Category Archives: VMware

Cohesity Basics – Excluding VMs Using Tags – Real World Example

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I’ve written before about using VM tags with Cohesity to exclude VMs from a backup. I wanted to write up a quick article using a real world example in the test lab. In this instance, we had someone deploying 200 VMs over a weekend to test a vendor’s storage array with a particular workload. The problem was that I had Cohesity set to automatically protect any new VMs that are deployed in the lab. This wasn’t a problem from a scalability perspective. Rather, the problem was that we were backing up a bunch of test data that didn’t dedupe well and didn’t need to be protected by what are ultimately finite resources.

As I pointed out in the other article, creating tags for VMs and using them as a way to exclude workloads from Cohesity is not a new concept, and is fairly easy to do. You can also apply the tags in bulk using the vSphere Web Client if you need to. But a quicker way to do it (and something that can be done post-deployment) is to use PowerCLI to search for VMs with a particular naming convention and apply the tags to those.

Firstly, you’ll need to log in to your vCenter.

PowerCLI C:\> Connect-VIServer vCenter

In this example, the test VMs are deployed with the prefix “PSV”, so this makes it easy enough to search for them.

PowerCLI C:\> get-vm | where {$_.name -like "PSV*"} | New-TagAssignment -Tag "COH-NoBackup"

This assumes that the tag already exists on the vCenter side of things, and you have sufficient permissions to apply tags to VMs. You can check your work with the following command.

PowerCLI C:\> get-vm | where {$_.name -like "PSV*"} | Get-TagAssignment

One thing to note. If you’ve updated the tags of a bunch of VMs in your vCenter environment, you may notice that the objects aren’t immediately excluded from the Protection Job on the Cohesity side of things. The reason for this is that, by default, Cohesity only refreshes vCenter source data every 4 hours. One way to force the update is to manually refresh the source vCenter in Cohesity. To do this, go to Protection -> Sources. Click on the ellipsis on the right-hand side of your vCenter source you’d like to refresh, and select Refresh.

You’ll then see that the tagged VMs are excluded in the Protection Job. Hat tip to my colleague Mike for his help with PowerCLI. And hat tip to my other colleague Mike for causing the problem in the first place.

Brisbane VMUG – July 2019

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The July edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Tuesday 23rd July at Fishburners from 4 – 6pm. It’s sponsored by Pivotal and promises to be a great afternoon.

Here’s the agenda:

  • VMUG Intro
  • VMware and Pivotal Presentation: Rapid and automated deployment of Kubernetes with VMware and Pivotal
  • Q&A
  • Refreshments and drinks.

Pivotal have gone to great lengths to make sure this will be a fun and informative session and I’m really looking forward to hearing more about what they’re doing. You can find out more information and register for the event here. I hope to see you there. Also, if you’re interested in sponsoring one of these events, please get in touch with me and I can help make it happen.

Random Short Take #14

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Here are a few links to some random news items and other content that I found interesting. You might find them interesting too. Episode 14 – giddy-up!

Dell Announces Dell Technologies Cloud (Platforms and DCaaS)

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Disclaimer: I recently attended Dell Technologies World 2019.  My flights, accommodation and conference pass were paid for by Dell Technologies via the Media, Analysts and Influencers program. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Dell Technologies recently announced their Dell Technologies Cloud Platforms and Dell Technologies DCaaS offerings and I thought I’d try and dig in a little more to the announcements here.

 

DTC DCaaS

[image courtesy of Dell Technologies]

Dell Technologies Cloud Data Center-as-a-Service (DTC DCaaS) is all about “bringing public cloud simplicity to your DCs”. So what do you get with this? You get:

  • Data residency and regulatory compliance;
  • Control over critical workloads;
  • Proximity of data with cloud resources;
  • Self-service resource provisioning;
  • Fully managed, maintained and supported; and
  • Increased developer velocity.

VMware Cloud on Dell

At its core, DTC DCaaS is built on VMware Cloud Foundation and Dell EMC VxRail. VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is “cloud infrastructure installed on-premises in your core and edge data centres and consumed as a cloud service”.

[image courtesy of Dell Technologies]

  • Cloud infrastructure delivered as-a-service on-premises
  • Co-engineered and delivered by Dell Technologies; ongoing service fully managed by VMware
  • VMware SDDC including compute, storage and networking
  • Built on VxRail – Dell EMC’s enterprise-grade cloud platform
  • Hybrid cloud control plane to provision and monitor resources
  • Monthly subscription model

How Does It Work?

  • Firstly, you sign into the VMware Cloud service account to create an order. Dell Technologies will then deliver and install your new cloud infrastructure in your core or edge DC location.
  • Next, the system will self-configure and register with VMware Cloud servers, so you can immediately begin provisioning and managing workloads with VMware’s hybrid cloud control plane.

Moving forward the hardware and software is fully managed, just like your public cloud resources.

Speeds And Feeds 

As I understand it there are two configuration options: DC and Edge. The DC configuration is as follows:

  • 1x 42U APC NetShelter rack
  • 4 – 15x E560 VxRail Nodes
  • 2x S5248FF 25GbE ToR Switches, OS10EE
  • 1x S3048 1GbE Management Switch, OS9EE
  • 2x VeloCloud 520
  • 6X Single-phase 30 AMP PDU
  • No UPS option

The Edge Location configuration is as follows:

  • 1x 24U APC NetShelter rack
  • 3 – 6x E560 VxRail Nodes
  • 2X S4128F 10GbE ToR Switches, OS10EE
  • 1X S3048-ON 1GbE Management Switch, OS9EE
  • 2x VeloCloud 520
  • 2x Single-phase 30 AMP PDU
  • 2x UPS with batteries for 30 min hold-up time for 6X E560F

 

Thoughts And Further Reading

I haven’t explained it very clearly in this article, but there are two parts to the announcement. There’s the DTC Platforms announcement, and the DTC DCaaS announcement. You can read a slightly better explanation here, but the Platforms announcement is VCF on VxRail, and VMware Cloud on AWS. DTC DCaaS, on the other hand, is kit delivered into your DC or Edge site and consumed as a managed service.

There was a fair bit of confusion when I spoke to people at the show last week about what this announcement really meant, both for Dell Technologies and for their customers. At the show last year, Dell was bullish on the future of private cloud / on-premises infrastructure. It seems apparent, though, that this kind of announcement is something of an admission that Dell has customers that are demanding a little more activity when it comes to multi-cloud and hybrid cloud solutions.

Dell’s ace in the hole has been (since the EMC merger) the close access to VMware that they’ve enjoyed via the portfolio of companies. It makes sense that they would have a story to tell when it comes to VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Cloud on AWS. The box slingers at Dell EMC are happy because they can still sell VxRail appliances for use with the DCaaS offering. I’m interested to see just how many customers take up Dell on their vision of seamless integration between on-premises and public cloud workloads.

The public cloud vendors will tell you that eventually (in 5, 10, 20 years?) every workload will be “cloud native”. I think it’s more likely that we’ll always have some workloads that need to remain on-premises. Not necessarily because they have performance requirements that require that level of application locality, but rather because some organisations will have security requirements that will dictate where these workloads live. I think the shelf life of something like VMConAWS is still more limited than some people will admit, but I can see the need for stuff like this.

My only concern is that the DTC story can be complicated to tell in places. I’ve spent some time this week and last digging in to this offering, and I’m not sure I’ve explained it terribly well at all. I also wonder how the organisations (Dell EMC and VMware) will work together to offer a cohesive offering from a technology and support perspective. Ultimately, these types of solutions are appealing because companies want to focus on their core business, rather than operating as a poorly resourced IT organisation. But there’s no point entering in to these kinds of agreements if the vendor can’t deliver on their vision. “Fully managed services” mean different things to different vendors, so I’ll be interested to see how that plays out in the market.

Dell Technologies Cloud Data Center-as-a-Service, delivered as VMware Cloud on Dell EMC with VxRail, is currently is available in beta deployments with limited customer availability planned for the second half of 2019. You can read the solution overview here.

Brisbane VMUG – May 2019

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The May 2019 edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Tuesday 28th May at Fishburners from 4pm – 6pm. It’s sponsored by Cohesity and promises to be a great afternoon.

Here’s the agenda:

  • VMUG Intro
  • Cohesity Presentation: Changing Data Protection from Nightmares to Sweet Dreams
  • vCommunity Presentation – Introduction to Hyper-converged Infrastructure
  • Q&A
  • Light refreshments.

Cohesity have gone to great lengths to make sure this will be a fun and informative session and I’m really looking forward to hearing about how they can make recovery simple. You can find out more information and register for the event here. I hope to see you there. Also, if you’re interested in sponsoring one of these events, please get in touch with me and I can help make it happen.

VMware – Unmounting NFS Datastores From The CLI

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This is a short article, but hopefully useful. I did a brief article a while ago linking to some useful articles about using NFS with VMware vSphere. I recently had to do some maintenance on one of the arrays in our lab and I was having trouble unmounting the datastores using the vSphere client. I used some of the commands in this KB article (although I don’t have SIOC enabled) to get the job done instead.

The first step was to identify if any of the volumes were still mounted on the individual host.

[root@esxihost:~] esxcli storage nfs list
Volume Name  Host            Share                 Accessible  Mounted  Read-Only   isPE  Hardware Acceleration
-----------  --------------  --------------------  ----------  -------  ---------  -----  ---------------------
Pav05        10.300.300.105  /nfs/GB000xxxxxbbf97        true     true      false  false  Not Supported
Pav06        10.300.300.106  /nfs/GB000xxxxxbbf93        true     true      false  false  Not Supported
Pav01        10.300.300.101  /nfs/GB000xxxxxbbf95        true     true      false  false  Not Supported

In this case there are three datastores that I haven’t been able to unmount.

[root@esxihost:~] esxcli storage nfs remove -v Pav05
[root@esxihost:~] esxcli storage nfs remove -v Pav06
[root@esxihost:~] esxcli storage nfs remove -v Pav01

Now there should be no volumes mounted on the host.

[root@esxihost:~] esxcli storage nfs list
[root@esxihost:~]

See, I told you it would be quick.

Random Short Take #13

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Here are a few links to some random news items and other content that I found interesting. You might find them interesting too. Let’s dive in to lucky number 13.

VMware – VMUG UserCon Sydney 2019 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

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This is a really quick post to disclose everything I received as part of my attendance at the recent VMUG UserCon in Sydney. My flights and accommodation were paid for by VMUG. I paid for my own transfers in the main, although Tim Carman kindly covered my taxi to the airport after the event. Alastair Cooke bought me a coffee on Tuesday morning. We both agreed that perhaps the Melbourne UserCon would have better coffee, as they’re into that kind of thing down there. Lunch at the event was really good. I had some caesar salad, a small wrap, some pork belly thing and a chocolate slice.

I didn’t pick up anything from the event sponsors, although my youngest daughter (who happened to be in the area) picked up a couple of Sydney VMUG stickers and one of those shopping / carry bag things. She was also really happy she could attend the session on Getting Started with Python by Grant Orchard and Cody De Arkland. She found it most entertaining.

If you’re interested, here’s the deck I presented on building a brand by starting (and maintaining) a blog.

Thanks again to VMUG for having me, and big thanks to Ryan, and Claire, and the rest of the Sydney VMUG team for putting on such a great event. Thanks also to the presenters for some really educational and engaging sessions, particularly those who travelled a long way to be there. I think it was a big success, with over 300 people turning up on the day.

Random Short Take #12

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Here are a few links to some random news items and other content that I found interesting. You might find it interesting too. Maybe.

  • I’ve been a fan of Backblaze for some time now, and I find their blog posts useful. This one, entitled “A Workflow Playbook for Migrating Your Media Assets to a MAM“, was of particular interest to me.
  • Speaking of Backblaze, this article on SSDs and reliability should prove useful, particularly if you’re new to the technology. And the salty comments from various readers are great too.
  • Zerto just announced the myZerto Labs Program as a way for “IT professionals to test, understand and experiment with the IT Resilience Platform using virtual infrastructure”. You can sign up here.
  • If you’re in the area, I’m speaking at the Sydney VMUG UserCon on Tuesday 19th March. I’ll be covering how to “Build Your Personal Brand by Starting and Maintaining a Blog”. It’s more about blogging than branding, but I’m hoping there’s enough to keep the punters engaged. Details here. If you can’t get along to the event, I’ll likely publish the deck on this site in the near future.
  • The nice people at Axellio had some success at the US Air Force Pitch Day recently. You can read more about that here.
  • UltraViolet is going away. This kind of thing is disheartening (and a big reason why I persist in buying physical copies of things still).
  • I’m heading to Dell Technologies World this year. Michael was on the TV recently, talking about the journey and looking ahead. You can see more here.

VMware – vExpert 2019

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I’m very happy to have been listed as a vExpert for 2019. This is the seventh time that they’ve forgotten to delete my name from the list (if you think I’ll ever give up on that joke you are sadly mistaken). Read about it here, and more news about this year’s programme is coming shortly. Thanks again to Corey Romero and the rest of the VMware Social Media & Community Team for making this kind of thing happen. And thanks also to the vExpert community for being such a great community to be part of.