Preston did a great job of talking about the difference between Outage vs Outrage. It usually comes down to one letter.
I like Time Machine, and I like the way Howard explains Apple concepts in his blog posts, so this article “How does Time Machine make a backup?” really hit the spot.
My friend Vincent has made it to 100,000 hits on his blog, and I really hope he gets a lot more. He’s a smart chap.
I recently had the opportunity to run through a VMware Cloud on Disaster Recovery deployment with a customer and thought I’d run through the basics. It’s important to note that there a variety of topologies supported with VCDR, and many things that need to be considered before you click deploy, and this is just one way of doing it. In any case, there’s a new document outlining the process on the articles page.
I’ve been a bit slack and neglected to post this sooner, but the Sydney and Melbourne VMUG UserCon events are coming up in less than a month. If you’re unfamiliar with UserCon, it’s an event put on by VMUG where you can:
Participate in technical deep dives led by a variety of industry experts;
Put your skills to the test during breakout sessions and hands-on labs;
Make meaningful connections with like-minded IT professionals;
Learn about the latest products and solutions from trusted VMUG partners;
Win Cool SWAG & prizes;
And a whole bunch more. The good news is that Chris McCain is doing the morning and closing keynote at both events, and there’s a heavy focus on security. In addition to that, there are some great speakers presenting from both VMware and the community. If you’re heading to the Sydney event, I recommend getting along to hear my friend Tony Williamson talking about real world service provider networking leveraging NSX.
The Melbourne event is being held on March 14, 2023 at Crown Melbourne (map), while the Sydney event is being held on March 16, 2023 at the Sofitel (map). You can view the full agenda and register for the Melbourne event here, and details of the Sydney event can be found here. If you have the time and are in the area, I heartily recommend registering and attending – these promise to be excellent events.
I’m very happy to have been listed as a vExpert for 2023. This is the eleventh time that they’ve forgotten to remove my name from the list (I’m like Rick Astley with that joke). You can read more 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. Congratulations to you (whether this is your first or thirteenth time). It looks like there are around 1400 folks from all parts of the globe. I think that’s pretty cool.
Now that holiday season is over, Brisbane VMUG would like to say thank you to its Community and Sponsors, who supported them as they got back in to in-person meetings last year. They’ve secured The Terrace at QUT from 2pm until 5pm on Friday 17th February, and would like to invite you to join them for some drinks, nibbles and networking.
There will be some prize giveaways and an opportunity to chill out and mingle with like-minded people from the vCommunity.
If you’ve ever had the chance to listen to Rebecca talk, you know she’s really smart. This article on setting the technical direction for a team made for great reading.
All the kids like to talk about storage over networks, not storage area networks. What about when old meets new? Chin-fah posted an excellent article on Fibre Channel protocol in a zero trust world.
Happy New Year (to those who celebrate). Let’s get random.
Those of you who know me well will know I’m a big fan of Debian. I find running manual apt commands on my various Raspberry Pis therapeutic, but an automated approach is probably better. This is a great article on how to configure automated security updates on Debian automatically.
I miss Tru64, and Solaris for that matter. I don’t miss HP-UX. And I definitely won’t miss AIX. Read about the death of Unix over at El Reg – Unix is dead. Long live Unix!
The I3.metal is going away very soon. Remember this is from a sales perspective, VMware is still supporting the I3.metal in the wild, and you’ll still have access to deploy on-demand if required (up to a point).
Welcome to Random Short Take #81. Last one for the year, because who really wants to read this stuff over the holiday season? Let’s get random.
Curtis did a podcast on archive and retrieve as part of his “Backup to Basics” series. It’s something I feel pretty strongly about, so much so that I wrote a chapter in his book about it. You can listen to it here.
More William Gibson content is coming to our screens, with the announcement that Neuromancer is coming to Apple TV. I hope it’s as well done as The Peripheral. Hat tip to John Birmingham for posting the news on his blog.
It’s been a while since I looked at Dell storage, but my friend Max wrote a great article over at Gestalt IT on Dell PowerStore.
I love Backblaze. Not in the sense that I want to marry the company, but I really like what the folks there do. And I really like the transparency with which they operate. This article giving a behind the scenes look at its US East Data Center is a fantastic example of that.
And, to “celebrate” 81 Random Short Takes (remember when I used to list my favourite NBA players and the numbers they wore?), let’s take a stroll down memory lane with two of my all-time, top 5, favourite NBA players – Kobe Bryant and Jalen Rose. The background for this video is explained by Jalen here.
Take care of yourselves and each other, and I’ll hopefully see you all on the line or in person next year.
In this edition of Things My Customers Have Asked Me (TMCHAM), I’m going to delve into some questions around TRIM/UNMAP and capacity reclamation on the VMware-managed VMware Cloud on AWS platform.
Why TRIM/UNMAP?
TRIM/UNMAP, in short, is the capability for operating systems to reclaim no longer used space on thin-provisioned filesystems. Why is this important? Imagine you have a thin-provisioned volume that has 100GB of capacity allocated to it. It consumes maybe 1GB when it’s first deployed. You then add 50GB of data to it. You then delete 50GB of data from the volume. You’ll still see 51GB of capacity being consumed on the filesystem. This is because older operating systems just mark the blocks as deleted, but don’t zero them out. Modern operating systems do support TRIM/UNMAP though, but the hypervisor needs to understand the commands being sent to it. You can read more on that here.
How I Do This For VMware Cloud on AWS?
You can contact your account team, and we raise a ticket to get the feature enabled. We had some minor issues recently that meant we weren’t enabling the feature, but if you’re running M16v12 or M18v5 (or above) on your SDDCs, you should be good to go. Note that this feature is enabled on a per-cluster basis, and you need to reboot the VMs in the cluster for it to take effect.
What About Migrating With HCX?
Do the VMs come across thin? Do you need to reclaim space first? If you’re using HCX to go from thick to thin, you should be fine. If you’re migrating thin to thin, it’s worth checking whether you’ve got any space reclamation in place on your source side. I’ve had customers report back that some environments have migrated across with higher than expected storage usage due to a lack of space reclamation happening on the source storage environment. You can use something like Live Optics to report on your capacity consumed vs allocated, and how much capacity can be reclaimed.
Why Isn’t This Enabled By Default?
I don’t know for sure, but I imagine it has something to do with the fact that TRIM/UNMAP has the potential to have a performance impact from a latency perspective, depending on the workloads running in the environment, and the amount of capacity being reclaimed at any given time. We recommend that you “schedule large space reclamation jobs during off-peak hours to reduce any potential impact”. Given that VMware Cloud on AWS is a fully-managed service, I imagine we want to control as many of the performance variables as possible to ensure our customers enjoy a reliable and stable platform. That said, TRIM/UNMAP is a really useful feature, and you should look at getting it enabled if you’re concerned about the potential for wasted capacity in your SDDC.
The November 2022 edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Thursday 24th November at the Cube (QUT) from 5pm – 7pm. It’s sponsored by Pure Storage and promises to be a great afternoon. Register here.
Raise Your Kubernetes Infrastructure Status From Zero to Hero
If your developers or platform architects are asking you for storage features commonly found in your vSphere infrastructure but targeted towards Kubernetes, you are not alone – let Portworx help you go from “I don’t know” to “No problem”!
Locking yourself into a storage solution that is dependent on specific infrastructure is a sure way to reduce efficiency and flexibility for your developers and where their applications can run – Portworx elevates you to “Hero” status by:
Providing your team a consistent, cloud native storage layer you can utilise on ANY Kubernetes platform – whether on-premises or in the public cloud
Giving you the capability to provide Kubernetes native DR and business continuity not only for your persistent storage, but all of the Kubernetes objects associated with your applications (think SRM and vMSC for Kubernetes!)
Enabling you to provide Kubernetes-aware data protection, including ransomware protection and 3-2-1 backup compliance with RBAC roles that can fit the existing policies within your organisation
Delighting your developers that need access to modern databases such as Kafka, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, and more by delivering self-service deployments with best practices “built-in”, which accelerate development cycles without a dinosaur DBA or learning complex Kubernetes operators
Come join us to see how we can create your “Better Together” story with Tanzu and give you the tools and knowledge to bring agility for your developers to your underlying infrastructure for modern applications running on Kubernetes!
Mike Carpendale
Mike joined Pure Storage in April 2021 as the APJ Regions Platform Architect. He has 20+ years experience in the industry, ranging from his expert level hands-on experience of designing and managing large scale on-prem as-a-service offerings underpinned by VMware, to his more recent work in the public cloud.
PIZZA AND NETWORKING BREAK!
This will be followed by:
VMware Session
Peter Hauck – Senior Solutions Engineer
VMware
And we will be finishing off with:
Preparing for VMware Certifications
With the increase of position requirements in the last few years, certifications help you demonstrate your skills and move you a step forward on getting better jobs. In this Community Ssession we will help you understand how to prepare for a VMware certification exam and some useful tips you can use during the exam.
We will talk about:
Different types of exams
How to schedule an exam
Where to get material to study
Lessons learned from the field per type of exam
Francisco Fernandez Cardarelli – Senior Consultant (4 x VCIX)
Soft drinks and vBeers will be available throughout the evening! We look forward to seeing you there! Doors open at 5pm. Please make your way to The Cube.
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