Category Archives: vmware

More on the EMC, Cisco and Citrix 5000 on vSphere CVD (Cisco Validated Design) in 30 minutes

Back a few months ago I shared about the joint reference architecture that was able to boot and login 5000 users in 30 minutes. Using the Cisco UCS running VMware vSphere, with Citrix XenDesktop and an EMC VNX 7500. Cisco and Citrix answer a few questions with Craig Chapman on the joint validated design in this video:

I really like this layout and it usually takes pretty pictures to get me interested. Here is a high level overview of the design.

 

 

media_1360240163674.png

 

Some of the original CVD links:

CVD Paper – 5000 User VDI with EMC, Cisco, Citrix and VMware
Mike Brennan’s blog about 5000 VDI users

Updated May 2013
Solution Brief from Cisco 4000 Users

 

My VMworld Session – Enterprise PaaS

If you have a session I missed please put it in the comments are yell at me on twitter.

My submission

media_1367370621370.png

I had 2 other sessions that seemed to be the exact same submissions as a certain VP from EMC, so I stuck with 5351 Enterprise Platform as a Service. – How IT will compete for internal business customers. There was an alternative title to this session and I promise to reveal it if my session gets approved. http://www.vmworld.com and make sure you vote!

SO. MANY. Sessions. Here are a few others I found interesting.

Other Sessions I see as interesting.

media_1367371105023.png

This should be very interesting, two very smart and interesting folks, Wade and Matt. Really looking to see some new faces on stages this year.

media_1367371443486.png

HMA was a customer of mine before I moved to a role in the EMC solutions group. It will be good to hear how they are leveraging cloud in their 80+ facilities.

Cloud Foundry and Puppet

media_1367371487252.png

I am on a Cloud Foundry/PaaS/DevOps/Next-Gen Apps kick as of late.

media_1367371633364.png
media_1367371194331.png

Must admit, Jonas rocks. Magnus is pretty cool too. Razor and SDS should prove to be a informative and not boring session.

PaaS Related

media_1367371564505.png

I am extremely interested on how to get from “Here is a VM” to “Here is an API, write some code”

An All New but Very Similar Adventure

The more things stay the same the more they change, or something like that. At the beginning of the month I started a new place within EMC. I am now the VMware/Cloud/SDDC guy for the Solutions Marketing and Enablement team with the EMC Solutions Group. Exciting new and fun things coming especially around content related to the same old theme for me. VMware, Virtualization, Cloud and all the related points, now with a focus on end-to-end solutions that address requests coming from the business. I am working with a pretty awesome team and I am excited to see what we can produce over the next few months.all-the-stuffz

So check back here soon for information on EMC World, All new reference archtectures, whitepapers, webcasts, podcasts and all way to get involved in the overall cloud community and conversation. As always it is my pleasure to take stuff I learn day to day and show it to you all in a way that will help you. Thanks for reading!

awesome

VMware View Stretched Cluster

The last few days I have been considering the best way to stretch a cluster of VMware View resources. After digging and talking to people smarter than me I figured out there is a lot of things to consider and that means lots of ways to solve this. In this first post I want to highlight the first overall solution that was inspired by an actual customer. This design came from one of the fine EMC SE’s and it inspired me to share further. I stole his picture. It is very storage centric (imagine that) so most of what I share will give some detail to the VDI and VMware portion.

VMware View and VNX and Isilon

wpid1163-media_1360942508658.png

Probably more detail then you need. Important things to remember. The VPLEX will keep the Volume in sync across distance at each site. All the benefits of FAST Cache will still be in place for each site.
In this solution each location will have file data redirected to the Isilon for SMB shares. I will use the VMware View pools and entitlements to force users to each side. Group Policy (GPO) or Third Party Persona Management will direct the users to their data. We are active/active in the sense that workloads are live at each site. Active Passive for the File portion as we will only kick users to site B in the event of a planned or unplanned event.
In another post I will discuss what I learned to make it complete non-persistent site to site active active everything. There is some cool stuff coming here.
First I used Resource pools to map to the VMware View Pools I created to. In the picture below the “Dell-Blades” cluster hosts 1-3 are in site A and hosts 3-6 are site B. One problem How to make sure each pool is pinned to each location?

wpid1164-media_1360944054169.png

Create the VM Group and Host Groups first!

wpid1165-media_1360944271778.png

Create the VM Site A and B group first. Then Create the Host Groups. As simple as editing the settings in your cluster and clicking DRS Groups Manager. One gotcha is you have to have hosts and VM’s first before making the groups. This may be an issue you have have not provisioned your View desktops first (I would wait). Just use some dummy VM’s at first to get the rules created.

With the Groups created Create the Rule

wpid1166-media_1360944500319.png

Remember these rules should say “Should run on hosts in group” (big thanks to @VirtualChappy). If you don’t have the rules right failover won’t work in case of a site going away for whatever reason.

Useful Script for setting DRS Host Affinity for all VM’s in a Resource Pool

wpid1162-media_1360597971375.png

This script I located on the community forums from the amazing LucD and at fix from another community user "GotMoo" I love the VMware Community.

What is so cool is I can run this after provisioning all of my desktops to get them in the right DRS VM Group and since usually in VMware View Environments you might create and destroy desktop VM’s regularly this helps a ton.

$vCenterServer = "vcenter.domain.lab"
#authenticating and Connecting to the VC

$CurrentUserName = [Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::getcurrent().name
$cred = Get-Credential $CurrentUserName
Write-Output "Connecting to vCenter. Please stand by..."
Connect-VIServer -Server $vCenterServer -Credential $Cred

 

#Function for updating the Resource VM Groups
function updateDrsVmGroup ($clusterName,$resourcePoolName,$groupVMName){
$cluster = Get-Cluster -Name $clusterName
$spec = New-Object VMware.Vim.ClusterConfigSpecEx
$groupVM = New-Object VMware.Vim.ClusterGroupSpec
#Operation edit will replace the contents of the GroupVMName with the new contents seleced below.
$groupVM.operation = "edit"

$groupVM.Info = New-Object VMware.Vim.ClusterVmGroup
$groupVM.Info.Name = $groupVMName

# Perform your VM selection here. I use resource pools per cluster to identify group members,
# but you could use any method to select your VM's.
get-cluster $clusterName | Get-ResourcePool $resourcePoolName | get-vm | %{
$groupVM.Info.VM += $_.Extensiondata.MoRef
}
$spec.GroupSpec += $groupVM

#Apply the settings to the cluster
$cluster.ExtensionData.ReconfigureComputeResource($spec,$true)
}

# Calling the function. I've found the group names to be case sensitive, so watch for that.
#updateDrsVmGroup ("ClusterName") ("ResourcePool Name") ("DRS VM Groupname")
updateDrsVmGroup ("UCS") ("DesktopsA") ("VM Site A")
updateDrsVmGroup ("UCS") ("DesktopsB") ("VM Site B")
# updateDrsVmGroup ("Cluster_STAGE") ("Group A") ("Group A VMs (Odd)")
# updateDrsVmGroup ("Cluster_STAGE") ("Group B") ("Group B VMs (Even)")
Disconnect-VIServer -Confirm:$False

More to come…

Finally this is a quick look at setting up View to be cross location. Of course other considerations about web load balancers, networking, number of View Connection Managers all need to be decided for your environment. Next post will include some of the stuff I found about keeping the users data live in both sites. Things like Windows DFS (Isilon can be a member), Atmos, VNX replication, and something called Panzura.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas everyone it was a busy year. Can’t wait to see what 2013 has in store. To everyone out there that takes the time to check out my blog, thank you. I hope you have a great holiday time, enjoy your family time and see you in 2013.

Merry Christmas from my family to you and yours. 2012

Merry Christmas from my family to you and yours. 2012

 

 

 

 

If you changed your IP in Puppet Razor

If you happen to build your puppet server using VMware Workstation then export the OVF so you can import it into an vSphere environment later. I had a bit of weirdness after the IP address changed. After setting my static IP I had to restart puppet. It seemed like it was going to work BUT the microkernel image was downloading from the old IP from my Workstation.

To Fix:

#vi /opt/razor/conf/razor_server.conf

Change the line:

image_svc_host: <old IP>

And

mk_uri: http://<old-ip>:8026

To have your new static IP.

Then run

#/opt/razor/bin/razor_daemon.rb restart

Everything should work better now.

You down with VDP? Yeah you know me!

I had to be the first one to make a really bad joke.

Everyone will admit, how to efficiently back up your VM’s is a hot topic. Remember VDP is VMware’s product, but a lot of EMC technical people should be able to let you know right away how it works. VDP will be an excellent fit for a lot of customers with environments where they can’t spend extra on “virtual” backups.

Here are some of my favorite things in the new VDP.

  1. First it is built right into the new vSphere Web Client
  1. A simple wizard guides you through making the jobs.
  2. VDP uses Change block tracking to accelerate full restores.
  3. Integrated Self-service File level restore. What is better than file level restore? No one opening a ticket to ask you to do it!

The other stuff

Someone will eventually ask what is the difference between VDP and Avamar?

VDP

  • Max # VMs: 100
  • Storage Pool: up to 2TB
  • Replication (DR): None
  • Image-Level backup only

Avamar

  • Max # VMs: Unlimited
  • Storage Pool: up to 124TB *
  • Replication (DR): Included
  • Image-Level backup
  • Guest-Level backup
  • Extensive application support
  • Physical & Virtual backup
  • NAS/NDMP support
  • Desktop/Laptop backup
  • Extended retention to VTL/tape
  • Enterprise management
  • Purpose-Built Backup Appliances
    • Avamar Data Store
    • Data Domain integration *

In-n-Out trip VMworld 2012

Time for the 4th annual trip to In-n-out at VMworld. This year we are in San Francisco. The calendar during dinner tim is getting packed with all kinds of things. SO as an attempt to get more people. The in-n-out trip will be a post EMC party deal level out any adult beverages trip. On Tuesday the 28th post 10pm give or take 15 minutes I will try to caravan to the In-n-out. They are open until 1am.
See you there!

20120824-114752.jpg

Get Ready for the vHunt at VMworld with some bonus prizes

I am very excited this year for VMworld. As is tradition there will be an In-n-Out run. More details on this as my calendar is more packed in previous years. It might need to be a late night run.

One other thing I am excited about is this years vHunt twitter game. In addition to all of the fun prizes EMC will be providing (a new iPad for one). I will be carrying out at the show some very special prizes thanks to VMware Press.

20120824-111946.jpg

  • Automating vSphere with VMware vCenter Orchestrator by Cody Bunch
  • The Official VCP 5 Certification Guide by Bill Ferguson
  • VMware vSphere 5 Building a Virtual Datacenter by Eric Maille and Rene-Francois Mennecier
  • Managing and Optimizing VMware vSphere Deployment by Sean Crookston and Harley Stagner
  • Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0 by Mike Laverick
  • While supplies last and if you find will need to find me OUTSIDE of the EMC Booth to get the prize. Once you find me tweet a picture with me and your new book with the #vHunt hastag and copy @VMwarepress.

    Cisco – EMC Webcast: … An Optimized End User Experience

     

    No matter what you do to accelerate, optimize and transform your desktop environment (physical or virtual) if the presentation is sub-par, no one cares. The common message from any vSpecialist when it comes to EUC (End User Computing, VDI is so 2011) is focus on the end user experience. Make it easy to access my data and applications from anywhere at any time and I am a happy user.

    This is something I really believe in. Having delivered VDI (or TS) solutions in the past, starting as a Citrix Metaframe XP administrator. So when I noticed this webcast I wanted to be sure share it with everyone. EMC is a huge place and there is ALWAYS something going on, but I wanted to take special notice when Cisco, EMC, VCE and VMware team up with a focus on getting the end user experience done right.

    Save the date and sign up! August 22, 2012 11:00 AM EDT / 8:00 AM PDT.

    So sign up now here: http://bit.ly/vdia22

    What to expect?

    When it comes to EUC there are so many “best” practices out there many times you just need someone to tell you what works. I will take a few seconds to detail the high level bullets I always share with customers when speaking about EUC.

    • From the EMC perspective it often relates to putting the right data in the right place. When using Flash drives to lower cost and footprint knowing how VDI I/O works is very important.

     

    • Also from the EMC realm is the amazing impact FAST Cache can have on these deployments vs. trying to account for all unexpected I/O with spinning media. This additionally lowers your cost and spindle count. That is right, someone at EMC saying buy less drives.
    • Use the money you save to put more RAM in your Cisco UCS B – series blades. Memory being the second bottle neck after storage when it comes to your VDI role out.
    • Speaking of memory make sure you use the best hypervisor for consolidation and memory management. vSphere 5 is still years ahead of even the promised products from the other guys. The TCO picture for hardware is ONLY part of the story, so make sure you get every last drop out of those Cisco UCS blades.
    • Lastly, if you want to deliver this in a tested and proven manner AND you realize your time to market is critical, EMC VSPEX and VCE Vblock take the world’s best components and software and make it work for you. No more testing for 9 months before pushing the go button.

    Get to the WEBCAST Already

    Once again, if you are exploring, testing, POC’ing, or running in production VDI in any way shape or form. Join the webcast on August 22 and see when EMC and Cisco have in store.

    Save the date and sign up! August 22, 2012.

    So sign up now here: http://bit.ly/vdia22

    More on VSPEX

    More on VCE and End User Compute and FASTPATH

    EMC Reference Architecture -one of many…

    From the Cisco Site <-Cisco UCS / EMC VNX RA