Tag Archives: management

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.

Puppet Announces Puppet Discovery, Can Now Find and Manage Your Stuff Everywhere

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Puppet recently wrapped up their conference, PuppetConf2017, and made some product announcements at the same time. I thought I’d provide some brief coverage of one of the key announcements here.

 

What’s a Discovery Puppet?

No, it’s Puppet Discovery, and it’s the evolution of Puppet’s focus on container and cloud infrastructure discovery, and the result of feedback from their customers on what’s been a challenge for them. Puppet describe it as “a new turnkey approach to traditional and cloud resource discovery”.

It also provides:

  • Agentless service discovery for AWS EC2, containers, and physical hosts;
  • Actionable views across the environment; and
  • The ability to bring unmanaged resources under Puppet management.

Puppet Discovery currently allows for discovery of VMware vSphere VMs, AWS and Azure resources, and containers, with support for other cloud vendors, such as Google Cloud Platform, to follow.

 

Conclusion and Further Reading

Puppet have been around for some time and do a lot of interesting stuff. I haven’t covered them previously on this blog, but that doesn’t mean they’re not doing interesting stuff. I have a lot of customers leveraging Puppet in the wild, and any time companies make the discovery, management and automation of infrastructure easier I’m all for it. I’m particularly enthusiastic about the hybrid play, as I agree with Puppet’s claim that a lot of these types of solutions work particularly well on static, internal networks but struggle when technologies such as containers and public cloud come into play.

Just like VM sprawl before it, cloud sprawl is a problem that enterprises, in particular, are starting to experience with more frequency. Tools like Discovery can help identify just what exactly has been deployed. Once users have a better handle on that, they can start to make decisions about what needs to stay and what should go. I think this is key to good infrastructure management, regardless of whther you were jeans and a t-shirt to work or prefer a suit and tie.

The press release for Puppet Discovery can be found here. You can apply to participate in the preview phase here. There’s also a blog post covering the announcement here.