Vmware on The IT Hollow

Kubernetes Visually - With VMware Octant

Tue, 20 Aug 2019 14:10:35 +0000

I don’t know about you, but I learn things best when I have a visual to reference. Many of my posts in this blog are purposefully built with visuals, not only because I think its helpful for the readers to “get the picture”, but also because that’s how I learn.

Kubernetes can feel like a daunting technology to start learning, especially since you’ll be working with code and the command line for virtually all of it. That can be a scary proposition to an operations person who is trying to break into something brand new. But last week I was introduced to a project from VMware called Octant, that helps visualize whats actually going on in our Kubernetes cluster.

VMware Cloud on AWS Firewalls Overview

Wed, 28 Nov 2018 16:03:46 +0000

If you’re getting started with VMware Cloud on AWS then you should be aware of all the points in which you can block traffic with a firewall. Or, if you look at it another way, the places where you might need to create allow rules for traffic to traverse your cloud. This post is used to show where those choke points live both within your VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC, as well as the Amazon VPC in which your SDDC lives.

VMware Discovery

Mon, 30 Oct 2017 14:20:38 +0000

VMware has been busy over the last year trying to re-invent themselves with more focus on cloud. With that they’ve added some new SaaS products that can be used to help manage your cloud environments and provide some additional governance IT departments. Cloud makes things very simple to deploy and often eliminates the resource request phases that usually slow down provisioning. But once you start using the cloud, you can pretty quickly lose track of the resources that you’ve deployed, and now are paying for on a monthly basis, so it’s important to have good visibility and management of those resources.

vRealize Automation 7 - Deploy NSX Blueprints

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 15:10:20 +0000

In the previous post we went over how to get the basics configured for NSX and vRealize Automation integration. In this post we’ll build a blueprint and deploy it! Let’s jump right in and get started.

Blueprint Designer

Login to your vRA tenant and click on the Design Tab. Create a new blueprint just like we have done in the past posts. This time when you are creating your blueprint, click the NSX Settings tab and select the Transport zone. I’ve also added a reservation policy that can help define with reservations are available for this blueprint.

vRealize Automation 7 - NSX Initial Setup

Mon, 07 Mar 2016 15:01:03 +0000

Its time to think about deploying our networks through vRA. Deploying servers are cool, but deploying three tiered applications in different networks is cooler. So lets add VMware NSX to our cloud portal and get cracking.

The first step is to have NSX up and running in your vSphere environment. Once this simple task is complete, a Distributed Logical Router should be deployed with an Uplink interface configured. The diagram below explains what needs to be setup in vSphere prior to doing any configurations in vRealize Automation. A Distributed Logical Router with a single uplink to an Edge Services Gateway should be configured first, then any new networks will be built through the vRealize Automation integration. While the section of the diagram that is manual, will remain roughly the same throughout, the section handled by vRealize Automation will change often, based on the workloads that are deployed. Note: be sure to setup some routing between your Provider Edge and the DLR so that you can reach the new networks that vRA creates.

vRealize Automation 7 – XaaS Blueprints

Mon, 29 Feb 2016 15:03:07 +0000

XaaS isn’t a made up term, well maybe it is, but it supposed to stand for “Anything as a Service.” vRealize Automation will allow you to publish vRO workflows in the service catalog. This means that you can publish just about any thing you can think of, and not just server blueprints. If you have a workflow that can order your coffee and have it delivered to you, then you can publish it in your vRA service catalog. Side note, if you have that workflow, please share it with the rest of us.

vRealize Automation 7 - Load Balancer Rules

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 15:15:32 +0000

In a previous post we went over installing an Enterprise Install of vRealize Automation behind a load balancer. This install required us to setup a Load Balancer with three VIPs but also required that we only had one active member in each VIP. A load balancer with a single member doesn’t really balance much load does it?

After the installation is done, some modifications need to be made on the Load Balancer. The instructions on this can be found in the official vRealize Automation Load Balancing Configuration Guide if you want to learn more. There are several examples on how to setup load balancing on an F5 load balancer and NSX for example. This post will focus on a KEMP load balancer which is free for vExperts and it will all be shown through with GUI examples.

vRealize Automation 7 – Enterprise Install

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 15:09:48 +0000

OK, You’ve done a vRealize Automation 7 simple install and have the basics down. Now it’s time to put your grown up pants on, and get an enterprise install done. This is a pretty long process, so be ready, but trust me, this is much better in version 7 than in the past.

Load Balancer

To start with, you will want to configure your load balancer. An enterprise install means that you’ll want at least two of each type of service so that you can protect yourself from a failure. There are three Virtual IPs (VIPs) that should be created prior to starting your install. The table below lists an example list of VIPs with their associated members and ports.

vRealize Automation 7 – Custom Actions

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 15:31:16 +0000

We’ve deployed a virtual machine from a vRA blueprint, but we still have to manage that machine. One of the cool things we can do with vRealize Automation 7 is to add a custom action. This takes the virtual machine object and runs a vRealize Orchestration blueprint against that input. We call these actions “Day 2 Operations” since they happen post provisioning.

To create a new custom resource action go to the Design Tab –> Design –> Resource Actions. Click the “New” button to add a new action.

vRealize Automation 7 - Custom Properties

Wed, 10 Feb 2016 15:09:39 +0000

Custom Properties are used to control aspects of machines that users are able to provision. For example, memory and CPU are required information that are necessary for users to deploy a VM from a blueprint. Custom properties can be assigned to a blueprint or reservation to control how memory and CPU should be configured.

Custom properties are really powerful attributes that can vastly change how a machine behaves. I like to think of custom properties as the “Windows Registry” of vRealize Automation. Changing one property can have a huge effect on deployments.

vRealize Automation 7 – Subscriptions

Mon, 08 Feb 2016 15:05:14 +0000

In vRealize Automation 7 a new concept was introduced called a “Subscription.” A subscription is a way to allow you to execute a vRealize Orchestrator workflow based on some sort of event that has taken place in vRA. Simple idea huh? Well some of you might be thinking to yourself, “Yeah, this is called a stub, Duh!” The truth is that stubs are still available in vRealize Automation 7 but are clearly being phased out and we should stop using them soon because they are likely to not be around in future versions. The idea of an event subscription is a lot like a stub when in the context of machine provisioning, but there are a lot more events that can be triggered than the stubs that have been around in previous versions. Let’s take a look.

vRealize Automation 7 – Manage Catalog Items

Tue, 02 Feb 2016 15:05:37 +0000

You’ve created your blueprints and entitled users to use them. How do we get them to show up in our service catalog? How do we make them look pretty and organized? For that, we need to look at managing catalog items.

Log in as a tenant administrator and go to the Administration Tab –> Catalog Management –> Catalog Items. From here, we’ll need to look for the blueprint that we’ve previously published. Click on the blueprint.

vRealize Automation 7 – Entitlements

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 15:01:13 +0000

An entitlement is how we assign users a set of catalog items. Each of these entitlements can be managed by the business group manager or a tenant administrator can manage entitlements for all business groups in their tenant.

To create a new entitlement go to Administration tab –> Catalog Management –> Entitlements. Click the “New” button to add a new entitlement.

Under the General tab, enter a name for the entitlement and a description. Change the status to “Active” and select a Business Group. Note: If only a single business group has been created, this will not be selectable since it will default to the only available group. Then select the users who will be part of this entitlement.

vRealize Automation 7 – Blueprints

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 15:10:13 +0000

Blueprints are arguably the thing you’ll spend most of your operational time dealing with in vRealize Automation. We’ve finally gotten most of the setup done so that we can publish our vSphere templates in vRA.

To create a blueprint in vRealize Automation 7 go to the “Design” tab. Note: If you’re missing this tab, be sure you added yourself to the custom group with permissions like we did in a previous post, and that you’ve logged back into the portal after doing so.

vRealize Automation 7 – Custom Groups

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 15:05:40 +0000

If you’ve been reading the whole series of posts on vRealize Automation 7, then you’ll know that we’ve already been setting up roles in our cloud portal, but we’re not done yet. If you need any permissions besides just requesting a blueprint, you’ll need to be added to a custom group first.

To create a custom group, login as a tenant administrator and go to the Administration Tab –> Users and Groups –> Custom Groups. From there click the “New” button to add a new custom group.

vRealize Automation 7 – Services

Tue, 26 Jan 2016 15:05:21 +0000

Services might be a poor name for this feature of vRealize Automation 7. When I think of a service, I think of some sort of activity that is being provided but in the case of vRA a service is little more than a category or type. For example, I could have a service called “Private Cloud” and put all of my vSphere blueprints in it and another one called “Public Cloud” and put all of my AWS blueprints in it. In the screenshot below you can see the services in a catalog. If you highlight the “All Services” service, it will show you all blueprints regardless of their service category. Otherwise, selecting a specific service will show you only the blueprints in that category.

vRealize Automation 7 – Reservations

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 15:16:53 +0000

vRealize Automation 7 uses the concept of reservations to grant a percentage of fabric group resources to a business group. To add a reservation go to Infrastructure –> Reservations. Click the “New” button to add a reservation and then select the type of reservation to be added. Since I’m using a vSphere Cluster, I selected Virtual –> vCenter. Depending on what kind of reservations you’ve selected, the next few screens may be different, but I’m assuming many people will use vSphere so I’ve chosen this for my example.

vRealize Automation 7 – Business Groups

Thu, 21 Jan 2016 15:15:27 +0000

The job of a business group is to associate a set of resources with a set of users. Think of it this way, your development team and your production managers likely need to deploy machines to different sets of servers. I should mention that a business group doesn’t do this by itself. Instead it is combined with a reservation which we’ll discuss in the next post. But before we can build those out, lets setup our business groups as well as machine prefixes.

vRealize Automation 7 – Fabric Groups

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 15:09:39 +0000

In the last post we setup an vCenter endpoint that defines how our vRealize Automation solution will talk to our vSphere environment. Now we must create a fabric group. Fabric Groups are a way of segmenting our endpoints into different types of resources or to separate them by intent. These groups are mandatory before you can build anything so don’t think that since you don’t need to segment your resources, that you can get away with not creating one.

vRealize Automation 7 – Endpoints

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 15:06:46 +0000

Now that we’ve setup our new tenant, lets login as an infrastructure admin and start assigning some resources that we can use. To do this we need to start by adding an endpoint. An endpoint is anything that vRA uses to complete it’s provisioning processes. This could be a public cloud resource such as Amazon Web Services, an external orchestrator appliance, or a private cloud hosted by Hyper-V or vSphere.

vRealize Automation 7 – Create Tenants

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 16:10:08 +0000

Now it’s time to create a new tenant in our vRealize Automation portal. Let’s login to the portal as the system administrator account as we have before. Click the Tenants tab and then click the “New” button.

Give the new tenant a name and a description. Then enter a URL name. This name will be appended to this string: https://[vraappliance.domain.name]/vcac/org/ and will be the URL that users will login to. In my example the url is https://vra7.hollow.local/vcac/org/labtenant. Click “Submit and Next”.

vRealize Automation 7 - Authentication

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 15:03:15 +0000

In order to setup Active Directory Integrated Authentication, we must login to our default tenant again but this time as our “Tenant Administrator” (we setup in the previous post) instead of the system administrator account that is created during initial setup.

Once you’re logged in, click the Administration tab –> Directories Management –> Directories and then click the “Add Directory” button. Give the directory a descriptive name like the name of the ad domain for example. Then select the type of directory. I’ve chosen the “Active Directory (Integrated Windows Authentication)” option. This will add the vRA appliance to the AD Domain and use the computer account for authentication. Note: you must setup Active Directory in the default (vsphere.local) tenant before it can be used in the subtenants.

vRealize Automation 7 - Base Setup

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 15:07:46 +0000

We’ve got vRA installed and thats a good start. Our next step is to login to the portal and start doing some configuration. Go to https://vra-appliance-name-orIP and enter the administrator login that you specified during your install. Unlike prior versions of vRealize Automation, no domain vsphere.local domain suffix is required to login.

To start, Lets add some local users to our vSphere.local tenant. Click on the vsphere.local tenant.

Click on the “Local users” tab and then click the “New” button to add a local account. I’ve created a vraadmin account that will be a local account only used to manage the default tenant configurations.

vRealize Automation 7 Guide

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 15:45:35 +0000

If following the posts in order, this guide should help you setup vRealize Automation 7 from start to finish. This is a getting started guide that will hopefully get you on the right path, answer any questions you might have, and give you tips on deploying your own cloud management portal.

Part 1 - Simple Installation

Part 2 -Base Setup

Part 3 - Authentication

Part 4 - Tenants

Part 5 - Endpoints

Part 6 - Fabric Groups

Part 7 - Business Groups

Part 8 - Reservations

Part 9 - Services

Part 10 - Custom Groups

Part 11 - Blueprints

Part 12 - Entitlements

Part 13 - Manage Catalog Items

Part 14 - Event Subscriptions

Part 15 - Custom Properties

Part 16 - XaaS Blueprints

Part 17 - Resource Actions

Part 18 - Enterprise Install

Part 19 - Load Balancer Settings

Part 20 - NSX Initial Setup

Part 21 - NSX Blueprints

Part 22 - Code Stream and Jenkins Setup

Part 23 - Code Stream and Artifactory Setup

Part 24 - Add Custom Items to vRA7

Part 25 - Upgrade vRA from 7.1 to 7.2

Part 26 - Adding an Azure Endpoint

Part 27 - Installing vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Part 28 - Configuring Endpoints for vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Part 29 - Using vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Part 30 - Unit Testing with vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Part 31 - Containers on vRealize Automation

Part 32 - vRA 7.3 Component Profiles

Part 33 - vRA 7.5 Upgrade

If you’re looking for a getting started video, check out this P luralsight course for a quick leg up on vRA 7.

vRealize Automation 7 Simple Installation

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 15:00:21 +0000

This is our first stop in our journey to install vRealize Automation 7 and all of it’s new features. This post starts with the setup of the environment and assumes that you’ve deployed a vRealize Automation appliance from an OVA and that you’ve also got a Windows Server deployed so that we can install the IAAS components on it.

After you’ve deployed the vRA7 OVA, login to the appliance with the root login and password supplied during your OVA deployment.

vRealize Automation and vCloud Air Integration

Mon, 21 Sep 2015 14:07:42 +0000

vRealize Automation is at its best when it can leverage multiple infrastructures to provide a hybrid cloud infrastructure. One of the things we might want to do is to set up VMware vCloud Air integration with your vRA instance.

To start, we need to have a vCloud Air account which you can currently sign up for with some initial credits to get you started for free. Once you’ve got an account you’ll be able to setup a VDC and will have some catalogs that you can build VMs from. If you’re concerned about these steps, don’t worry a default VDC including some storage and a network will be there for you by default.

Move a vApp Between Clusters

Mon, 23 Feb 2015 14:00:14 +0000

I recently made some changes to my home lab and had to create a new Cluster because of my EVC mode when I was faced with migrating my vC Ops vApp to the new cluster. I moved the hosts over, but the vApp wouldn’t go with them like the virtual machines did.

vAppMigrate1

My first attempt was to export the vApp to an OVF file and reimport it to the new cluster which failed with an error.

VMware SSL Automation Tool - Error Generating pfx

Mon, 29 Dec 2014 16:13:20 +0000

During the process of setting up a new vCenter Server in my lab, I ran into an issue adding SSL Certificates to my vCenter services. I followed my own blog posts about how to do this so that I wouldn’t miss anything, but nevertheless ran into an error that took me quite a while to get fixed.

After creating all my certificate requests using the VMware SSL Automation Tool, I updated my SSO with my custom certificate without issue. The next step is to make sure the Inventory Service trusts the new SSO Certificate, which also went without a hitch.

Know Heads from Tails about Linux

Mon, 21 Jul 2014 13:26:20 +0000

There are a few Linux commands that vSphere Administrators should know for basic troubleshooting purposes and I wanted to take a second to review them in case you’ve typically been a Windows Administrator (like me).

First, traversing the Linux file system is pretty similar to going through Windows directories from the command line.

change directories

Windows : CD C:dirname

Linux : cd /dirname

Show files and folders

Windows : dir

VMware Drive Type Changer

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 13:33:09 +0000

There are a ton of features now that VMware has that may require either an SSD or a Non-SSD to be available in your ESXi host. Host Caching requires an SSD and Partner products like PernixData also require an SSD to be available on the host. VMware’s Virtual SAN (VSAN) currently require both an SSD and a Non-SSD to be available.

I’ve seen that many people want to try out these products in a lab environment, but don’t want to go out and buy another disk just to familiarize themselves with the product. In these cases, you can fool ESXi into thinking there is a device of the type you want. This can be done by using the esxcli commands on the host as documented here on VMware’s site.

Dynamically Assigned Static IP Addresses...Huh?

Mon, 30 Jun 2014 16:08:12 +0000

After a long day of working with Microsoft’s IPAM feature, I found that it might be possible to deploy my virtual servers with a static IP Address without going to look up an IP from an Excel spreadsheet or some other log.

OK, let’s address the elephant in the room first. I know that there is this thing called DHCP and that I can already automatically assign an IP addresss, but with that solution, my IP Address could change from time to time. Typically, I create a DHCP Scope for servers that I’m just testing out, or need some dummy VMs with IP Addresses. This way I don’t have to worry about looking up stuff before deploying a VM that I’m going to destroy again shortly afterwards. I also use DHCP for PC’s, where I almost never care about the IP Address.

Test Connections from an ESXi Host Using vmkping

Mon, 23 Jun 2014 16:19:10 +0000

If you’ve been in a situation where you need to test connectivity, you’ve probably used the ping command. But what do you do when you’re trying to test connectivity from an ESXi host? Luckily there is a command called vmkping that will allow you to test from the host.

The first thing that you need to do is to SSH into your ESXi host. Turn the SSH Service on from the Configuration –> Security Profile Tab. Then you can use your favorite ssh client and remote into your host.

VMware Log Insight 2.0

Mon, 16 Jun 2014 14:30:34 +0000

VMware just announced their 2.0 version of Log Insight last week and for a logging product, it’s pretty cool. Let’s face it, most of us don’t get up every morning and rush to our computer to check out the newest logging software on the market, but VMware Log Insight is still neat.

Installation

The VMware Log Insight 2.0 product was shockingly easy to install for log management system. In my experience, logging software makes you jump through so many hoops that you need to be a Parkour Ninja to do successfully, and some of which I would consider to be a " Cold Butter IT Solution", but not in this case. The install comes in the form of an OVA and I won’t go through that process, but it’s very simple.

vCNS Edge SSL VPN

Tue, 13 May 2014 14:00:14 +0000

A secured, remote connection to your data is a requirement for almost all network designs these days. Mobility, telecommuting and late night help desk calls have created an environment that needs to have access to the local network in a secure fashion. vCNS Edge can provide these services to your virtual infrastructure.

In previous posts, I’ve walked through installing vCNS Manager and installing vCNS Edge appliances. These are prerequisites to setting up SSL VPN on the VMware vCloud Network and Security appliance..

vShield Endpoint - Trend Micro Deep Security (Part 1)

Mon, 24 Mar 2014 13:03:24 +0000

If you’re a vSphere Administrator and have compliance regulations to deal with, vShield Endpoint might save you a lot of hassle. From my own experience with PCI-DSS, it was important to limit the cardholder data environment scope. The fewer devices that touch credit card data, the fewer items that had to be protected. In the same breath, it was important to have Anti-Virus, malware protection, firewall rules and file integrity monitoring. vShield Endpoint allows for all of these things to be handled in a single package. This post looks specifically at Trend Micro’s Deep Security Product.

vShield Endpoint - Trend Micro Deep Security (Part 2)

Mon, 24 Mar 2014 13:02:02 +0000

In the first post in this series, we deployed the vShield Endpoint host driver and installed the Trend Micro Deep Security Manager on a Windows VM.

Trend Micro Deep Security Appliance Deployment

First, we need to login to the Deep Security Manager which is conveniently accessed as a web page. Go the the DNS name of the Manager that you entered during the setup wizard in part 1 of this series. Log in with the username and password that you specified.

vShield Endpoint - Trend Micro Deep Security (Part 3)

Mon, 24 Mar 2014 13:01:49 +0000

The first parts of this series focused mainly on how to install the Trend Micro Deep Security product and how to prepare your environment. This post shows you a bit more of what can be accomplished with the product.

vShield Endpoint Part 1 vSheidl Endpoint Part 2

Policies

This is the guts of the product. All the configurations you’ve done up to this point have been leading up to a solution that can help secure your environment and possibly make it comply with a regulatory body.

Atlantis USX with VMware VSAN?

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 12:45:12 +0000

Last week I attended the Virtualization Field Day 3 put on by the amazing staff at GestaltIT. One of the sessions was hosted by the folks at Atlantis Computing and they were giving us an overview of their Atlantis USX product.

All travel expenses and incidentals were paid for by Gestalt IT to attend Virtual Field Day 3. This was the only compensation given.

Atlantis USX Overview

Before we get to the crux of the issue, a quick refresher on what Atlantis USX does. The USX product will utilize existing SAN, NAS and DAS and combine it with a server ram to do caching. The value proposition is that Atlantis USX can carve out RAM to be used as either a whole datastore (SUPER FAST) or combine it with existing storage and have it act as a cache. Keeping the cache so close to the processor without having to go across a bus or HBA, which can add additional latency, can be an important addition to a performance strapped storage solution.

vCenter HA Datastore Heartbeats

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 15:00:02 +0000

High Availability is a great reason to virtualize your servers. It can help reduce downtime by automatically rebooting virtual machines in the case of a host failure. But, a relatively minor host issue should not cause the reboot of all of your virtual machines. This is where vCenter HA datastore heartbeats are useful. Let’s first look at a basic example of HA. Below is our normal environment with no failures. We have a few VMs on each host and the hosts are connected to a pair of datastores and a network switch. Now assume we have a host failure, we now need to have HA kick in and reboot the virtual machines on the failed host, over on the still working hosts. HA is working great and is a great feature, but lets take a look at what happens if the Management network were to fail. Without datastore heartbeats involved, the two hosts wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other over the network so the two of them would assume that the other was failed. But by looking at the example below we can see that even though the Management network is down, the virtual machines and their network is working just fine. This means that no outages are being noticed by end users so we DON’T want HA to kick in because the virtual machines will restart.

PernixData FVP 1.5 Beta

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 14:50:50 +0000

Good news for all of you eagerly awaiting the next iteration of the PernixData FVP software. Version 1.5 is now in Beta and you can request the download for your own testing from the following link http://info.pernixdata.com/Betaprogram.

Disclosure: At the time of this writing I am a PernixPro which entitles me to early access to software, licenses or other merchandise. The thoughts expressed in this post are my own and have not been vetted by PernixData.

VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.5 Guide

Mon, 04 Nov 2013 14:02:37 +0000

This is a Site Recovery Manager 5.5 Guide to help understand the design, installation, operation and architecture of setting up VMware SRM 5.5

SRM 5.5 Architecture SRM 5.5 Installation SRM 5.5 Site Configuration SRM 5.5 VM Replication Configuration

SRM 5.5 Array Replication Configuration

SRM 5.5 Virtual Appliance Replication SRM 5.5 Protection Groups SRM 5.5 Recovery Plans SRM 5.5 Bulk IP Customizations SRM 5.5 Test Recovery SRM 5.5 Recovery SRM Gotchas

Official Documentation Links

SRM 5.5 Release Notes SRM 5.5 Compatibility Matrix SRM 5.5 Documentation Center SRM Port Numbers SRM Product Page

VMware Fault Tolerance (FT)

Mon, 21 Oct 2013 13:00:53 +0000

I think the Olsen twins have been using FT longer than VMware has.

Awesome! So you’ve got your brand new shiny VMware cluster all setup with HA and think, “Man, I’m in great shape now. Downtime is a thing of the past!”.

Well, not so fast! VMware High Availability just means that if a physical host fails, the virtual machines can reboot on another host which LIMITS your downtime. What if your machines are so critical that you can’t have this reboot time in the case of a host failure? The answer might be VMware Fault Tolerance (FT).

Windows Server 2012 as a Storage Device for vSphere Home Lab

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 13:30:39 +0000

If you’ve got a some hardware lying around for your lab, Windows Server 2012 may be a great solution for a home storage device. You can now do both block (iSCSI) and NAS (NFS) on the same server, as well as having an OS to install some management apps on it. In my lab, I use this management server to run Veeam for my backups, PRTG network monitor for bandwidth tracking, as well as using this server for both iSCSI targets and NFS mounts.

Are you thin or thick? Where at?

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 13:47:47 +0000

I’m often asked about how to provision virtual machine disks. This almost always comes down to, “Should I use thick or thin disks?” and then “Should I do thin provisioning on the array or on the hypervisor?”

So here we go: Thin vs Thick

Thin provisioning:

Thin provisioned disks don’t allocate all of the space during the provisioning of the storage. Instead, they allocate the space on demand. This is a great way to get more bang for you buck out of your storage. Let’s take a closer look with an example.

Understanding VMware Slot Sizes

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:45:12 +0000

VMware slot sizes are an important topic if you’re concerned with how many ESXi hosts are required to run your environment.

What is a Slot?

To begin this post, we need to understand what a slot is. A slot is the minimum amount of CPU and memory resources required for a single VM in an ESXi cluster. Slot size is an important concept because it affects admission control.

A VMware ESXi cluster needs a way to determine how many resources need to be available in the event of a host failure. This slot calculation gives the cluster a way to reserve the right amount of resources.

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 1)

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:38:57 +0000

I recently decided to give VMware Horizon a shot and found the install to be a little confusing so this gives me a good opportunity to lay it all out so that others can try it out for themselves. A big “thank you” goes out to Raj Jethnani for a helping hand with this post. If you’d like to follow him on twitter his link is here: @rajtech

For those of you who don’t know, Horizon is a nifty SAAS platform for you to present thinapp applications too. I could see many organizations benefit from this technology in the near future.

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 2)

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:37:29 +0000

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 1) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 3) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 4)

Configure the Horizon Service

Now that the appliances are setup, it’s time to get busy configuring them. Go to the web address of the Horizon service that you configured (from part 1)

In our case this was http://theithollow.hollow.lab

The first page isn’t very interesting, just begin the wizard.

The second page is almost less interesting, because you have to put in your license key that cost you money. It has to be done, so enter it here.

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 3)

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:36:58 +0000

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 1) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 2) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 4)

In the last part we configured the Horizon Connector, now we’re going to run the setup wizard in order to assign applications and select users.

Horizon Connector Setup Wizard

Let’s begin the setup wizard

Join the domain. Enter the domain name and enter the username and password that has permissions to add a machine to the domain.

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 4)

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:35:34 +0000

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 1) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 2) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 3)

In the last part, we finished setting up the basics of Horizon Connector and the Service Portal.

Now we can login to the Service Portal to assign our applications.

Application Prerequisites

A couple of more prerequisites should be done before we log in.

First, install the Horizon agent on all (or a few test machines) clients that will be using the thinapp packages that are published with Horizon.

VMware Ballooning explained

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 14:20:29 +0000

In my last post I explained a memory reclamation technique called Transparent Page Sharing. This post is dedicated to the Balloon driver method.

The first thing to be clear about is that Memory Ballooning is a technique that is only engaged when the host is running low on physical memory. If you have a host with 60 GB of physical memory available and the virtual machines are only allocated a total of 30GB of memory, then you may never need to know what memory ballooning is all about. However if you are over committing your hosts then this is an important topic to review.

Memory De-duplication in VMware

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 15:15:01 +0000

One of the companies I worked for got a Netapp filer and I loved the fact that it would dedupe the data that was sitting on disk. I got over 40% more storage just by having that sweet little feature on. I was thinking, “How awesome would it be to dedupe my memory?” Getting more memory out of my servers would be a nice thing. Well as it turns out, VMware does this already, but they call it “Transparent Page Sharing.”

Software iSCSI load balancing in ESXi 5

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 14:14:56 +0000

When you team NICs together in ESXi 5 you can pick from a variety of load balancing techniques to determine how traffic should flow over the adapters. You might think that setting up software iSCSI initiators in ESXi would be done in a similar manner. Add a VMkernel to a vSwitch, add a couple of adapters and set a teamingfailover policy. It turns out that this is not the case. You could setup a software iSCSI initiator this way, but it won’t provide you the teaming or failover you’ve intended.

My VCAP5-DCA Experience

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:06:24 +0000

I just found out that I’ve passed the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5 - Datacenter Administration exam and wanted to share my experience.

When I first set out to take on this exam, I was apprehensive about it because of the number of possible questions that could be asked on it. The blueprint was quite large and covered basically everything related to vSphere. I got some helpful advice from a friend who told me that instead of worrying about if I could pass the exam, think about it like vSphere Olympics. It’s a chance to show off how much you know. It was a subtle change, but a different mindset really helped me.

vSphere 5.1 SSO issues

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 14:00:09 +0000

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been hearing a lot of customers having issues logging into vCenter after upgrading to vSphere 5.1. I upgraded the lab and had some issues as well, but was able to fix the issues and wanted to share what I’ve learned. As you may know version 5.1 of vSphere requires the SSO service to be installed before vCenter can be upgraded. SSO is required for this version and cannot be skipped.

HP Insight Control for vCenter

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 15:15:10 +0000

I recently tried out the HP Insight Control plugin for vCenter and was very pleased about the added functionality that was provided in my vSphere client.

http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/integration.html

This plugin gives you additional control of your HP servers and storage that are being used by your vSphere environment. Like other storage vendors, the install will configure your VASA plugin, and will also allow you to do things such as create datastores and snapshots on the storage array from the vSphere Client.

VMware Path Masking

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 13:15:34 +0000

I’ve written posts in the past regarding LUN masking on a storage array, but it is possible to mask a path directly from your vSphere environment. I feel that if at all possible the masking should be handled at array level because the array is closest to the disk. Let’s face it, if vSphere shouldn’t see a LUN for one reason or another, then why is the array presenting it in the first place?

Updating HP ESXi Hosts with VUM

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 14:16:26 +0000

As you may well know, when installing VMware ESXi on an HP server, it is best practice to get a specific image of the hypervisor with the vendor’s drivers included. This will prevent issues such as having missing network cards once you’ve installed ESXi. But what about keeping the server up to date?

Many companies update their servers on a monthly basis for compliance reasons or just best practices. It has been my experience that VMware patches are usually deployed at the same time. VMware Update Manager (VUM) can push updates to the ESXi hosts with the latest patches from VMware, but did you know that you can also use it to patch HP Drivers and CIM providers?

Microsoft Licensing with VMware View Composer

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 14:00:29 +0000

I know the subject of Microsoft licensing makes most administrators want to crawl under a desk and hide when the topic comes up, but it’s important to understand a few things if you’re going to be standing up a VMware View deployment, or any VDI project.

During the install of a Windows 7 operating system you of course have to enter a license key. Once the OS has been installed and booted up, it needs to activate. Product activation is necessary so that Microsoft can make sure that the software is only installed on the number of PCs that were licensed to use it. This product activation can be done via a network connection or via telephone. When you enter your assigned volume license keys during installation you have two types of keys that you can enter:

A Quick Thought on VXLANs

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 11:00:48 +0000

After attending VMworld this year, I decided I needed to try to understand VXLANs a little better. Based off of the basic concept that it stretches a layer two broadcast domain over layer three networks, I was worried that I knew how this was accomplished.

What is VXLAN?

VXLAN stands for Virtual Extensible LAN and is a fairly new method of making the datacenter network elastic. Suppose for example that you want to be able to move your virtual machines from your own server room to a co-location and then to a public cloud depending on what the load was on your environment. In order to do this without causing downtime, you’d need a way for your layer two ethernet frames to continue getting from your clients to your servers even, if a router is in that path.

VMworld 2012 Right Here Right Now

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 02:24:48 +0000

VMworld 2012 was in San Francisco this year and the weather was beautiful. San Francisco was a lovely host and the Moscone Center proved to be very capable of handling the large crowds that were around for the event.

The Solutions Exchange was massive. It included companies like HP, EMC, Netapp as well as some startup companies like Tintri, PHD Virtual and a very new Cloud Physics which was the talk of VMworld this year. Check them out at http://www.cloudphysics.com.

VMware DPM Green Datacenters

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 13:58:39 +0000

Now that we’ve entered the virtualization age, we’ve become accustomed to moving workloads between hosts in order to get better performance. We’re so used to it, that VMware DRS will move workloads around automatically and many administrators don’t even care what host is running their virtual machines. Hosts are now more like a resource container, where we move our servers to the resource that is most available.

VMware lets us take DRS one step further, where if we have extra resources available that aren’t being used, we can power off the hosts in order to save on power consumption. If we have 50 hosts running, but only using the resources of 30 of them, let’s power off the remaining 20 hosts to save on power and cooling. Over a year, these types of savings can really add up.

Using ESXTOP and RESXTOP to Obtain Performance Metrics

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 01:13:39 +0000

Sometimes we need a quick set of statistics to see what is going on inside a vSphere host. Sort of like using Microsoft’s task manager on a Windows server, we can quickly take a look at what some performance stats on the VMware hosts. A couple of the tools to do this are the esxtop and resxtop commands.

Esxtop and resxtop are basically the same with the exception that esxtop must be run directly on the vSphere host by connecting via SSH. Resxtop can be run remotely from the vMA perhaps. Below is a screenshot of the two tools running side by side. Aside from the refresh rates not being matched up, you can see that they are both showing the same information.

VMDirectPath I/O Basic Setup

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 00:46:36 +0000

While I was studying for the VCAP-DCA I realized that many people might not have access to a lab that includes the capability to do VMDirectPath I/O. My own lab is using nested ESXi hosts inside of VMware Workstation so I don’t have access to DirectPath either, but I was able to borrow some equipment in order to test my skills.

If you don’t have access to this type of equipment but want to study for the VCAP5-DCA, the below setup should suffice for you to learn it, as the setup is not very difficult.

Lowering Disaster Recovery Costs with Site Recovery Manager

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 14:04:40 +0000

Setting up a disaster recovery site can be a costly endeavor. VMware Site Recovery Manager has made disaster recovery much simpler, but it’s still expensive to get a DR site up and going. Rack space, power, cooling, bandwidth, storage and compute can all add up pretty quickly, not to mention that hopefully you’ll never have to use this equipment.

Replication Bandwidth

Bandwidth could be very expensive depending on how much data needs to be replicated. Consider some of these techniques to make the best use of your bandwidth.

vSphere 5 AutoDeploy Basics

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 13:55:52 +0000

vSphere AutoDeploy always seemed like a lot of work to setup just to deploy a few VMware hosts, but in my current job I don’t setup hosts very often. If you are constantly deploying new hosts to get out in front of performance issues, or are building a new datacenter and deploying many hosts at once, AutoDeploy can be a great way to get up and running quickly.

Prerequisites

In order to use AutoDeploy, you’ll first need vSphere5, the AutoDeploy Install (which is on the vCenter Media), the vSphere5 Offline Bundle, PowerCLI, a DHCP Server and a TFTP server for starters.

Using PowerCLI for VMware Update Manager

Thu, 31 May 2012 13:29:08 +0000

You never know when you’ll need to script something and PowerCLI gives you the tools to do it. I decided to see if I could script some of the VMware Update Manager (VUM) tasks while I was reviewing section 5.2 of the VCAP5-DCA Beta Blueprint and found that the procedures were quite easy. My next thought was, “Why would I want to script this when I can use the GUI, and on top of that I can schedule scans and remediation already?” My answer was, “You never know.” Who knows when you’ll need to use the PowerCLI to accomplish a task. Maybe, you’re scripting something so someone else can run it without really knowing how to perform the task, or you’re trying to get a report, or who knows.

Upgrading ESXi hosts using VMware Update Manager

Tue, 29 May 2012 19:42:54 +0000

Unlike many operating systems, VMware ESXi gives you a nice tool to upgrade their hypervisor to the latest version. VMware Update Manager gives you the ability to grab the latest build and apply it to your existing ESXi hosts.

I should mention that VMware Update Manager is not the only solution to upgrade your ESXi hosts. Hosts can also be upgraded manually by booting the host to the latest build and performing an upgrade, or by utilizing the new autodeploy features in vSphere 5. VMware Update Manager is a simple tool that can automate the installs on several hosts in sequence and is available with all editions of vSphere 5.

Simple Free VMware Backups

Sun, 20 May 2012 21:44:01 +0000

If you need to backup some of your virtual machines, maybe it’s time to consider VMware Data Recovery 2.0. This VMware appliance provides an easy way to backup some virtual machines for free, but if you’re looking for a large scale backup solution it might be necessary to use more traditional backup solutions from Symantec or Veeam.

To get started, download the VMware Data Recovery iso from vmware.com. The iso includes a plugin for vCenter as well as an OVF for deploying the appliance. Once you’ve deployed the OVF template and installed the vCenter plugin, you can open the vDR from the solutions and applications section of the vCenter console.

NLB in vSphere (Unicast or Multicast)?

Tue, 08 May 2012 18:37:56 +0000

Suppose you have multiple virtual machines that you would like to distribute load across that are housed inside of your virtual environment. How do we go about setting up Network Load Balancing so that it will still work with things like DRS and VMotion?

Switch Refresher

In most networks we have switches that listen for MAC addresses and store them in their MAC Address Table for future use. If a switch receives a request and it knows which port the destination MAC address is associated with, it will forward that request out the single port. If a switch doesn’t know which port a MAC Address is associated with, it will basically send that frame out all of it’s ports (known as flooding) so that the destination can hopefully still receive it. This is why we’ve moved away from hubs and moved towards switches. Hubs will flood everything because they don’t keep track of the MAC Addresses. You can see how this extra traffic on the network is unwanted.

Poor Man's SRM Lab (Whitebox)

Thu, 03 May 2012 12:32:17 +0000

I really wanted to test out some VMware Site Recovery Manager scenarios and realized that buying SANs, servers and networking equipment was quite expensive. I also didn’t have a lot of space in my house that was available for running all of this equipment. After completing my VCP5 I was given a copy of VMware Workstation 8 and thought that I might be able to build a nested virtual environment, where the ESXi hosts themselves were virtualized inside of workstation. (Don’t worry, virtualizing a virtual host doesn’t warp time or space, it’s safe.)

Netapp VASA Provider 1.0

Tue, 01 May 2012 18:58:25 +0000

Netapp has released their vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) provider 1.0 to their support site. http://support.netapp.com If you’re not that familiar with the VASA concept, this article should explain what it is and how it’s used in regards to VMware vSphere 5.

What is VASA?

VASA Providers collect information about your storage systems and present that information to vSphere. In previous versions of vSphere, an administrator might need to keep track of hisher datastores in a spreadsheet or have a naming convention that showed the properties of an individual datastore. For example, if your storage system had both SSD and Sata disks, the Datastore might be named VMFS01_SSD or something similar.

VMware Replication Setup for Site Recovery Manager

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:21:22 +0000

Recently, I wrote a blog post about how to setup and configure VMware Site Recovery Manager for vSphere 5.0. This setup included using array based storage replication to transfer data and it ignored the new VMware replication engine that is included with Site Recovery Manager 5.0. This post is intended to cover the setup and configuration of the vSphere replication.

If you’re not familiar with it, the vSphere Replication Management Server handles individual replication of powered on virtual machines, to a secondary site. This is a free vSphere appliance with the purchase of VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0. Traditionally, vSphere required that the storage providers were replicating the virtual machine data for SRM to work, but that has all changed with 5.0. Now VMware can do the replication for you.

VMware Site Recovery Manager Basic Setup

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 17:23:49 +0000

Finally, the idea of running a Disaster Recovery test is manageable. VMware Site Recovery Manager combined with vSphere has made it possible to test a failover to a warm site without worrying that the DR test itself will cause an outage.

Setting up Site Recovery Manager and performing a site failover sounds like a daunting task, but VMware has made this very simple, assuming you are familiar with vSphere already. If you already have a virtual environment setup at both your production site and a secondary site, SRM is pretty simple to get started with but allows for almost any DR Plan you can think of to be run.

Virtual Routing for Bubble Networks

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:13:57 +0000

A question often comes up about what to do when you have a segmented virtual network that needs to be able to traverse subnets. This might happen if you’re doing some testing and don’t want the machines to contact the production network, or perhaps doing a test SRM failover and having the virtual machines in their own test network. Virtual machines in subnet (A) might need to contact other virtual machines in subnet (B) but don’t have access to the physical router any longer, so they can’t communicate. To solve this issue, how about we try a virtual router?

SQL HA Mirroring with vCenter

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 21:27:51 +0000

We’re probably all aware of the benefits of clustering things like SQL Server in order to provide highly available data. But shared storage clustering has some drawbacks on VMware ESXi clusters such as not being able to vMotion.

• Database Mirroring – SQL Server database mirrors utilize a non-shared storage availability solution, using built-in SQL Server replication technology to create and maintain one or more copies of each database on other SQL Servers in the environment. SQL Server database mirrors provide application-aware availability, and the lack of a quorum disk makes this a VMware-friendly solution, allowing the full use of vMotion, DRS, and HA.

Netapp VSC4 Optimization and Migration

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:40:13 +0000

One of my most frequently read articles is on how to use MBRAlign to align your virtual machine disks on Netapp storage. Well, after Netapp has released their new Virtual Storage Console (VSC4) the tedious task of using MBRAlign might be eased for some admins.

Optimization and Migration The new VSC4 console for vSphere has a new tab called Optimization and Migration. Here you are able to scan all or some of your datastores to check the alignment of your virtual machines. The scan manager can even be set on a schedule so that changes to the datastore will be recognized.

Understanding Beacon Probing

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:30:32 +0000

If you’ve built a virtual infrastructure you’ve probably had to decide whether or not to use Beacon Probing when setting up your vSwitch uplink ports. But what is it, and why do we need it?

Let me propose a scenario. Assume that we have a virtual switch with three uplinks, and one of those uplinks fails.

If the uplinks are setup correctly, they will see the failed uplink and start sending their frames over the other active uplinks. This is standard network fault tolerance from vSphere.

VMware Network Traffic Routing

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 13:00:27 +0000

VMware has lots of ways to setup networking on their ESXi hosts. In order to set this up in the best way for your needs, it’s important to understand how the traffic will be routed between VMs, virtual switches, physical switches and physical network adapters.

Before looking at an example, we should review some networking 101. Machines on the same vlan on the same switch can communicate with one another (assuming there is no firewall type devices in the way). Machines on different vlans on the same switch cannot communicate unless the traffic passes through a router.

Path Selection Policy with ALUA

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:58:05 +0000

It’s important to understand how VMware ESXi servers handle connections to their associated storage arrays.

If we look specifically with fibre channel fabrics, we have several multipathing options to be considered. There are three path selection policy (PSP) plugins that VMware uses natively to determine the I/O channel that data will travel over to the storage device.

Fixed Path
Most Recently Used (MRU)
Round Robin (RR)

Let’s look at some examples of the three PSPs we’ve mentioned and how they behave. The definitions come from the vSphere 5 storage guide found below.

Overview of vStorage API Array Integration (VAAI)

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:06:36 +0000

Many storage providers have been working with VMware to improve performance of disks by giving VMware access to invoke capabilities of the storage system. There are basically three main primitives that VMware can invoke to do this.

Full Copy
Hardware Assisted Locking
Block Zeroing

Full Copy

Lets look at what happens when you clone a VM without VAAI. The ESXi server will start to copy the blocks of the original VM and start to paste them in the new location. Below is an animation to describe this process.

Extending Windows System Drives with vSphere

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 16:29:13 +0000

vSphere has made it very simple to resize disks. They old days of finding larger disks to put in your severs and cloning or migrating data aren’t necessary now that virtualization has become widely used.

If you’re using vSphere you can easily extend non system drives by changing the size of the Hard Disk, and then going into the virtual machine and using diskpart or Disk Manager and extending the drive.

SAN Snapshots vs VMware Snapshots

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 02:33:24 +0000

I found people have a hard time understanding that a SAN Snapshot and a VMware snapshot are fundamentally different. I think because unless you’re a storage administrator, you’re probably not dealing a whole lot with snaps to begin with. VMware has made it more commonplace for System Administrators to deal with snapshot technology.

SAN Snapshots

Lets first look at how traditional SANs take snapshots.

To start we have 6 blocks being used. The file system has marked blocks which blocks are being used.

Exchange Split Brain ... On Purpose?

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:42:40 +0000

I was recently tasked with performing a company wide disaster recovery test. The test had the normal goals with a standard recovery time objective, and recover point objectives. Unfortunately, the test needed to be performed during the middle of a production day, and not affect production. Under normal circumstances we could assume that our production servers were disabled or destroyed in some manner and we could power up our DR servers and continue the business. During this test however we needed to make sure that both networks could run at the same time.

VMWorld 2011

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 19:42:15 +0000

VMworld 2011 was held at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Over 25,000 attendees this year.

It was held in Las Vegas, but the sites and attractions didn’t take away from the event. Despite all the distractions that Las Vegas can provide, there was too much going on at VMworld to get caught up in the city.

My favorite part of VMworld was the Hands on Labs.

After signing up for the specific lab you wanted, you were ushered to your assigned desk. There were dual screen workstations setup at every desk and very straight forward instructions on how to complete the labs. These labs would get very in depth and would show you why and what was happening behind the scenes when you would perform your operations. I especially enjoyed the Netapp lab.