VMware NSX – First Impressions

29/06/2016 by user

One of the first “killer applications” on the PC platform was Lotus 1-2-3, a spread sheeting program that greatly improved the productivity of the people using it and making a clear case for buying PCs. More recently, we’ve seen this sort of thing happening in IT infrastructure, with virtualisation, automation, cloud and “as a service”. VMware’s NSX product is the latest in a line of products from VMware in this sort of area.

If we go back to the “good old days” of getting a server up and running, it could take weeks. The diagram below shows the amount of effort involved.

While some of these numbers may have been more or less depending on circumstances, in many cases it could’ve taken over 150 business hours to get a server ready for use. Or almost a full month.

VMware Horizon 7 – First Impressions

06/04/2016 by user

VMware Horizon is a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) product which initially allowed provisioning of Virtual Desktops off a base image in an easily to manage fashion. Over time, VMware have added extra functionally, such as the ability to add Remote Desktop Services (RDS) servers.

Version 7 has added a number of interesting features and improvements. The one mentioned first in the release notes is Instant Clones. This is a technology I’ve been following for a while, ever since I read about it. Originally known as VMFork, it’s a technology to allow very rapid, almost instant, provisioning of Virtual Machines. Duncan Epping wrote a good overview of VMFork/Instant Clone back in 2014. Support for Virtual Volumes and Linux desktops are some of the other features that have been added.

SQL As A Service Proof of Concept with SQL 2012 and vRealize Automation

05/03/2016 by user

Standing up a redundant/highly available database infrastructure can be one of the more complicated pieces of work. Doing it by hand is a long process with any points where errors could happen. It was with this in mind that I decided to use this as my first “project” with vRealize Automation.

A Brief History of SQL Server High Availability

When discussing redundancy or high availability (HA) for databases, there’s two distinct outcomes – firstly to ensure the continued delivery of the service in the event of infrastructure failure (the actual HA part) and secondly to ensure the data is kept in an orderly fashion (data integrity, no loss of data, etc). Where these two activities happen depend on the technology used.

In older versions of SQL Server, these outcomes were achieved using SQL Clustering. In SQL Clustering, the HA function was achieved at the server level by having 2 or more servers, while data integrity was maintained by the database residing on shared storage.

Want hands on with Virtual Volumes? EMC has a Virtual Appliance for that

12/02/2016 by user

Virtual Volumes (VVols) is a new method of managing storage introduced in VMware vSphere 6.0. Unlike many of the new features in vSphere 6.0, VVols requires not just vSphere 6.0 to work, but a storage device that supports the technology. Fortunately, EMC have produced a virtual appliance that emulates a storage device with VVol support, so you can get some practical exposure to Virtual Volumes without needing a shiny new storage array. Download and documetation can be found at http://www.emc.com/products-solutions/trial-software-download/vvols.htm The process for getting Virtual Volumes completely working is rather long, as the flow chart from EMC’s documentation below shows:

I’ll run through the steps in getting the Appliance and Virtual Volumes working on a vSphere installation.

vRealize Automation 7.0 – First Impressions

29/01/2016 by user

vRealize Automation is, as VMware puts it, cloud automation software. It’s the black box where the magic that happens between a customer or consumer of your cloud services and the infrastructure the cloud sits on, providing the services we would normally associate with a cloud service such as self-service, elasticity and multi-tenant support.

vRealize Automation - The Black Box — vRealize Automation – The Black Box

In the past, this product was known as vCloud Automation Center, or vCAC. It was rebranded along with a number of other VMware products under the vRealize banner. However, the newly branded vRealize Automation product still retains some references to vCAC.

vCloud Air Test Experience

13/10/2015 by user

vCloud Air is VMware’s public cloud offering, similar to Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft’s Azure. The key distincion between vCloud Air and these other offerings is that vCloud Air uses VMware’s products such as vSphere.

The VMWare User Group (VMUG) recently added free credits on vCloud Air OnDemand as part of their EVALExperience program. As the name suggests, vCloud Air OnDemand is a pay-as-you-go service. I looked at this service offering as a server engineer with a reasonable background in VMware, considering aspects such as the ease of basic tasks, general administration, technical considerations for the business (good and bad) and how it compares to other offerings.

Getting serious about a home lab – Part 2 (The hardware arrives)

30/08/2012 by user

With my new lab, I ended up deciding on a two server approach to address the issues mentioned in part one – one server will purely be the “brains”, performing the virtualisation functions, while the other server will provide storage. In line with that, I ended up getting the following parts:

Virtualisation Server

1 x Intel i7 3930K
1 x Intel DX79SI motherboard
8 x Kingston 8GB RAM (64GB total)
1 x Corsair 120GB SSD
2 x Intel gigabit NICs
1 x Fractal Design Define XL case

Storage Server

1 x Intel i7 3820
1 x Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 motherboard
1 x Kingston 8GB RAM
1 x Corsair 180GB SSD
9 x Hitachi Ultrastar A7K3000 (2TB) HDD
2 x Intel gigabit NICs
1 x Fractcal Design Define XL case

I also bought a Netgear gigabit switch and put an Adaptec RAID controller into the storage server. The 2 additional NICs in each server are for iSCSI traffic with their own IP range.

Getting serious about a home lab – Part 1 (The high concept)

15/08/2012 by user

Back in November I posted about the implementation of what was essentially version 2 of my home lab on the VMWare ESX platform, moving an i3 with 8GB of RAM to an i7 with 16GB and proper storage on a RAID controller. The problem with that environment is it only really served the needs of my “production” virtual machines and hasn’t allowed me to expand further as about 14GB of the 16GB total is allocated out (even with the VMs being under-provisioned in terms of RAM).

Running in parallel with this is my desire to get some traction on my certifications and having a good virtualisation platform that I can quickly set-up lab environments on is an important part of this. Thus begins the project, to implement version 3 of my home lab environment. The broad hardware bits of the “high concept” are:

Capable of supporting my current virtual environment with better performance (essentially meaning I can allocate more correct amounts of RAM to my current VMs)
Capable of scaling up to support multiple simple lab environments or singular complex lab environments
Address the storage issues with v2 of the home lab

In terms of software or process, the outcome I’m hoping for is fairly high levels of automation leveraging the feature set available to me in my current available software pool. Similarly, in the future I could use this model for a testing environment at work, which again means leveraging technologies that may be licensed with (ie. standard vSphere, SCCM, etc) as opposed to the best solutions possible that they may not be licensed for (some of the automation-heavy vmware products come to mind).

Going forward I hope to document the process I’ll be going through in making the home lab, including research and testing to get the end result.