep fast!
  24. Edge Computing Innovations in Office of the CTO and Dell Technologies [EIOT2715BU] by Chris Wolf and Daniel Beveridge
    This session was one of my favorite sessions last year, although the title has slightly changed, I am sure it will be packed with cool demos, industry insights, and futures!
  25. How to Become the Platform Engineer of the Future [PD2248U] by Martijn Baecke and Matthew Steiner
    The last session on this list and I think it is an important one. How do you evolve as an IT practitioner, what kind of opportunities are out there and what types of skills would you need for those opportunities? Martijn and Matt will guide you through a fast evolving IT world.

That was it for now, enjoy the show. (Early bird tickets will end the 21st of June, so get them now!)

ESXi on ARM/Raspberry Pi for vSAN Witness purposes or for?

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I was just catching up on a couple of VMworld sessions. One session that stood out to me was most definitely once again the session by Chris Wolf and Daniel Beveridge. I am not going to write up a full coverage of it, as it is mostly very similar to the session they did in the US which I posted about here.

However, what is interesting in the European edition is that Regis Duchesne comes up on stage after about 38 minutes in and he starts discussing and demoing ESXi on ARM, but more impressively ESXi on top of a Raspberry Pi. Note that these machines have very limited memory (1GB) and little CPU (64-bit SoC @ 1.4GHz) resources, and are low powered! Gotta love an intro as well that includes “been at VMware for about 20 years”.

Very interesting to see that Regis and the team managed to get ESXi booting on an RPI 3b, but also that it only uses about 500MB of the memory, which would leave room to boot one VM as Regis points out if you are lucky. One example of a use case is to use this machine as a physical vSAN Witness host for 2 host configurations. This was the immediate use case I had in mind as well for this! (Although preferably a configuration with a bit more CPU power and memory would be preferred!)

Regis also mentions the option to run 1 VM on an RPi3, but you could, of course, have multiple RPi’s running and connect them using a 1GbE switch so the VMs can communicate with each other, you could even create a cluster and move VMs between RPi’s when you are doing maintenance at the edge. Or even more VMs could potentially run on an RPi and you could use it as an IoT gateway. As Regis points out, what is great about ESXi is that it already provides isolation and QoS for VMs, which ensures that all apps running on an IoT gateway would get their fair share of resources. (Eliminate the noisy neighbor problems) Note that this is a project and very much at an alpha stage, nowhere close to being available for customers or partners, but as Regis points out… if you are a customer or partner doing things at the edge and interesting in this please let us know. The team is looking for design partners to better understand the different use case, to ensure they build something which can be useful for customers! (You can leave a comment here, let us know what you are looking to do with it and I will connect you with the right folks.)

See you at VMworld Europe

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VMworld Europe is coming up fast. I always get the question where people can find me. This is not an easy question as VMworld Europe usually means two things: sessions and meetings. Actually, it means three things: sessions, meetings and running between those. If you want to find me it is best to attend one of the three sessions I will be part of. Note that one session is full right now.

  • Innovating Beyond HCI: How VMware is Driving the Next Data Center Revolution [HCI3728KE] (seats available)
    Wednesday, Nov 07, 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
    In this session, I will be joining Yanbing Lee and John Gilmartin up on stage. This is the general session for the Storage and Availability BU as well as the Integrated Systems BU. In this session, we will discuss where, how, and why HCI and VMware Cloud Foundation started. But more importantly where we are today and where we will be going in the future. It will have great demos that reveal what we have planned in the upcoming year(s), so make sure to register for this one!
  • The Power of Storage Policy-Based Management [HCI1270BE] (seats available)
    Wednesday, Nov 07, 12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.
    The world of software-defined storage moves at a rapid pace, and VMware is one of the biggest enablers. In this session, Cormac and I will guide you through the world of software-defined storage initiatives at VMware and provide a primer to VMware vSAN, VMware Virtual Volumes (VVol), persistent cloud-native storage options (Project Hatchway), the VMware vSphere APIs for I/O filtering, and the binding factor in these cases: storage policy-based management. Be warned: We will bring demos!
  • vSphere Clustering Deep Dive, Part 1: vSphere HA and DRS [VIN1249BE]
    Tuesday, Nov 06, 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
    In this session, Frank and I will take you through the trenches of VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and vSphere High Availability (HA). Find out about options to optimize your DRS settings for your specific requirements and goals, such as if you should be load balancing on active or consumed memory, as well as what has recently changed in the DRS algorithm and if it will impact DRS behavior. And for vSphere HA, you will learn about when it restarts virtual machines (VMs), what kind of restart times to expect, and where you can find evidence that a VM (or multiple) have been restarted. You will find out about all of these items and more. Prepare to dive deep, as the basics will not be covered.

    • Session is repeated on Thursday at 10:30!

Oh, and rumor has it that Frank, Niels and I may be handing out some signed copies of our book again at the Rubrik booth… More on that later. I am hoping we will see long queues through the solution exchange again.

VMworld Europe Session Builder is open!

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VMworld Session Builder is open, so if you are planning on going to VMworld Europe you may want to go to the session builder website and add the sessions you would like to see to your schedule. I created a list for VMworld US, most of these still apply. I also have two sessions of my own at VMworld Europe, you can add those by searching for “Epping”, or just click here and you will see them listed.

It also seems registrations are starting to ramp up fast now, if you haven’t registered I would urge you to do so today, typically sessions fill up quickly, and you don’t want to find yourself missing out on the sessions you wanted to see as a result of a late registration!

Oh, and we may have a couple of books to hand out in EMEA as well… Stay tuned for more on that later!