Breakfast
Same as Day 1, kind of a bummer (continental breakfast)
General Session
Caught this while lounging in a bean bag. Honestly I didn’t take too much away. Sanjay Poonen demoed the internal application that allows VMware employees to access various applications and windows images. Apparently they are taking their internal stuff mainstream and offering that integration as an offering. He also gave away VMware Fusion and Workstation to all of the users of the VMworld APP (I grabbed a fusion one).
Kit Colbert showed off the vSphere Integrated Containers, which allows you to spin up a VIC host (I believe Photon based) and then add load Docker containers. The VIC looks like an appliance in vSphere, with each container like a sub VM.
Yanbing Li closed out the general session, discussing how VSAN is he foundation of the previously announced VMware Cloud Foundation. I was a little disappointed that she didn’t have a cool demo like last year (cross-cloud vmotion), but I also feel like she was stuck at the end instead of showcased.
Lunch
Build your own soft and hard-shell tacos with choice of barbacoa, carnitas or chicken.
Sessions
STO7534 – Virtual SAN – Day 2 Operations
- The session tried to describe the operations that occur after the cluster is setup. This would include setting up logging, alerting, replacing hard drives, maintenance mode, patching, and updating on-disk formats.
Notes: If you are booting from USB/SD, then /scratch is held on RAMDISK. You SHOULD setup syslog so local logs as well as partial trace (in VSAN 6.2/vSphere 6.l0u2) will be sent off. Log Insight has a content pack that can interpret the partial trace. Core dumps will try to be sent to the network coredump collector (if configured) then pushed to the local diagnostic particion (which is created even on USB/SD cards if host is <=512gb ram).
Alerting in vCenter is nothing new (70 VSAN alerts packaged in), but they did go through and use alerts from vCenter and VROPS to
- see a diskgroup error
- Determine the diskgroup
- Determine that it’s a disk that failed
- Determine UUID and NAA of disk
- Turn on the LED of the disk (find disk using NAA)
- determine disk position using the CLI
Upgrade to 6.0u2 process described:
- Maintenance mode options were described:
- Ensure accessibility (no data migration, runs degraded)
- Full data migration (data moved off of node))
- Update vSphere to 6.0u2
- Update HCL db files
- Make sure all are green in health check
- Update on-disk format
You may get errors that you don’t have enough space to data migrate the host. You can use reduced availability mode from the vsan observer to basically use “Ensure accessibility” but specific to on disk format.
INF8092 The Power Hour: Deep Dive
Biggest takeaway: PowerShell has been released for Linux and Mac OS X. VMware will be releasing PowerCLI flings soon.
TAM10673 What’s Next for vSphere
TAM10659 Future of vMotion
INF8856 vSphere Encryption Deep Dive: Technical Preview
A Technical Preview of VM encryption was discussed. vCenter can be pointed to key management server(s) which can then be used to encrypt the key that is then used to encrypt VMs. The outside (tenant) key will be changed by the KMS. When it is changed, the key is pushed down to each host in the cluster . The fact that the VM is encrypted will restrict some operations from admins that do not have the proper crypto roles and permissions.
I am really excited about VM Encryption as I believe it will solve the situation where everyone wants their own little physical cage because they want to lock down the data. Encryption could let encrypted and non-encrypted VMs live in the same cluster on the same storage. There was no discussion of performance impact, so we will have to see.
Dinner
Steak at Smith and Wollensky’s with the VMware account team from the Houston region.
vExpert Reception at The Mob Museum was fun, I got theretowards the last 30 minutes of Pat Gelsinger’s Q&A. It’s great that he would spend his precious time talking to the vExpert community. I left from there and split a Lyft with a friend back to MGM (friend went to Tintri party) and back to Luxor.
I got up the energy to go out one more event, vBacon. I ran into a couple of guys I met at (well following to) VMunderground as well as various faces in the community.
Slice of pizza and soda to go from a nearby shop and off to be to write this blog.