Eric Sloof

Operationalizing VMware NSX offers guidance to management-level decision makers and influencers concerned with the impact of VMware NSX on their organization, staff, and operational processes. It also speaks to engineers and technical decision makers responsible for optimizing operational tooling in a VMware NSX environment.

Operationalizing VMware NSX provides the information needed to optimize the on-going operations of a VMware NSX environment. Specific areas examined include the critical aspects of team structure, culture, roles, responsibilities, and skillsets.

Additional guidance is provided for operational processes, monitoring, and troubleshooting in a VMware NSX environment. 

Announcing Three New VMware NSX Guides!

VMware NSX Micro-segmentation – Day 2 is a guide designed to help organizations understand how to operationalize micro-segmentation in their environments.

VMware NSX Micro-segmentation – Day 2 provides a primer on leveraging tools – VMware vRealize Log Insight, Application Rule Manager, and VMware vRealize Network Insight – to build rulesets necessary to facilitate micro-segmentation.

Announcing Three New VMware NSX Guides!

This course begins with the concept of software-defined datacenter, software-defined storage, and hyper-converged infrastructure, then reviews traditional vSphere’s storage solutions and introduces vSAN as a new addition to the solutions.

The course also discusses vSAN’s architecture, relationships between components and some basic concepts. This course explains the major vSAN technologies that fulfill workload requirements, and discusses the key features and common use cases of vSAN.

VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) is the powerful automation engine in VMware’s vRealize Cloud Management Platform (CMP). vRA is designed to automate not just applications and service delivery, but also the infrastructure ecosystem around them, resulting in an app-centric authoring, provisioning and lifecycle management solution.

A critical component of that infrastructure is a Networking and Security strategy that can meet the demands of new and existing applications while protecting enterprises against a modern threat.

This video presentation dives into application-centric networking and security solutions with vRealize Automation 7.3 and VMware NSX to make building, consuming, and lifecycle-managing networking and security a core function of service delivery.

DRS Dump Insight is a service portal where users can upload drmdump files and it provides a summary of the DRS run, with a breakup of all the possible moves along with the changes in ESX hosts resource consumption before and after DRS run.

Users can get answers to questions like:

• Why did DRS make a certain recommendation?
• Why is DRS not making any recommendations to balance my cluster?
• What recommendations did DRS drop due to cost/benefit analysis?
• Can I get all the recommendations made by DRS?

The portal also enables users to do What-If analysis on their DRS clusters with options like:

• Changing DRS Migration Threshold
• Dropping affinity/anti-affinity rules in the cluster
• Changing DRS advanced options

https://www.drsdumpinsight.vmware.com/

VMware Education Services has released a new badge, the vRealize Operations 2017 Specialist. This digital badge shows that you can plan, manage, and help scale SDDC and multi-cloud environments through unified monitoring, automated performance management, cloud planning and capacity optimization. These specialists help their organizations streamline and automate IT operations from applications to infrastructure across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

 

VMware Education Services has released a new badge, the VMware vSAN 2017 Specialist. The badge holder is a technical professional who understands the vSAN 6.6 architecture and its complete feature set, knows how to conduct a vSAN design and deployment exercise, can implement a live vSAN hyper-converged infrastructure environment based on certified hardware/software components and best practices, and can administer/operate a vSAN cluster properly.

More info at: Turbocharge your HCI Career with the vSAN Specialist Badge

Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) is a storage policy framework that helps administrators match virtual machine workload requirements against storage capabilities. SPBM runs as an independent service in the vCenter Server.


This paper covers SPBM performance and is divided into two sections. In the first section, we cover performance improvements of SPBM in vCenter 6.5 over vCenter 6.0 U3. In the second section, VMware covers scaling trends of SPBM in vCenter 6.5.

Best practices are described for optimizing Big Data applications running on VMware vSphere. Hardware, software, and vSphere configuration parameters are documented, as well as tuning parameters for the operating system, Hadoop, and Spark.

The Hewlett Packard Enterprise ProLiant DL380 Gen9 servers used in the test featured fast Intel processors with a large number of cores, large memory (512 GiB), and all-flash disks.


Test results are shown from two MapReduce and three Spark applications running on three different configurations of vSphere (with 1, 2, and 4 VMs per host) as well as directly on the hardware.

Among the virtualized clusters, the fastest configuration was 4 VMs per host due to NUMA locality and best disk utilization. The 4 VMs per host platform was faster than bare metal for all tests with the exception of a large (10 TB) TeraSort test where the the bare metal advantage of larger memory overcame the disadvantage of NUMA misses.

For many years, I was a big fan of Asymetrix Toolbook and Visual Basic. I won’s say I’m an experienced programmer but I knew my way around (remember the vmClient).

Since Visual Basic doesn’t run on a Mac, I did some research and have found a good cross platform alternative called Xojo, it’s a a development tool for creating powerful, native applications for desktop, web, iOS, and Raspberry Pi. 

The only problem I had is how to I talk to vSphere? Version 6.5 has a REST API and Xojo is equipped with a rest socket. Just connect those two together and let the fun begin.

In this video, I’ll explain how to create your own cross platform applications in Xojo and access the vSphere 6.5 REST API through the Xojo rest socket. This allows you to list, create, and power-on virtual machines and all the other stuff from your own user interface.  Xojo and vSphere we got a lift off.