Eric Sloof

Overview

The VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Automation ABX Actions for Ansible Automation Platform Deployment Guide provides comprehensive instructions for leveraging the sample Aria custom resource to interact with the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform effectively.

Intended Audience

This guide is designed for experienced data center cloud administrators and automation developers who work with VMware Aria Automation to create automated solutions for their organizations. Familiarity with the following technologies and concepts is essential:

• VMware Aria Automation: Expertise in using and developing with Aria Automation Assembler.
• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform: Proficiency in managing users, organizations, and integrating with version control platforms like GitLab and GitHub. Understanding Ansible inventories and components, as well as developing and using playbooks for configuration management.
• Python 3: A solid understanding of Python 3 and its associated packages.
• YAML: Familiarity with YAML syntax and data types.

High performance computing (HPC) environments are crucial to innovation today. They drive drug discovery, electronic design automation, digital movie rendering, and deep learning—just to name a few of the many applications. At the same time, an ever-growing need for security is pushing HPC environments from the physical world to the virtual.

Traditional bare-metal HPC systems are unable to meet the requirements for dynamic sharing and isolation of resources, making them incapable of supporting secure multi-tenancy. Aging infrastructures further escalate security concerns. One of the key benefits virtualization offers to the enterprise is enhanced network security. Virtualized HPC environments also provide significant value, allowing IT teams to leverage multi-tenancy to maximize hardware utilization while maintaining complete separation between research projects, ensuring files and data remain private.

While public clouds offer a variety of security policies, challenges related to security and management flexibility still persist. This is especially evident in areas such as clinical genomic sequencing, chip design, and other sensitive research fields that undergo regulatory compliance and demand the highest levels of security. To address these challenges, modern HPC environments require a software-defined networking solution that delivers robust security and streamlines security operations.

In this paper, VMware leverages VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and one of its core components, NSX-T Data Center, for HPC workloads. A multi-tenant networking architecture is presented, along with an evaluation of HPC application performance when paired with various NSX-T features, including micro-segmentation with the distributed firewall (DFW), encapsulation with GENEVE overlay, and the NSX enhanced data path (ENS)/network stack. Finally, VMware provides a list of best practices.

VMware Cloud Foundation Administrator (VCP-VCF Admin) 2024 certification is a key credential for IT professionals looking to validate their expertise in deploying, managing, and supporting private cloud environments using VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). This certification is ideal for those transitioning from traditional infrastructure roles to cloud administration. It is specifically tailored for professionals tasked with implementing and maintaining VCF infrastructure, ensuring it aligns with organizational goals for availability, performance, and security. Earning this certification showcases a professional’s capability to efficiently operate and manage VCF environments.

• Exam 2V0-11.24 : VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2 Administrator
• VMware Certified Professional - VMware Cloud Foundation Administrator 2024
   

The VMware vSphere Foundation 5.2 Administrator (2V0-12.24) exam, which grants the VMware Certified Professional – VMware vSphere Foundation Administrator 2024 certification (VCP-VVF Administrator 2024), consists of 55 questions and uses a scaled scoring system with a passing mark of 300. Candidates are allotted 115 minutes for the exam, allowing sufficient time for non-native English speakers to complete it.

• Exam 2V0-12.24 : VMware vSphere Foundation 5.2 Administrator
• VMware Certified Professional - VMware vSphere Foundation Administrator 2024

High-performance computing (HPC) environments are at the forefront of innovation, fueling advancements in areas like drug discovery, electronic design automation, digital movie rendering, and deep learning. As these applications become increasingly critical, the need for robust security has driven the shift from physical to virtual HPC environments.

Traditional bare-metal HPC systems fall short when it comes to dynamic resource sharing and isolation, making them unsuitable for secure multi-tenancy. Aging infrastructures heighten security risks, while virtualization offers significant advantages, particularly in terms of networking security. Virtualized HPC environments enable IT departments to maximize hardware utilization and ensure complete separation between research projects, safeguarding files and data.

Despite the array of security policies available through public clouds, challenges persist, especially in sensitive fields like clinical genomic sequencing or chip design, where regulatory compliance and top-notch security are paramount. To meet these demands, modern HPC environments require a software-defined networking solution that enhances security and simplifies operations.

In this paper, we explore the capabilities of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and its core component, NSX-T Data Center, for managing HPC workloads. We delve into a multi-tenant networking architecture and assess the performance of HPC applications using various NSX-T features. These include micro-segmentation with the distributed firewall (DFW), encapsulation with GENEVE overlay, and the NSX enhanced data path (ENS)/network stack. We also provide a set of best practices to optimize your HPC environment.

Introducing Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 8.0 Update 3 – a valuable resource packed with expert tips to optimize the performance of VMware vSphere 8.0 Update 3. While it isn’t a comprehensive guide for planning and configuring your deployments, it offers crucial insights into enhancing performance across key areas.

Here’s a quick overview of what you’ll find inside:

• Chapter 1: Hardware for Use with VMware vSphere (Page 11) – Discover essential tips for selecting the right hardware to get the most out of your vSphere environment.

• Chapter 2: ESXi and Virtual Machines (Page 25) – Dive into best practices for VMware ESXi™ software and the virtual machines operating within it.

• Chapter 3: Guest Operating Systems (Page 57) – Learn about optimizing the guest operating systems running on your vSphere virtual machines.

• Chapter 4: Virtual Infrastructure Management (Page 69) – Gain insights into effective management practices for maintaining a high-performance virtual infrastructure.

Whether you're aiming to fine-tune your setup or just looking for ways to boost efficiency, this book is an excellent reference for ensuring your VMware vSphere environment performs at its best.

Data transfer over TCP is very common in vSphere environments. Examples include storage traffic between the VMware ESXi host and an NFS or iSCSI datastore, and various forms of vMotion traffic between vSphere datastores.

VMware has observed that even extremely infrequent TCP issues could have an outsized impact on overall transfer throughput. For example, in VMware's experiments with ESXi NFS read traffic from an NFS datastore, a seemingly minor 0.02% packet loss resulted in an unexpected 35% decrease in NFS read throughput.

In this paper, VMware describes a methodology for identifying TCP issues that are commonly responsible for poor transfer throughput. VMware captures the network traffic of a data transfer into a packet trace file for offline analysis. The packet trace is then analyzed for signatures of common TCP issues that may have a significant impact on transfer throughput.

The TCP issues considered include packet loss and retransmission, long pauses due to TCP timers, and bandwidth delay product (BDP) issues. VMware uses Wireshark to perform the analysis, and a Wireshark profile is provided to simplify the analysis workflow. VMware describes a systematic approach to identify common TCP issues with significant transfer throughput impact and recommends that engineers troubleshooting data transfer throughput performance include this methodology as a standard part of their workflow.

VMware assumes readers are familiar with the relevant TCP concepts described in this paper and have a good working knowledge of Wireshark. For additional information about these topics, refer to the SharkFest Retrospective page of recent SharkFest Conferences.

In this paper, VMware gives AI/ML training workload performance test results for the VMware vSphere virtualization platform using multiple NVIDIA A100-80GB GPUs with NVIDIA NVLink; the results fall into the “Goldilocks Zone,” which refers to the area of good performance with virtualization benefits.

Their results show that several virtualized MLPerf Training1 v3.0 benchmarks’ training times perform within 1.06% to 1.08% of the same workloads run on a comparable bare metal system. Note that lower is better.

In addition, we show the MLPerf Inference v3.0 test results for the vSphere virtualization platform with NVIDIA H100 and A100 Tensor Core GPUs. Our tests show that when NVIDIA vGPUs are used in vSphere, the workload performance measured as queries served per second (qps) is 94% to 105% of the performance on the bare metal system. Note that higher is better.