Category Archives: VMware

Random Short take #74

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Welcome to Random Short Take #74. Let’s get random.

VMware Cloud on AWS – TMCHAM – Part 6 – Sizing

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In this edition of Things My Customers Have Asked Me (TMCHAM), I’m going to touch briefly on some things you might come across when sizing workloads for the VMware Cloud on AWS platform using the VMware Cloud on AWS Sizer.

VMware Cloud on AWS Sizer

One of the neat things about VMware Cloud on AWS is that you can jump on the publicly available sizing tool and input some numbers (or import RVTools or LiveOptics files) and it will spit out the number of nodes that you’ll (likely) need to support your workloads. Of course, if that’s all there was to it, you wouldn’t need folks like me to help you with sizing. That said, VMware has worked hard to ensure that the sizing part of your VMware Cloud on AWS planning is fairly straightforward. There are a few things to look out for though.

Why Do I See A Weird Number Of Cores In The Sizer?

If you put a workload into the sizer, you might see some odd core counts in the output. For example, the below screenshot shows 4x i3en nodes with 240 cores, but clearly it should be 192 cores (4x 48).

Yet when the same workload is changed to the i3 instance type, the correct amount of cores (5x 36 = 180) is displayed.

The reason for this is that the i3en instance types support Hyper-Threading, and the Sizer applies a weighting to calculations. This can be changed via the Global Settings in the Advanced section of the Sizer. If you’re not into HT, set it to 0%. If you’re a believer, set it to 100%. By default it’s set to 25%, hence the 240 cores number in the previous example (48 x 1.25 x 4 nodes).

Why Do I Need This Many Nodes?

You might need to satisfy Host Admission Control requirements. The current logic of Host Admission Control (as it’s applied in VMC sizer) is as follows:

  • A 2-host cluster should have 50.00 percent reserved CPU and memory capacity for HA Admission Control.
  • A 3-host cluster reserves 33.33 percent for HAC

And so on until you get to

  • A 16-host cluster reserving 6.25 percent of resources for HAC.

It’s also important to note that a 2-host cluster can accommodate a maximum of 35 VMs. Anything above that will need an extra host. And if you’re planning to run a full HCX configuration on two nodes, you should review this Knowledge Base article. Speaking of running things at capacity, I’ll go into Elastic DRS in another post, but by default we add another host to your cluster when you hit 80% storage capacity.

What About My Storage Consumption?

By default there are some storage policies applied to your vSAN configurations too. A standard Cluster with 5 hosts or less is set to 1 Failure / RAID-1, whilst a standard Cluster with 6 hosts or more is set to tolerate 2 Failures / RAID-6 by default. You can read more about that here.

Conclusion

There’s a bunch of stuff I haven’t covered here, including the choices you have to make between using RVTools and LiveOptics, and whether you should size with a high CPU to core ratio or keep it one to one like the old timers like. But hopefully this post has been of some use explaining some of the quirky things that pop up in the Sizer from time to time.

VMware Cloud on AWS – TMCHAM – Part 5 – VM Management

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In this edition of Things My Customers Have Asked Me (TMCHAM), I’m going to delve into some questions around managing VMs running on the VMware-managed VMware Cloud on AWS platform, and talk about vCenter plugins and what that looks like when you move across to VMware Cloud on AWS.

How Can I Access vCenter?

VMware vCenter has been around since Hector was a pup, and the good news is that it can be used to manage your VMware Cloud on AWS environment. It’s accessible via a few different methods, including PowerCLI. If you want to access the HTML5 UI via the cloud console, you’ll need to ensure there’s a firewall rule in place to allow access via your Management gateway – the official documentation is here. If the rule has already been created and you just need to add your IP to the mix, here’s the process.

The first step is to find out your public IP address. I use WhatIsMyIP.com to do this.

In your console, go to Networking & Security -> Inventory -> Groups.

Under Groups, make sure you select Management Groups.

You’ll find a Group that was created that stores the IP information of folks wanting to access vCenter. In this example, we’ve called it “SET Home IP Addresses”.

Click on the vertical ellipsis and click Edit.

Click on the IPs section.

You’ll then see a spot where you can enter your IP address. You can do a single address or enter a range, as shown below.

Click Apply and then click Save to save the rule. Now you should be able to open vCenter.

Can I run RVTools and other scripts on my VMC environment?

Yes, you can run RVTools against your environment. In terms of privilege levels with VMware Cloud on AWS, you get CloudAdmin. The level of access is outlined here. It’s important to understand these privilege levels, because some things will and won’t work as a result of these.

Can I lockdown my VMs using PowerShell?

You will have the ability to set these advanced settings on your VMs in the SDDC, but this is limited to per-VM, rather than on a per-cluster basis. So if you normally ran a script on a pre-VM basis to harden the VM config, you’d need to run that on each VM individually, rather than on a per-cluster level.

What about vCenter plugins?

We don’t have a concept of vCenter plugins in VMware Cloud on AWS, so there are different ways to get the information you’d normally need. vROps, for example, has the ability to look at VMware Cloud on AWS, using either the on-premises version or the cloud version. There’s information on that here, but note that the plugin isn’t supported with VMC vCenter.

What about my Site Recovery Manager plugin? The mechanism for managing this will change depending on whether you’re using SRaaS or VCDR to protect your workloads. There’s some good info on SRaaS here, and some decent VCDR information here. Again, there is no plugin available, but the element managers are available via the cloud console.  

What about NSX-V? VMware Cloud on AWS is all NSX-T, and you can access the NSX Manager via the cloud console.

Conclusion

A big part of the reason people like VMware Cloud on AWS is that the management experience doesn’t differ significantly from what you get VMware Cloud Foundation of VMware Validated Designs on-premises. That said, there are a few things that do change when you move to VMware Cloud on AWS. Things like plugins don’t exist, but you can still run many of the scripts you know and love against the platform. Remember, though, it is a fully managed service, so some of the stuff you used to run against your on-premises environment is no longer necessary.

VMware Cloud on AWS – TMCHAM – Part 4 – VM Resource Management

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In this episode of Things My Customers Have Asked Me (TMCHAM), I’m going to delve into some questions around resource management for VMs running on the VMware-managed VMware Cloud on AWS platform, and what customers need to know to make it work for them.

Distributed Resource Scheduler

If you’ve used VMware vSphere before, it’s likely that you’ve come across the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) capability. DRS is a way to keep workloads evenly distributed across nodes in a cluster, and moves VMs around based on various performance considerations. The cool thing about this is that you don’t need to manually move workloads around when a particular guest or host goes a little nuts from a CPU or Memory usage perspective. There are cases, however, when you might not want your VMs to be moving around too much. In this instance, you’ll want to create what is called a “Disable DRS vMotion Policy”. You configure this via Compute Policies in vCenter, and you can read more about the process here.

If you don’t like reading documentation though, I’ve got some pictures you can look at instead. Log in to your vSphere Client and click on Policies and Profiles.

Then click on Compute Policies and click Add.

Under Policy type, there’s a dropdown box where you can select Disable DRS vMotion.

You’ll then give the policy a Name and Description. You then need to select the tag category you want to use.

Once you’ve selected the tag category you want to use, you can select the tags you want to apply to the policy.

Click on Create to create the Compute Policy, and you’re good to go.

Memory Overcommit Techniques

I’ve had a few customers ask me about how some of the traditional VMware resource management technologies translate to VMware Cloud on AWS. The good news is there’s quite a lot in common with what you’re used to with on-premises workload management, including memory overcommit techniques. As with anything, the effectiveness or otherwise of these technologies really depends on a number of different factors. If you’re interested in finding out more, I recommend checking out this article.

General Resource Management

Can I use the resource management mechanisms I know and love, such as Reservations, Shares, and Limits? You surely can, and you can read more about that capability here.

Conclusion

Just as you would with on-premises vSphere workloads, you do need to put some thought into your workload resource planning prior to moving your VMs onto the magic sky computers. The good news, however, is that there are quite a few smart technologies built into VMware Cloud on AWS that means you’ve got a lot of flexibility when it comes to managing your workloads.

Brisbane VMUG – June 2022

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The June (re-scheduled from May) edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Wednesday 8th June at The Atrium from 5pm. It’s sponsored by Oracle and promises to be a great afternoon.

Agenda

Discover the Benefits of Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Alicia Thompson, Principal Cloud Architect, Oracle Cloud will cover how Oracle VMware Solution (OCVS) helps customers accelerate and simplify their cloud journey by seamlessly extending or migrating their existing on-premises VMware applications to Oracle with complete control without refactoring, re-tooling, and access to Oracle’s entire portfolio of cloud services. Demonstrating Oracle VMware Solution in Action!

VMware and Doing More with OCVS

Peter Hauck, Senior Solutions Engineer, VMware will provide an update on the available validated components that support OCVS from VMware including:

  • vRealize Cloud Management
  • Site Recovery Management
  • Horizon
  • Tanzu
  • Diving deeper into a Tanzu use case for OCVS leveraging the power of Oracle Cloud.
  • Overview of how to implement manage and scale Tanzu in OCVS.

Lessons We Learned After Building a Multi-Region, Multi AZ Cloud Platform based on VMware Products

Amin Naserpour – Solutions Architect, Digital Sense will talk about how Digital Sense designed and built a multi-region, multi availability zone cloud platform based on VMware products. In this session, he will share some of the key challenges that Digital Sense faced and how to address them as well as some of the constraints and hard limits that you must be aware of.

Soft drinks and vBeers will be available throughout the evening. Doors open at 5pm. Please make your way to The Atrium, on level 6. Register for the event here. Check out the Meetup link here. 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 #72

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This one is a little behind thanks to some work travel, but whatever. Let’s get random.

VMware Cloud on AWS – TMCHAM – Part 3 – SDDC Lifecycle

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In this episode of Things My Customers Have Asked Me (TMCHAM), I’m going to delve into some questions around the lifecycle of the VMware-managed VMware Cloud on AWS platform, and what customers need to know to make sense of it all.

 

The SDDC

If you talk to VMware folks about VMware Cloud on AWS, you’ll hear a lot of talk about software-defined data centres (SDDCs). This is the logical construct in place that you use within your Organization to manage your hosts and clusters, in much the same fashion as you would your on-premises workloads. Unlike most on-premises workloads, however, the feeding and watering of the SDDC, from a software currency perspective, is done by VMware.

Release Notes

If you’ve read the VMware Cloud on AWS Release Notes, you’ll see something like this at the start:

“Beginning with the SDDC version 1.11 release, odd-numbered releases of the SDDC software are optional and available for new SDDC deployments only. By default, all new SDDC deployments and upgrades will use the most recent even-numbered release. If you want to deploy an SDDC with an odd-numbered release version, contact your VMware TAM, sales, or customer success representative to make the request.”

Updated on: 5 April  2022

Essential Release: VMware Cloud on AWS (SDDC Version 1.18) | 5 April 2022

Optional Release: VMware Cloud on AWS (SDDC Version 1.17) | 19 November 2021

Basically, when you deploy onto the platform, you’ll usually get put on what VMware calls an “Essential” release. From time to time, customers may have requirements that mean that they qualify to be deployed on an “Optional” release. This might be because they have a software integration requirement that hasn’t been handled in 1.16, for example, but is available for 1.17. It’s also important to note that each major release will have a variety of minor releases as well, depending on issues that need to be resolved or features that need to be rolled out. So you’ll also see references to 1.16v5 in places, for example.

Upgrades and Maintenance

So what happens when your SDDC is going to be upgraded? Well, we let you know in advance, and it’s done in phases, as you’d imagine.

[image courtesy of VMware]

You can read more about the process here, and there’s a blog post that covers the release cadence here. VMware also does the rollout of releases in waves, so not every customer has the upgrade done at the same time. If you’re the type of customer that needs to be on the latest version of everything, or perhaps you have a real requirement to be near the front of the line, you should talk to your account team and they’ll liaise with the folks who can make it happen for you. When the upgrades are happening, you should be careful not to:

  • Perform hot or cold workload migrations. Migrations fail if they are started or in progress during maintenance.
  • Perform workload provisioning (New/Clone VM). Provisioning operations fail if they are started or in progress during maintenance.
  • Make changes to Storage-based Policy Management settings for workload VMs.

You should also ensure that there is enough storage capacity (> 30% slack space) in each cluster.

How Long Will It Take?

As usual, it depends. But you can make some (very) rough estimates by following the guidance on this page.

Will My SDDC Expire?

Yes, your SDDC version will some day expire. But it will be upgraded before that happens. There’s a page where you can look up the expiration dates of the various SDDC releases. It’s all part of the lifecycle part of the SDDC lifecycle.

Correlating VMware Cloud on AWS with Component Releases

Ever found yourself wondering what component versions are being used in VMware Cloud on AWS? Wonder no more with this very handy reference.

 

Conclusion

There’s obviously a lot more that goes on behind the scenes to keep everything running in tip-top shape for our customers. All of this talk of phases, waves, and release notes can be a little confusing if you’re new to the platform. Having worked in a variety of (managed and unmanaged) service providers over the years, I do like that VMware has bundled up all of this information and put it out there for people to check out. As always, if you’ve got questions about how the various software integrations work, and you can’t find the information in the documentation, reach out to your local account team and they’ll be able to help.

Brisbane VMUG – April 2022

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The April 2022 edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Thursday 28th April. It’s powered by VMware, Google Cloud, and Queensland University of Technology and promises to be a great event. It’s also an opportunity to welcome the new leaders to the Brisbane VMUG team: Claire O’Dwyer and Antony West.

Agenda

Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) – Tech Overview and Key Use Cases

In this session we will cover the GCVE platform in depth, as well as GCVE’s technical advantages when compared to other “VMware on X” solutions. As well as diving into the GCVE solution, we will cover some key technical use cases for the platform (e.g. Backup/DR options from an on-premises DC to GCVE).

Delivered by Clay Quinn, Customer Engineer, Google Cloud.

This will be followed by:

Automating Deployments and Configuration Management with Salt

Salt is an open-source configuration management tool with some interesting and useful features. In this session we will cover some of the key capabilities and concepts of Salt and demonstrate how we can use Salt to deploy configure and manage environments.

Delivered by Mark Foley, Senior Solutions Engineer, VMware

PIZZA AND NETWORKING BREAK! (Exciting!)

And we will be finishing off with:

Migrating from NSX-V to NSX-T

Delivered by Tony Williamson, Senior Consultant, VMware PSO.

Soft drinks and vBeers will be available throughout the evening. We look forward to seeing you there! Doors open at 5pm.

You can find out more information and register for the event here. Note that the March 2022 meeting had to be rescheduled due to ‘Rona issues – I’ll update the blog when I have new dates for that one.

Random Short Take #70

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Welcome to Random Short Take #70. Let’s get random.

VMware Cloud on AWS – TMCHAM – Part 2 – VCDR Notes

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In this episode of “Things My Customers Have Asked Me” (or TMCHAM for short), I’m going to dive into a few questions around VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR), a service we offer as an add-on to VMware Cloud on AWS. If you’re unfamiliar with VCDR, you can read a bit more about it here.

VCDR Roles and Permissions

Can RBAC roles be customised? Not really, as these are cascaded down from the Cloud Services hub. As I understand it, I don’t believe you have granular control over it, just the pre-defined, default roles as outlined here, so you need to be careful about what you hand out to folks in your organisation. To see what Service Roles have been assigned to your account, in the VMware Cloud Services, go to My Account, and then click on My Roles. Under Service Roles, you’ll see a list of services, such as VCDR, Skyline, and so on. You can then check what roles have been assigned. 

VCDR Protection Groups

VCDR Protection Groups are the way that we logically group together workloads to be protected with the same RPO, schedule, and retention. There are two types of protection group: standard-frequency and high-frequency. Standard-frequency snapshots can be run as often as every 4 hours, while high-frequency snapshots can go as often as every 30 minutes. You can read more on protection groups here. It’s important to note that there are some caveats to be aware of with high-frequency snapshots. These are outlined here.

30-minute RPOs were introduced in late 2021, but there are some caveats that you need to be aware of. Some of these are straightforward, such as the minimum software levels for on-premises protection. But you also need to be mindful that VMs with existing vSphere snapshots will not be included, and, more importantly, high-frequency snapshots can’t be quiesced.

Can you have a VM instance in both a standard- and high-frequency snapshot protection group?  Would this allow us to get the best of both worlds – e.g. RPO could be as low as 30 minutes, but with a guaranteed snapshot of 4 hours?  Once you do a high-frequency snap on a VM, it keeps using that mechanism thereafter, even if it sits in a protection group using standard protection. Note also that you set a schedule for a protection group, so you can have snapshots running ever 30 mins and kept for a particular period of time (customer selects this). You could also run snapshots at 4 hours and keep those for a period of time too. While you can technically have a VM in multiple groups, what you’re better off doing is configuring a variety of schedules for your protection groups to meet those different RPOs.

Quiesced Snapshots

What happens to a VM during a quiesced state – would we experience micro service outages? The best answer I can give is “it depends”. The process for the standard, quiesced snapshot is similar to the one described here. The VM will be stunned by the process, so depending on what kind of activity is happening on the VM, there may be a micro outage to the service.

Other Considerations

The documentation talks about not changing anything when a scheduled snapshot is being run – how do we manage configuration of the SDDC if jobs are running 24/7?  Seems odd that nothing can be changed when a scheduled snapshot is being run? This refers more to the VM that is being snapped. i.e. Don’t change configs or make changes to the environment, as that would impact this VM. It’s not a blanket rule for the whole environment. 

Like most things, success with VCDR relies heavily on understanding the outcomes your organisation wants to achieve, and then working backwards from there. It’s also important to understand that this is a great way to do DR, but not necessarily a great way to do standard backup and recovery activities. Hopefully this article helps clarify some of the questions folks have around VCDR, and if it doesn’t, please don’t hesitate to get in contact.