vExperts, Thank You for a Great VMworld U.S.
Thank you to the vExpert community for coming out to join us for our annual vExpert Party at VMworld U.S. Each year we host the vExperts at a private event to provide a night of fun and entertainment. For this party we had food trucks, dessert truck, drinks, quarters, food & fire entertainment as well […] The post vExperts, Thank You for a Great VMworld U.S. appeared first on VMTN Blog .
VMware Goes GA with Its Development Cloud on AWS
NEWS ANALYSIS: Like any other cloud deployment, the partnership enables VMware to focus on developing its products and not have to deal with the issues around hosting them, which has never been its primary business.
The post VMware Cloud on AWS Technical Overview appeared first on frankdenneman.nl .
Yesterday we launched the VMware Cloud on AWS service. VMware Cloud on AWS allows you to run your applications across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments based on VMware vSphere, with optimized access to AWS services. The Cloud SDDC consists of vSphere, NSX and vSAN technology to provide you a familiar environment which can be managed an operated with your current tool and skill set. By leveraging bare-metal AWS infrastructure the Cloud SDDC can scale in an unprecedented way.
VMware Cloud on AWS is a service and that means that we will not using product versions when we refer to the service. Instead we will be calling the first release the initial availability of the service. Any release after is referred to as future release. VMware Cloud on AWS is operated by VMware. In short that means that VMware is responsible for providing infrastructure resources, the customer is responsible for consuming the resources. This article explores the resource capacity of the Cloud SDDC at initial availability.
Compute in VMware Cloud on AWS
At initial availability, the VMware Cloud on AWS base cluster configuration contains four hosts. Each host is configured with 512GB of memory and contains dual CPUs. These CPUs are custom-built Intel Xeon Processor E5-2686 v4 CPU. Each CPU contains 18 cores running at 2.3GHz, resulting in a physical cluster core count of 144. Hyper-threading is enabled, allowing the VMs to consume 288 logical processors in the default Cloud SDDC configuration. Please note, that VMware Cloud on AWS uses a single, fixed host configuration; the option to add components to the host configuration is not offered at this time. However, the scale-out model enables expansion to up to 16 hosts, resulting in 576 CPU cores and 8TB of memory.
vSphere DRS and vSphere HA are enabled and are configured to provide the best availability and resource utilization. vSphere DRS is full automated and the migration threshold is set to the default vSphere DRS level to avoid excessive vSphere vMotion operations. High availability of cluster resources is provided by vSphere HA and Auto remediation hardware.
vSphere High Availability is used to guarantee enough resources for restarting VMs during an ESXi host failure. The ESXi hosts are monitored and in the event of a failure, the VMs on a failed host are restarted on alternative ESXi hosts in the cluster. To maximize productivity while minimizing overhead, the vSphere HA settings of the cluster is configured to tolerate the equivalent of one ESXi host failure (25% percentage-based admission control policy). The host isolation response is set to power off and restart the VMs.
Host failures remediation is the responsibility of VMware. If a host fails permanently, VMware replaces this ESXi host without user intervention. Automatic remediation of failed hardware eliminates the impact of long-term resource reduction of a permanent host failure. The Cloud SDDC is configured with two DRS resource pools. One resource pool contains the management VMs to operate the Cloud SDDC, while the other top-level resource pool is created to manage customer workloads. Customers have the option to create child resource pools.
The full post is available at frankdenneman.nl site.
VMware have just released the first major update to vSphere 6.5, normally, I don’t blog on these but this update is so big and it fixes some really annoying bugs I saw using the GA version of vSphere 6.5… thankfully, we worked hard with their support to overcome some of the issues I highlighted in yellow, this was of course done for the greater good.
The release notes for ESXI 6.5 U1 can be seen here https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.5/rn/vsphere-esxi-651-release-notes.html and it can be downloaded from here https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=ESXI65U1&productId=614&rPId=17343
The release notes for vCenter 6.5 U1 can be seen here https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.5/rn/vsphere-vcenter-server-651-release-notes.html and it can be downloaded from here https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=VC65U1&productId=614&rPId=17343
In the current and wide storage market, where access to data is faster and faster to satisfy applications demanding more and more data, vendors are mainly divided in Hardware and Software.
Among the second ones, a Company dealing since 1998 with data abstraction from the underlying storage harwdare is DataCore Software.
The Company will explain its solutions on September during Tech Field Day 15, where I’m lucky enough to join the delegates that attend the event. This presentation will be also live at the same link.
Today, its offer is based on 2 products:
While the second is actually an Hyper-converged solution, the first one is probably the one that performs the best results in an enterprise environment.
SANsymphony-V can manage all the current standards (DA, SAN, and Cloud), is storage-agnostic, is also hypervisor-agnosticIn the SPC-1 test (Storage Performance Council – an independent organization performing benchmarks on storage devices – you can find the specific and complete report here), classified 1° on response with 100% load: 32 ms.
Let’s have a look at 3 usual scenarios
As we can see on the image, there are 3 main components in the storage presentation
A centralized GUI manages the whole organization regardless of the number of nodes.
I had a look and I found it quite clear and intuitive.
One of the strenght points of this solution is that 2 is the minimum number of nodes needed.
SANSymphony resides in the middle of the virtual infrastructure, directly on the I/O path (Parallel I/O technology) between applications and the undelying storage, regardless of the vendor.
I have to say that many of the features offered are already present in the market from other competitors, but none of them is applied in a universally format compatibility, allowing aggregation of many vendors of storage, everyone adopting that features in the very same way of the other ones.
Definition of different storages can be set by the system or manually according to performances, assigning one of the 15 “Tiers” – data will move towards the higher tier using availability and performance parameters, automating the transition from hot to cold down to archiving data in a quite granular way.
An additional performance optimization is made by using nodes’ RAM for the high frequently accessed data, much faster than any SSD or Flash disk.
Almost 2 decades of life of the Company and the objective and verified performances of its solutions make Datacore Software one of the best support for accelerating data access. And maybe today the real challenge is nomore data availability (considered as granted), but quick data access. The faster solution will win…
Downloading a large VM #VMTN
I have a need to download a relatively large VM from our ESXI infrastructure down to my local copy of VMware Workstation. I’ve done this in the past with
By William Lam
The much anticipated release of vSphere 6.5 Update 1 just GA’ed late last week and like many in the community, I also went ahead and upgraded my home lab to this latest release. vSphere 6.5 Update 1 contains a ton of fixes as well as several new capabilities which you can read all about in the release notes here and here.
One neat little trick I take advantage of in my lab environments when deploying the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) is actually pre-filling out the credentials for the vSphere Client UI (not recommended for production environments of course) which I had blogged about here a few years back. Sine I have many different environments for different scenarios, I find myself being lazy and having to type in the credentials to each one of these environments. Instead, I can pre-fill either the username and/or password (which I will stress again, not recommended for production) within the vSphere Client Login UI page which is simply just using HTML.
You can have a deeper look in his own blog: http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2017/08/vsphere-client-login-ui-customizations-do-not-persist-in-vcsa-6-5-update-1.html
As the dog days of summer begin to wane, the excitement and anticipation of VMworld 2017 begins to rise. Customers wait with bated breath to hear the latest VMware announcements and listen to industry experts. VMware speakers and staff gear up to demonstrate the latest and greatest features and share our vision for the future.
And it goes without saying that everyone is ready to party with customers and partners in Las Vegas, Aug. 28–31, at the Mandalay Bay resort and in Barcelona, Sept. 11–14, at the Fira Gran Via exhibition center.
Cloud computing will be bigger than ever at this year’s event: How cloud enables the digital workspace, reduces infrastructure and management costs, secures the enterprise and offers organizations flexible deployment options across public and private clouds.
You have hundreds of cloud-centric sessions to choose from. Here is our top 10 list of sessions that you won’t want to miss.
For complete details on these cloud-centric sessions, as well as other powerful sessions at VMworld 2017, head to the VMworld U.S. and VMworld Europe content catalogs. We look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas and Barcelona.
Author: Nina Seth
Article firstly appeared on VMware End-User Computing Blog .
vAddicted 