The APAC BrownBags kicked off last night with a VCAP-DCD study group.

The Video

Slides

More BrownBags

You can find all our past recordings for both the VCP5 series as well as every other topic we’ve covered (50+ hours) here: http://professionalvmware.com/brownbags/

These are collected over a period of a few weeks while out on leave. They have again gotten to be too many to effectively manage, so as I close them out, I read & dump here.

• Cloud Shark – A vApp or physical appliance, as well as a service, for uploading packet captures (pcap) files. Good for sharing, and reading on devices that don’t have Wireshark.
• PowerCLI Top posts – Pay attention to the HA, SDRS, and VM Start-up scripts.
• Y-U-No vMotion – Good post on making sure all your requirements for vMotion are met, as well as a script to do the checking for you.
• Be Startup You – A good post on being awesome, or iterating till you get there. FIND THE MCDONALDS OF YOUR SOUL. BURN IT TO THE GROUND.
• On Service – Service is a thing that lots of companies tout, but very few get right.
• vPanoroma – This one came from vHersey via Jason Boche. vPanaroma is a free vApp that provides a high level dashboard when aimed at your vCenters. Pretty slick, and would look nice when projected at the wall.
• vCenter Orchestrator & PowerCLI Seamless Integration – Well, title says it all, from the vCO Blog.
• “Ultimate” vSphere Home Lab – I love seeing what others are doing with their home labs. This one is an 8 part series on the lab, including story, hardware, and setup.
• Android in Workstation 8
• vSphere 5 Reference Card: Storage – Updates to the vReference card for vSphere 5 and it’s storage changes.
• VMware Press: SRM 5.0 by Mike Laverick – Congrats Mike! This is one of the first titles out on VMware Press and continues Mike’s awesome SRM book series.
• vSphere Health Check PowerPack (PowerCLI) – Gabe form Gabe’s Virtual world brings us not just the vSphere Health Check PowerPack, but also guides on it’s various parts.
• vCO and Wavemaker – Had this one open for a long while, but seemingly I lost it in the shuffle. Wavemaker was acquired by VMware, and makes building good looking, functional, vCO web portals quite easy.
• Load Balancing on Datastore Cluster Configs – Good read on the impacts of Load Balancing with SDRS.

Since vSphere added the ability to have oddly numbered non power of two vCPU configurations, I’ve wondered what it’d be like to run a VM with an odd number. Will Windows react oddly? etc?

I also had some curiosity around doing similar for non standard amounts of ram (non power’s of two or multiples of 1024).

When changing resources on my vCenter VM I decided to take the plunge, Prime numbered CPU’s and 2PI * 1024 (rounded) MB of ram. Into it a few months now and so far so good!

Just wanted to make a quick note to John Troyer, the man, myth, and legend behind the awesomeness of the VMware communities on his birthday to say “Thanks” for everything. Really! Some of John’s efforts that I’ve had some real life benefit from:

• Blogger/Press pass @ VMworld.
• vExpert 3 years running (vExpert is the VMware analog to Microsoft’s MVP)
• Numerous BrownBag guests.
• Same as above, but with listeners. I get chills when there is a shout out on the VMTN round table.

Each of these may not seem big on it’s own, but consider, I’m one of many hundreds of vNerds out there who get the same treatment. It’s always awesome to have someone at VMware who knows you by name and will advocate on your behalf.

Happy Birthday John, & Thanks for all you do.

I’ve not had a good chance to process the entirety of the flood that has been the vSphere 5 release. Let alone think on the implications of the licensing change. So a summary post will be forth coming at some stage (maybe). Until then, here are a bunch of links that I gathered in or around the announcement. Note, some of these may be linked twice… it really is a link dump to be honest.

• http://blogs.vmware.com/rethinkit/2011/07/vmware-building-the-foundation-for-the-cloud-era-with-the-launch-of-vsphere-5-and-the-cloud-infrastr.html
• http://vmguy.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/1674
• http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2011/07/12/virtualization-wars-episode-v-vmware-strikes-back/
• http://www.seancrookston.com/2011/07/12/vsphere-5-for-the-smb/
• http://vtexan.com/2011/07/12/really-cool-things-in-vsphere5/
• http://blogs.vmware.com/uptime/2011/07/whats-new-with-vmware-vcenter-site-recovery-manager-v50.html
• http://blog.cowger.us/?p=71
• http://corus360.com/company/blog/vmware-announces-vsphere-5-and-a-new-licensing-model/
• http://blogs.vmware.com/uptime/2011/07/vsphere-50-is-released-with-new-ha-features.html
• http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/07/14/vsphere-5-0-storage-vmotion-and-the-mirror-driver/
• http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/07/13/vsphere-5-0-profile-driven-storage-what-is-it-good-for/
• http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/07/13/vsphere-5-0-what-has-changed-for-vmfs/
• http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/07/12/whats-new-for-storage-whitepaper-and-videos/
• http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/07/12/vsphere-5-0-storage-drs-introduction/
• http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/07/12/5-is-the-magic-number-2/
• http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/07/12/live-blog-raising-the-bar-part-v/
• http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2011/07/raising-the-bar-v-vsphere-5.html
• http://blogs.vmware.com/esxi/2011/07/whats-new-with-esxi-in-vsphere-50.html
• http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-19367/TS-509279.mp3
• http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/07/new-enhanced-vsphere-50-storage-features-part-3-vaai.html
• http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/07/new-vsphere-50-storage-features-part-2-storage-vmotion.html
• http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/vsphere-5-licensing-with-vram-isn%E2%80%99t-that-bad-at-all/
• http://vmwaretraining.blogspot.com/2011/07/blog-posts-related-to-vsphere-5-release.html
• http://vmwaretraining.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-does-vcp3-holder-update-to-vcp5.html
• http://www.vmwarevideos.com/vmware-cto-steve-herrod-covers-new-vsphere-5-features
• http://www.vmwarevideos.com/duncan-epping-interviewed-by-david-davis-about-vsphere-5-and-his-new-book
• http://www.vmwarevideos.com/duncan-epping-interviewed-by-david-davis-about-vsphere-5-and-his-new-book
• http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2011/07/vshield-app-5-data-security-awesomesauce-and-free-to-try.html
• http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2011/07/vstorage-apis-for-array-integration-vaai-vsphere-5-edition.html
• http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2011/07/vsphere-5-apd-gets-a-new-friend-pdl.html
• http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2011/07/vm-ha-laying-a-foundation-for-today-and-tomorrow.html
• http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2011/07/vmfs-5what-you-need-to-know-in-a-nutshell.html

The Video

2011-05-25 ProfessionalVMware BrownBags – Nick Weaver Edition from ProfessionalVMware on Vimeo.

The Links

Not too many:

• http://nickapedia.com/2011/02/16/virtual-selection-cloud-constructs-for-rapid-prototypingtesting/
• http://nickapedia.com/?s=uber

One post, two parts. Not because they’re short, but because the days were so intense I only had a chance to jot down notes & start to expand on them now.

TL;DR – For those at the show, you’ll understand. For those that couldn’t make it… you’ll want to stay tuned to EMC & VMware… Big things coming.

Day 2 – Who Peed in Your Resource Pool

Day 2 was interesting on a number of accounts:

Keynote:

• It costs VMWare .06 per vm per hour to provision a VM.
• The hypervisor is no longer the secret sauce. That is now in management and orchestration
• Real time statistical analysis of your environment will help you identify the kid that peed in the resource pool.
• There are lots of new animals in the IT zoo (read: end user Devices)

VMWare End User Computing 2015

This one identified the state of things today, and how they’ll play out into the future. Unfortunately, I’ve still not made sense of my notes. I figure that’s because he iPad autocorrected them for me. Blah.

vLab – VSI

Boom! This lab was slick in that it walked you through installing, configuring & working with the EMC VSI plugin for vCenter. The plugin itself operated slowly, but this was more due to the nested VM nature of the lab.

Chad Sakac!

Chad did a “Social City” session after which I cornered him to ask about a BrownBag. I’ll have to work out some scheduling… but, expect some “face melting awesomesauce” coming to a BrownBag near you.

Day 3 – Hookah Smoking Caterpillars

A bit tired after yesterday, but some additional things talked about/covered that I came for.

PowerPath/VE Ask the Experts

This was a panel session, with a large number of folks from the PowerPath team. The questions were all over the place, so I’ll try to highlight a few that were interesting:

• Q: “I have customers who try to migrate either the quorum or MSCS volumes without taking the other node down, this makes pain. Is there a way to have the PowerPath migration tools notify the user of this pitfalls?” A: Crowd: “Wait what?” A: Panel: “Suggestion Taken”
• Q: “I have an issue when deploying PowerPath/VE to ESXi hosts that causes a PSOD. There is an open issue, but can you provide some perspective?” A: Engineering is working on it. The issue is a hard one to pin down as there don’t seem to be many consistencies with it, but they’re digging in.
• Q: “Does PowerPath/VE Support RDMs on Virtual Machines?” A: Yes… No… well, we’ll need to follow-up on that, here’s a card.

Virtual Storage Overview & Direction

I’m just going to leave these here and let you make of them what you will. I think you’ll find them curious indeed.

Disclaimer: EMC stated at the beginning of the session that well, these are “vision” slides. The future is uncertain, so take them with a grain of salt.

Nerd Herd

This was a “Social City” event put on / arranged by NerdBlurt (Luigi Danakos / @NerdBlurt). The panelists:

The conversation went round and round on the various bits of the show that each liked, thoughts on the vision, etc. I believe there will be a recording of the session here.

Summary:

On the whole, I didn’t get to a number of the sessions I was after, but still feel I got a huge amount of info from the ones I did make, as well as from the conversations with other expert folks at the show. The conversation with the PowerPath/VE engineers on deployment, FlexLM, and VUM told me quite a bit about what I rolled in there for. Additionally I got to corner any number of vSpecalists & other experts both VMware & EMC alike to get some direct questions addressed.

Further the show floor had any number of interesting things outside the typical key players. There was a small time SSD player with whom I had a great conversation (he wasn’t giving away an iPad2, so I got to talk to him for a bit). The storage/virt space is going to be interesting for a while to come & it’s good to see the small guys innovating also.

Pool Pee picture by this guy here.

In lieu of a longer post later (tomorrow morning) I thought it would be worthwhile to drop a note about a few things. First was Paul Maritz’s keynote… There was quite a bit of good info in there:
- it costs VMWare .06 per vm per hour to provision a VM.
- the hypervisor is no longer the secret sauce. That is now in management and orchestration.
- real time statistical analysis of your environment will help you identify the kid that peed in the resource pool.
- there are lots of new animals in the IT zoo.

Next up was the “VMWare vision of end user computing 2015″. I’ll need some time to process my notes and get a good post out, but essentially the speaker took up from where Paul left off.
- things aren’t getting written to the OS anymore, they’re being written to newage web frameworks or hybrid kids.
- users expect coherent & ubiquitous access to data. View & ThinApp help, but the answer is bigger.
- automation and orchestration make that happen.

So this happened. VMware has pulled the ESX Classic binaries from being available as a direct download:

While they do provide a download link for ESX classic, it sends a pretty clear message… If you haven’t made migration plans, NOW is the time to do so.

Thankfully, they’ve not left folks completely out to dry and have provided some basic ESXi migration guidance here.

Additionally, I’d suggest as a first step, installing ESXi as a VM inside VMware Fusion or Workstation to become familiar with it before migrating your production hosts. Like using Fusion/Workstation for other test/dev workloads, this should be no different. Test your tools, agents, processes, etc against the VM image before blowing away a production host.

Other than having and on and off bout with some stomach bug yesterday, all and all the show was great. Here are some of the highlights (The post is picture heavy… sorry):

TL;DR – I went to some sessions, they were cool, but not as cool as vmotioning a running VM onto the Isilon in the keynote.

The Sessions

Keynote #1

I don’t have much to add or say about this one, excepting that they touched on some pretty interesting things re: “Big Data” and the new way’s things are going to need to be done now that the world is going virtual.

Keynote #2

This one was a bit more interesting in that the following happened:

Project Lightning

(more here). Basically, EMC Really Really likes flash. Really:

the big news is outing the fact that for many moons, we’ve been quietly working on a project to not only deliver a server-side flash-based PCIe card, but more importantly – an end-to-end solution around applying the idea of “tiering” from the server all the way to the array.

The demo on this was was slick… I’m still a bit intrigued about the “vSphere & Isilon co-residence” bit that allowed a workload to be vmotioned ONTO the Isilon. Interesting implications… and kinda wonder when it’ll be available across the rest of the platforms.

UIM 2.1

Integrated with vCenter, Provisioning & Ops Goodness (more here).

(Image & youtube embed borrowed from Chad @ virtualgeek)

VPLEX Geo

Also Cool was vPlex Geo. 3rd site witness & Active/Active across async distances. Read more here.

PowerPath/VE #1:

I also took in a few PowerPath/VE sessions. The first was sort of a 101 on some of the changes to PowerPath for 2011. Highlights:

• Improved Bus Dead/Alive messaging
• High latency watermark metric now provided along with the warning
• PowerPath Viewer is a free download, runs on Windows & lets you monitor multiple hosts
• RSA encryption for Data at Rest w/ HBA assisted encryption. (Not sure if this is on vSphere, yet).

PowerPath/VE #2:

This one went a little deeper than the first & covered vBlocks & vPlex. Highlights:

• UIM is vBlock & PowerPath Magic – As in, it auto-configures your vSphere hosts in the vBlock to use best practices (dual dual port HBAs, each cabled to a different director, etc)
• rcli/rpowermt for remote administration of ESXi hosts
• PowerPath Viewer Q2 release for vSphere support
• Deploy PowerPath/VE using VUM
• VSI – is also VUM integrated & gives some slick views into your emc environment
• PowerPath/VE lives in the hypervisor kernel

Bloggers Lounge:

Sorry John Troyer, but EMC has set the bar pretty high:

Robotics?!

The Cloud

Summary

All and all an excellent first day, and I’m looking forward to Day #2.