CrashLoopBackoff

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation at a the TechX conference in Baton Rouge. I wanted to share what I presented with regards to running VMware View 5 with a VNXe. The solution is meant for those shops where the IT team is one. That one person must do everything.

Using some of the VMware wizards included in the VNXe along with pools optimized for VMware View replicas and linked clones. I was able to show a demo adding storage and 50 desktops and all be finished and ready to use before the presentation time was up. Pretty easy. With the VNXe now supporting EFD, I would expect even better performance.

If you have trouble displaying the embedded Sliderocket Presentation look here.
VMware View and VNXe

Credit to the original authors of the View on VNXe 3300 Reference Architecture. I drew my inspiration for running the tests and Demos on View 5 and vSphere 5 from this paper.

I am sitting listening to the smooth jazz of a pre-conference call waiting room.

Thought I would take some time to promote a few events coming in the next month I am lucky enough to be involved with. I wake up every day stoked to do things like this. I love to work with this technology and I get to tell other people what it can do! Wow.

Tech X 2011 Baton Rouge, LA – October 5-8 – River Center

This conference held in Baton Rouge, will feature a keynote by the vSpecialists very own Wade O’Harrow. I will be supporting the breakout sessions with a session on using VMware View with the VNXe. If you are anywhere around from Texas to Florida, get over to Baton Rouge the 3 day event is free of charge! I hear the EMC vLabs will make an appearance.

 

VMware/EMC Accelerate to Your Cloud – Tampa Bay September 20 – Marriott Tampa Westshore

More information

VMware/EMC Accelerate to Your Cloud – Miami September 22 – JW Marriott Marquis

More Information

First of all I would like to thank my wonderful wife for letting me go to VMworld one week after our new daughter was born. Don’t worry, we have family in town so she is being take care of. This is a post that I wanted to write a week ago but I have been unplugged for a week to enjoy the before mentioned new child.

So what is going on at VMworld this year?

v0dgeball

First up is v0dgeball. This is a great idea to let some of the vendors battle it out on the Dodgeball court and all the proceeds go to Charity. This year the Wounded Warrior project will receive the proceeds from the event. Please check out the details here. It is Sunday night so hopefully you are reading this in time.

 

 

 

In-n-Out Burger Run #v-in-n-out

As I have already mentioned a few times come we will be meeting up for some Double Double fun Monday night after the welcome reception and have you back in time to go to a party or two.
Details are here.

 

Do you have Leakage? Stop Leaks with Your Cloud

As someone that is back in the business of diapers I couldn’t help myself. One of the biggest obstacles to Public Cloud adoption is the loss of security and control. Is the public cloud is actually less secure? The answer really depends, but there are some of us still want to have that control and monitoring. Even though you think your company is not in the public cloud you may be surprised to find that certain projects that should be inside your walls have been using public cloud offerings to provide the on demand elastic resources that they could not get from internal IT. This is what we call leakage. Unauthorized movement of your data to a public cloud offering. Now this may be against policy, but how do you know this is not happening. One knee jerk reaction is to block everything and fire anyone that looks at an outside resource. Instead of playing defense I would rather advocate going on the offensive. Start to use your existing infrastructure to provide private cloud services. Use automation, monitoring, and management tools to make it a reality without killing the infrastructure teams. By providing on-demand service you provide a controlled alternative to the public cloud. Transitioning then to a Hybrid Cloud in order to provide the burstability with service providers infrastructure using the same VMware and EMC technology that you are used to using in your Enterprise.

Am I saying Hybrid Cloud is a diaper? Not sure. I will be in the EMC booth this week discussing how to use VMware and EMC technology to enable Your Cloud.

I look forward to making some updates to what is new as the show goes on.

Just quick update and reminder about In-n-Out. Even though @jtroyer is a traitor going over to Five Guys we are still having the meetup. (five guys is good grease, don’t get me wrong.)

1.  After the Monday welcome reception at VMworld (8:30 ish) meet near the Taxi stand at the Venetian.
2. If you are wondering which In-n-out here it is.

If you are like me and build and destroy things constantly or just like doing things in ways you probably are not supposed to here is a quick tip.

I was destroying a vCD environment the other day but I wanted to save some templates I created with vCD. Instead of exporting and re-importing or using some intelligent method. I used vCenter to clone the VM to another place. While I was using this machine I cloned it off a few times for some tests.

Then I noticed some network wackiness. A ping would work for a a little while then go away and come back. First thought was I messed something up in the networking on these new hosts. After searching and searching and checking for switching loops. I finally found the machine had a manually coded MAC address. So I had 5 VM’s on the network with the same MAC address. This obviously caused some issues.

To fix it I migrated the machines to VMXNET3, and removed the old NIC because I needed to do that anyway. You could also change the MAC back to automatic. I would guess you would need to powerdown for this, but I didn’t test this out yet.

 

 

 

 

 

I will be wearing a different shirt at VMworld this year, but that is not important. What is important is getting to In-n-Out.

Glad to see this year that Tim Oudin is organizing a run over to In-n-Out. I am planning an “afters” trip to In-n-out Monday night. Immediatley following the VMworld welcome reception we will pack folks into a cab and enjoy a Double Double (animal style).

Can’t wait to see you all again in Vegas this year.

Sometimes it seems like you look down and everything has changed. It has been almost 2 months since I blogged. That is unacceptable. I used to always write things that I was learning. I can assure you I leanr something new at work as a vSpecialist everyday.
Now that we can hopefully move past any licesing worries with vSphere 5.

I am exciting that we are now free to talk about:

• Storage Clusters
• Storage DRS
• All new HA
• Automatic Failback in SRM
• Linked Clones in vCloud Director
• Netflow in dvSwitches

So much goodness. So much potential for troubleshooting.

One potential issue I have found while installing vCenter 5. Make sure the vCenter server can resolve DNS and do reverse DNS. I thought I would be smart and placed my new vCenter in a new subnet that didn’t have the proper reverse lookup zones created. vCenter warned me during installation and then failed to generate the SSL certs and then the install failed. Just something to look out for.

I decided to wait a few months after everyone else blogged about our team experience during my first quarter at EMC.

First off it is truly an honor to be working with some awesome people at EMC and VCE. You never know what things are going to be like when you start something new. Sure I know such and such from blogs or twitter. I may have even met them in person at VMworld.

What a great team though. I just want to say thank you to the team. It was exciting to see everyone grow through the training. It is great to be somewhere that I don’t catch funny looks for being excited about working with VMware/Storage/Networking/Datacenter.

Thanks team 05.

One of the tasks that always made me crazy when doing deployments was managing multipathing. Starting with vSphere 4.0 most of the storage platforms recommended using the Round Robin policy. At some point we all had to modify the policy for each datastore via the vCenter client. It is like stabbing yourself in the eye with a sewing needle. The other way is to use a script from the cli to change the default policy for each datastore. Much easier but there should be a better way for those that don’t have crazy script capabilities.

Imagine being able to right click on an ESX cluster. Going through a small wizard and then setting all of the policies for each datastore on each host. Also works with Powerpath VE if you have it. Awesomeness. I almost shed tears of joy.

After installing the EMC VSI plugin right click a host (or entire cluster), go to EMC à Set Multipathing Policy…

Use the Wizard to set your preferred NMP (or even Powerpath VE) policy.

 

Like that everything is set on the host or cluster, all the same way. Thing of beauty.