No, this is not a farewell post, but rather the opposite. It’s Dr John Troyer’s birthday!
John lives and breathes his role, as Senior Social Media Strategist at VMware, and I have to say that one of the most brilliant moves VMware has done is to employ John in his current role. Lots of other corporation employ marketing people in their social media roles, VMware went the other way and put the very technically savvy Dr. John in the driving seat. To be honest, I don’t think he even has a rear-view mirror, as he’s constantly evolving and moving forward. Well played VMware, and extremely well executed John.
Recently at the office I was given the task to test out some SMB NAS products to use as potential candidates for some of our small branch offices all over the world. I did many tests relating from backup and replication to actually running VMs on them and pounding them with IOmeter. What I will share with you in this series of posts is my vSphere/IOmeter tests for NFS and iSCSI. With these tests my main goal was to see what kinds of IO loads the NAS devices could handle and also how suitable they would be for running a small vSphere environment. In my next post I will go into iSCSI performance and will publish all of my results including NFS into a downloadable PDF.
As many of you did I watched todays Cloud Infrastructure Forum and the release of vSphere 5 today. I was very excited with many of the features such as Storage Profiling, Storage DRS, VMFS 5 release, and they have blown the top off of the resource limits on VMs to create Monster VMs - just to mention a few. However, one topic I notice causing quite a stir is the new licensing that seemed to be very briefly mentioned at the end of the webinar. To quote VMware in page 3 the vSphere 5 licensing guide:
July 12, 2011 9am-Noon Pacific Time: Join this online event, and get all the details on “the next generation of cloud infrastructure”!
VMware CEO Paul Maritz and CTO Steve Herrod will be presenting on the next generation of cloud infrastructure. Join us and experience how the virtualization journey is helping transform IT and ushering in the era of Cloud Computing.9:00-9:45 Paul and Steve present - live online streaming
10:00-12:00 three tracks of deep dive breakout sessions
Setting Up Automated ESXi Deployments
automation ESXi fun Ops PowerCLI Powershell realworld Virtualization VMware
Automating ESXi installs was made much easier after the release of vSphere 4.1 where the Scripted Install feature was added, and by using VMware Auto Deploy from VMware Labs. VMware Auto Deploy requires that you have vCenter and Host Profiles in your environment, and that again requires that you have Enterprise Plus licenses in your environment.
It is, however, possible to deploy ESXi in an automated fashion completely without vCenter and Host Profiles! By using a combination of a PXE based installation and PowerCLI for automating the setup of ESXi after the initial deployment. As this setup has been put together for a specific work project, my PowerCLI script also copies a VM template to the deployed ESXi host as well as the vMA for administrative tasks. There is one caveat with regards to this setup though, and that is that the free version of ESXi only allows PowerCLI in read-only mode. This means that you will either need to get licenses for the ESXi install, or use trial licenses. With the price drop from VMware on the Remote Office / Branch Office (ROBO) licenses, we’re looking at using that licensing model for our fleet of vessels.
Let me start this post out with a little story. I am normally a hardcore virtualization and storage guy. Sometimes my career in this sector brings me into working with stuff I haven’t worked with before because virtualization encompasses so much. As I continue to work with other teams I learn more and more about what they do everyday. I usually find myself involved in every performance troubleshooting session and every new project these days. My personal philosophy is the IT guy of the future will be truly converged just as all the technologies are converging into 1 box or “stack”. Specialties in smaller subsets will fall away and a more specialization in everything Datacenter may become the norm.
The last day of Tech Field Day #6 myself and all the other delegates were lucky enough to get a sneak peek at stealth startup ‘Zerto’. We weren’t allowed to talk about it until the 22nd and I know I am a little slow on the punch but I currently haven’t seen a lot of coverage. Just for an initial disclosure statement my trip to Tech Field Day 6 was paid for by the vendors we visited, however, I am in no way obligated to write about them or publicize them in any manner.
Now there is a catchy title if I ever saw one. Only “problem” is that it’s a whitepaper that I have written for Veeam. In reality this is the first published article I have ever written, that I didn’t publish on my own. I’m excited about it, yet strangely nervous about how it will be received by the people who download it. If you happen to do so, make sure to let me know how you found it, all comments and criticism will be most appreciated.
In a previous post, vCenter Integration Mantra, I made the point that vSphere vAdmins wants the 3rd party modules to integrate into the vCenter client and show their delicious addon-value there, and not in their own management interface. Give the vAdmins the info they need, where they do most, if not all their work. Open up the admin client and let us get all that juicy and fruity information we need. Sounds good, right?
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