VMware Explore 2022 – The 2 minute story around multi cloud in the Virtual Machine & Dev world

VMware Explore 2022 – The 2 minute story around multi cloud in the Virtual Machine & Dev world

Things have changed over the last few years. I have become a dad, my blog was on pause, but now I am back :) And so are our IT-events. Like Olivia Newton-John have foreseen it in 1982 – let’s get physical.

VMworld is now VMware Explore – and a lot has changed. The window for VMware was open just for a short timeframe (a little reference to himym) has decided to not be solo anymore & get part of broadcom. Even though we are in the middle of the takeover and certain scenarios have been discussed I am looking forward to how VMware will present itself during this years VMware Explore. To bring you on track what major topics are going to be the theme I am going to give you a short wrap up about the current state of VMware’s VM & Container/Dev strategy.

Register HERE

As in the years before VMware will have two main conferences in the United States (San Francisco) & Europe (Barcelona). Besides that 4 more 2 day events are coming to countries with a huge growing market around IT.

The topic will remain the same as the last years: multi-cloud multi-cloud & multi-cloud (and for sure workplace :). VMware’s Cloud Console is gaining more and more cloud services. A lot of common products we use are available as a subscription based service & still there is a lot to do from my point of view.

VMware follows certain strategies in the world of multi-cloud. One of those strategies is

“One (cloud) foundation to rule it all”

Within the pure infrastructure & virtual machine space VMware is pushing its cloud foundation (vSphere, vSAN & NSX) into all major clouds for several years now. The goal here is to convince customers & enterprises getting rid of their datacenters to migrate everything as it is in a lift & shift manor to AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba, Oracle Cloud or one of the plenty VMware Cloud Provider’s out there.

And if you don’t want to go to the cloud? If you simply want to keep your datacenter or choose a partner as a co-location for your datacenter VMware is going to give us surely more insights in vSphere+ & vSAN+: the new subscriptions around vSphere & vSAN included in a centralized cloud console. What would be the target of the business to go that road?

This strategy is is something we have seen for years now. What are the challenges for VMware & it’s partners? Convince companies that it is more useful to keep the current operations models you have to today & migrate it to the cloud. That will just works when you talk to companies that are satisfied with how the IT is operates today. Otherwise the CIO will prefer a way to migrate to the native infrastructure service instead of putting it on a vmware-in-the-middle stack.

If you have a solution based on vSphere/vSAN/etc. running today, that satisfies the business goals but lacks scaleability, availability (in terms of – I need that solution on all continents within days) and maybe operability the VMware Cloud Story is just great. IMO the best way to get the quick wins of lift & shift projects into the cloud.

But since most cloud initiatives also wants to reduce the amount of legacy VMs with a concrete set of things like cpu, memory & disk we need to talk about modern applications that are not just installed on a ‘fat’ system. We need to talk about applications that scale out if required & scale down to zero once they are not used. The answer to that is:

tanzu

tanzu

tanzu

Now you see it :) VMware’s Tanzu is an interesting name for all tools & solutions around developing application & running them. Over the years the story around kuberentes has changed a lot and seems to be finally finalized (the story is finalized not the products & velocity of features / products within tanzu).

Within the comdivision team we did some cool stuff around the infrastructure part of tanzu & if someone would ask me what the goal here is I would say the following.

The cloud native landscape is huge and to get things here up & running from scratch is nearly impossible for enterprises.

With tanzu & its tools VMware tries to make a lot of those things consumable in an easy fashion. From an infrastructure point of view Tanzu Kubernetes (Grid) clusters are the key.

You run this K8s conformant (VMware supported) cluster everywhere (on vSphere/EC2/Azure VMs), manage it centrally with the SaaS solution Tanzu Mission Control.

If you want to create new clusters -> Just do it. If you want to scale out k8s clusters -> Just do it. If you want to extend clusters with services from the Cloud Native landscape? -> Just do it.

With just do it I mean -> run a simple cmdlet for the pros or click on the proper buttons in Tanzu Mission Control.

From my point of view what Cloud Foundation is the core foundation for the infrastructure within all the clouds, is the Tanzu Kubernetes (Grid) cluster for everything cloud native.

So I am really looking forward on new things coming into the cloud native world & I am really hoping that broadcom will follow VMware’s current strategy in the cloud-native space.

VMware #vSAN 6.6 – Features and expectations based on field-experience

The release of vSAN 6.6 came with a tremendous ‘what’s new feature set’ brining VMware’s software-defined storage and hyper-converged solution to the next level. Many bloggers out there in the community did a great to job to explain the details of the following new features:

  • Removal of the Multicast requirement
  • Encryption using existing KMS solutions (KMIP 1.1 compatible)
  • Stretched Cluster enhancements (changing of witness hosts and secondary level of failure protections within a site)
  • Re-synchronization enhancements (including throttling)
  • Web Client independant vSAN monitoring User Interface
  • Performance enhancements
  • Maintenance Mode enhancements including more information and prechecks
  • New ESXCLI commands (that can be used with PowerCLI, e.g. to easily get smart data of the physical devies)
  • and many more…

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#VMworld Europe 2016: New Products and Product updates (including vSphere 6.5 / vSAN 6.5)

[Update] During the conference I added further information and links to the specific new features, etc.

I am honest right now. I was a little disappointed when I attended the VMworld in the US from an announcement perspective. The whole situation changes a few months later during #VMworld EU in Barcelona. The ‘VMware announcement season was opened by the interesting (and maybe unexpected) deep partnership with Amazon’s AWS.

During the General Session VMware did not stop with their announcements and Pat Gelsinger talked among other about new products within the VMware portfolio:

  • vSphere
  • vSAN
  • vRealize Automation
  • vRealize Log insight
  • Site Recovery Manager
  • vRealize Operations

For sure the announcement of vSphere 6.5 is the most interesting one since we were quiet disappointed with the 6.0 release and the announcement feature are removing some of the constraints we had so far in architecting our environments.

vmworld_eu

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vSphere: Get (hyperconverged) SMART information via #PowerCLI and #ESXCLI

Scooby Doo can doo-doo, but Jimmy Carter is SMARTer

Screen Shot 2016-06-13 at 13.55.55

Ok, that was weak… let’s still try to turn this blog post around to a good one and let me show you how you can be SMARTer by getting relevant SMART information out of your local disk devices within your ESXi host (Which can be really useful for vSAN / hyperconverged environments with local devices).

Thanks to Get-ESXCLI (v2) we are able to access easily the local ESXCLI tool via PowerCLI 6.3 R1++. Since there is a ESXCLI Namespace Method to access the SMART data of local disks we are going to use this in the following script.

# Change Parameter 
$vCenter = 'vcsa01.lenzker.local'
$ClusterName ='CL01'
$outputfile = 'c:\temp\smart.csv'
#codeblock
Connect-VIServer $vCenter
 
$resultList = @()
 
$Cluster = Get-Cluster -Name $ClusterName
$ESXs = $Cluster | Get-VMHost | Where {$_.ConnectionState -eq 'Connected'}
Foreach ($ESX in $ESXs){
$scsidevs = $ESX | Get-Scsilun | Where {$_.isLocal -eq $True -AND $_.canonicalName -notmatch 'mpx'}
$esxcli = $ESX | Get-ESXCLI -v2
$arguments = $esxcli.storage.core.device.smart.get.CreateArgs()
 
foreach ($scsidev in $scsidevs){
write-host "Gathering Smart-Data from $scsidev.canonicalName"
$arguments.devicename = $scsidev.canonicalName
$smart = $esxcli.storage.core.device.smart.get.Invoke($arguments)
 
$healthstatus = ($smart | Where {$_.Parameter -contains 'Health Status'}).Value
$readerror = ($smart | Where {$_.Parameter -like'Read Error Count'}).Value
$writeerror = ($smart | Where {$_.Parameter -contains 'Write Error Count'}).Value
$temperature = ($smart | Where {$_.Parameter -contains 'Drive Temperature'}).Value
 
 
$resultList += New-Object -TypeName PSCustomObject -Property @{
esx = $ESX.Name
devname = $arguments.devicename
healthstatus = $healthstatus
readerror = $readerror
writeerror = $writeerror
temperature = $temperature
} | Select esx, devname, healthstatus, readerror, writeerror, temperature
}
 
}
 
$resultfile = $resultList | export-csv -Path $outputfile -notype

et voila…it will discover all local devices and exports the relevant information into a CSV file.

get-smart output

you can find the script here.

VMware #vSAN Queue Depth: Call for input/discussions

During the week I was at a customer site that is using vSAN 6.2 as foundation for their upcoming virtual desktop infrastructure (Seems like 2016 is really really the year of the VDI). I love vSAN and believe that at the moment it’s a great fit for many dedicated use-cases within the virtualization field.

During some load- & failover tests of the vSAN installation I realized something regarding the IO-queues within the vSAN-stack and to be honest, I am not quiet sure what the risks, mitigations and therefore the correct actions are.

We open a VMware ticket in parallel, but if you have any more in-depth knowledge about this topic, please let me know since this might be interesting to more of people (since the number of vSAN implementations is increasing).

Since the integration of flash/SSD in the performance/cache tier of vSAN the performance is great compared to classical HDD-based solutions.

To ensure a good performance level Duncan Epping and Cormac Hogan talked about the queuing topics within some blog posts or the offical vSAN troubleshooting reference manual (great document btw.).

Screen Shot 2016-06-10 at 09.40.18

….

Screen Shot 2016-06-10 at 09.40.36

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