Category Archives: VMware

VMworld 2017

VMworld Europe 2017 – Day 1

VMware, , , , ,

11,000 people (the most ever), have descended upon Barcelona this week for the annual European VMware conference. This year sees the event brought forward from October to September, and only a week or so after their flagship Las Vegas Event.

Depending on your relationship with VMware, and for many, the Tuesday of VMworld is day 1. However if you are a partner it’s probably day 3, and if you are a TAM customer, day 2.

  • Partners can take part in onsite training on Sunday, to assist VSP and VTSP certifications, and on the Monday its Partner day, a keynote and dedicated sessions focused on enablement.
  • TAM Customers have their own dedicated sessions as well as a keynote as well. These are the customers closest to VMware for a variety of reasons.

The announcements

Ok, so lets summarise todays key announcements. VMware is now at the point where it is able to deliver the following;

  • Modernize Data Centers
  • Integrate Public Clouds
  • Empower the Digital Workspace
  • Transform Security

And these are the priorities in which they have been working towards in their strategy and product releases over the past few years.

  • VMware Cloud Provider Program – empowering partners to drive the innovation in technology, with customers finding it easier to deploy and utilize hybrid cloud environments.
    • VMware’s HCX technology to enable multi-cloud and multi-site application migration and portability – this is for the always on environments that have struggled to migrate in the past.

  • VMware vRealize Suite will be getting further updates, I expect more on Wednesday about this.
    • Tighter integration between the products of the vRealize stack, and VSAN.
    • Expect to see more workings with AWS and Azure now they have solutions running on them as well (VMC on AWS, Horizon on Azure).
  • VMware vSphere Integrated Containers 1.2 – the latest updates will push more robustness into the solution, and allow companies to scale further.
  • VMware Mobile Security Alliance Partners – under the digital workspace term, this is VMware’s big push and it wont stop soon. VMware is king of the DC, but they want a slice of whats outside the DC as well.
  • VMware vCloud NFV platform – there is now going to be a specific OpenStack for NFV.
    • Targeted at Communications Service Providers it will enable them to quickly and reliably deploy and upgrade OpenStack NFV environments—allowing them to accelerate service delivery, simplify management, increase agility and service security and readily develop new revenue streams.

 

You can now see the full day 1 announcements on the below YouTube link.

My sessions

I’ll be collating my sessions notes separately after the event.

Further information

Make sure you follow the hastags #vmworld and #vmworld2017 on twitter, to get an update from the community, its the best way to follow all the individual announcements and see what’s happening during session as well.

For other blogs etc around the web visit;

https://www.vmware.com/radius/accelerating-enterprise-transformation-perspective-vmworld-2017-europe/

https://blog.cloud.vmware.com/s/content/a1y6A000000eAvvQAE/introducing-vmwares-hcx-technology/

VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive proof copies

Now available – VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive

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It’s here!!!

I am sure many of you have been following this technical book closely, the latest publication by Frank Denneman. And now its available to order!!!!  There is already a fantastic opening statement wrote by Duncan Epping today as the book is officially published.

The book focuses on four key physical host component areas, and doesn’t touch VMware software features in-depth such as HA and DRS, only the host resources;

  • CPU
  • Memory
  • Storage
  • Network

As can be seen by the striking cover below.

VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive front cover

If you haven’t already, I recommend that you give the @Hostdeepdive twitter account a follow, or at least a browse through to see some of the snippets released.

If you have read the VMware vSphere Clustering Technical Deepdive books, you already know what to expect in terms of technical level of content, however the sneak peaks show that Frank and Niels have gone even deeper than you can imagine.

See the below example,

I’ve been tracking this publication closely, and wished I could have been a reviewer, but i now have my copy on order, so expect a review soon!

Where to buy?

Below are the links from everyone’s favourite retailer to purchase the paperback copy, I believe that eBook available should be after VMworld;

Amazon Book Blurb

I couldn’t really write this up better than whats on amazon;

 The VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive is a guide to building consistent high-performing ESXi hosts. A book that people can’t put down. Written for administrators, architects, consultants, aspiring VCDX-es and people eager to learn more about the elements that control the behavior of CPU, memory, storage and network resources.

This book shows that we can fundamentally and materially improve the systems we’re building. We can make the currently running ones consistently faster by deeply understanding and optimizing our systems.

The reality is that specifics of the infrastructure matter. Details matter. Especially for distributed platforms which abstract resource layers, such as NSX and vSAN. Knowing your systems inside and out is the only way to be sure you’ve properly handled those details. It’s about having a passion for these details. It’s about loving the systems we build. It’s about understanding them end-to-end.

This book explains the concepts and mechanisms behind the physical resource components and the VMkernel resource schedulers, which enables you to:

    Optimize your workload for current and future Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) systems.
    Discover how vSphere Balanced Power Management takes advantage of the CPU Turbo Boost functionality, and why High Performance does not.
    How the 3-DIMMs per Channel configuration results in a 10-20% performance drop.
    How TLB works and why it is bad to disable large pages in virtualized environments.
    Why 3D XPoint is perfect for the vSAN caching tier.
    What queues are and where they live inside the end-to-end storage data paths.
    Tune VMkernel components to optimize performance for VXLAN network traffic and NFV environments.
    Why Intel's Data Plane Development Kit significantly boosts packet processing performance.

Finally to round off, here is one of my recent favourite tweets from Frank, that I’ve also been sharing around work.

Regards

Dean


TrendMicroDeepSecurity9

Trend Deep Security – Agentless Deployment with NSX – Issues with Web Reputation Service

Uncategorized, VMware, , , , , ,

So I’ve just had the pleasure of deploying Trend Deep Security via the Agent-less method, utilizing the NSX free license which allows guest introspection, but no other features.

Starting in NSX 6.2.3, the default license upon install will be NSX for vShield Endpoint. This license enables use of NSX for deploying and managing vShield Endpoint for anti-virus offload capability only, and has hard enforcement to restrict usage of VXLAN, firewall, and Edge services, by blocking host preparation and creation of NSX Edges.

The Issue

With the basic Deep Security License you get the following coverage;

  • Anti-Malware
  • Web Reputation Service

However upon deploying Trend and jumping through the various hoops. (flakey support for NSX free license). You will find that you have multiple errors showing against your VM’s.

Trend-Agentless-Issue-1

The Cause

After speaking with Trend, I received the following response, which seems kind of obvious; Continue reading Trend Deep Security – Agentless Deployment with NSX – Issues with Web Reputation Service →

PowerCLI

PowerCLI – Setup Host networking and storage ready for ISCSI LUNs

Networking, Storage, VMware, , , , , , ,

So I am no scripting master, my PowerShell knowledge is still something I want to expand. During an install last week I had a number of hosts to setup from scratch, so I decided to do this via PowerCLI, as a lot of the tasks were repetitive. Setting up the vSwitch networking and iSCSI configuration for each host

For those of you new to scripting, I’ve included screenshots to accompany the commands so you can see whats going on in the GUI.

Note: the full code without the breaks is at the end of this post

#Setup which host to target 
$VMhost = 'hostname'

Continue reading PowerCLI – Setup Host networking and storage ready for ISCSI LUNs →

Paris Tuileries Garden Facepalm statue

Further ESXi 6.0 CBT bug info – Reset your CBT!!!

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Following on from the recent (November 2015) ESXi 6.0 CBT bug, which has now been fixed in the latest released patch ESXi600-201511401-BG, some further information has come to light, provided by Anton Gostev, of Veeam.

You can read the snippet of important information from the Veeam forum post following the issue (Official Veeam KB2075);

All, we have completed the first day of testing in the same exact lab and using the same heavy write I/O test that made the original issue easily reproducible. After a few TB of increments, the above-mention patch appears to fully resolve the original issue when installed on ESX 6.0 Update 1a build 3073146.

However, we found that simply installing the patch is not sufficient, and CBT reset is required for all of your VMs. This is because existing CBT map files may contain issues created earlier due to the original bug, which may result in inconsistent full backups in future. Having CBT reset will also force the following job run use "full scan" incremental pass, thus fixing any existing inconsistencies in backups and replicas, as discussed earlier in this topic.

Provided CBT reset has been performed, Active Full backups is not required.

Performing Active Full backups by itself cannot be considered as a substitute to CBT reset with this particular CBT issue.

Thanks!

You can either follow the CBT Reset instructions from Veeam or look over to Chris Wahl’s latest blog post “Resetting VMware’s Changed Block Tracking (CBT) File with PowerCLI”.

Regards

Dean