Check out this post on their DataStore Contention Card:

For a general overview, go here: I am a massive fan of analytics and trend metrics and I use a number of systems to gain a wide overview of the performance and monitoring of our Hosting and Cloud Platform.

A few weeks ago, the CloudPhysics team released to a limited number of users a Custom Card Designer. This pretty much lets you construct custom cards based on a huge number of metrics presented via a builder wizard.

Cards you design and save are listed on the page above. From here you can view your custom cards and edit them if they require tweaking. Once you click the Create Card + button you are presented with a list of property data metrics from which to construct your card.

Properties fall under four main categories and there are a large number of available metrics under each category. The wizard lets you drag and drop items into the builder window. From there you can preview and then save your custom card for future use.

As a quick example I needed a quick way to see which datastores where connected to their respective hosts in each cluster so that consistency in datastore availability was maintained. It was as simple as dragging across Host:Name and Host:Datastore, putting in a filter to only view hosts of a certain name it was ready to go.

You have the option to preview and continue editing, or saving to the Card Designer main page. From that page you can execute the query. The results of my quick test card are shown below.

One thing I would like to see is an option to export the results to a csv or excel document…but other than that it’s a great example of what CloudPhysics is all about…data and how to get the most out of it as efficiently as possible.

Having just gone through my first deployment of the Horizon Workspace vApp (…and failed) …put together with the fact there isn’t much on the internet in terms of walkthroughs, I thought a blog post would be handy. This won’t be a HA scaled out deployment as I only need to support 100-500 internal users for the moment, but the on-line docs do touch on Advanced Configuration tasks.

There is quiet a bit to the deployment, so this post will only touch on the key points and any additional items the docs don’t cover clearly. While starting to write out this post it became clear this would need to be a multi-parter…in this part I’ll go through initial DNS configuration requirements, deploying the Horizon Workspace vApp and going through the initial configuration wizard.

Initial Design Action Items:

Reading through the online docs the key takeaway is that you need to get your DNS right…that is, allocate the vApp VM IP addresses and ensure the reverse IP’s match up. You also need to think about the FQDN for internal and external access.

FQDN: xx.horizon.domain.com -> (split DNS employed relative to the vCenter/ESX environment to ensure internal and external access is achieved without the VM’s having to route publicly)

 Caution: After you deploy, you cannot change the Horizon Workspace FQDN.

This was the mistake I made which meant I had to redeploy the vApp and get the FQDN right. When it came time for me to publish the gateway-va externally the external host name redirected the the FQDN specified during setup which I configured as an internal address.

Deploy The vApp:

Once you download and acquire the OFV from the VMware Download page, deploying the vApp is straight forward, however one thing to point out is that you need to ensure you have a vCenter Datacenter IP Pool configured so that the vAPP can correctly allocate IP/DNS settings to the VM’s. The OVF deployment screen below, warns you about that.

I had a previous IP Pool setup for my vCOP’s install, but there wasn’t a requirement to populate the DNS settings. That part is critical for this setup to be successful as the vApp will use these settings to configure DNS on the VM’s…without it, the initial configuration will fail due to a DNS lookup error when the configurator VA tries it’s first lookup against the VA IPs. You will need to restart the VA if any errors are detected.

Initial Configuration:

Once the vApp has been deployed you should only have the configurator-va powered on. (do not power on the other VA’s). Log into the vCenter console for the configurator-va and go through the initial Configuration Wizard.

Once enter is pressed the wizard kicks off the the DNS checks mentioned above are executed. You are then prompted to enter in the root password to all VA’s in the vApp (this also becomes you default login password). From there you enter in your SMTP relay, Workspace FQDN and vCenter credentials.

From this point the wizard goes through and configures the remains VA’s, allocates the root password throughout the different systems and creates the SSL certificate services. This process can take up to 30-40 minutes depending on the your underlying storage. Viewing the process through vCenter you can see a summary of what’s taking place…interestingly (similar to vCloud Director managed VM’s) the VA’s management is taken over by the configurator-va and through that all the wizard actions take place.

Once complete you are presented with the message below and you are ready to continue configuring Horizon Workspace from the configurator-va web console.

Part 2 will follow and run through setting up initial Horizon Workspaces users, groups, services and policies.

There is a fundamental shift happening in how we consume IT and pretty much all leading technology vendors are in the process of embracing that change. VMware have chosen to focus on three key areas and after a few years of letting the dust settle they have three main pillars of focus.

Software Defined Datacenter
Hybrid Cloud
End User Computing

I’ve written about EUC and their Hybrid Cloud Offerings in the past so I’m not going to focus on that in this post…but the one thing I will say is that VMware still have a material understanding of where their partners sit in the ecosystem and still see them being central to their offerings… As a Service Provider guy working for a vCloud Powered provider there is some concern around the vHPC platform that will be deployed globally over the next few years… But we need to understand that there has to something significant in the Public Cloud space in order to compete with AWS and Google … And maybe Microsofts Azure. AWS is a massive beast and will only be slowed by its own success…will it get too big and product heavy… therefore loosing focus on the basics. There has been the evidence in recent weeks about increasing issues with instance performance due to capacity issues.

With regards to the SDDC push … Last year was the year of network virtualisation but what excites me more at this point is the upcoming features around software defined storage. There has been an explosion of software based storage solutions coming on the market over the past 18 months and VMware have seen this as a key piece to the SDDC.

vVOLs and vSANs represent a massive shift in how vSphere/vCloud environments are architected and engineered. Storage is the biggest pain point for most providers and traditional SANs might have well run their race. There is no doubt that storage arrays are still relevant but with the new technology behind virtual sans on the horizon direct access storage will start to feature… Where we had limitations around availability and redundancy previously the introduction of technology that can take DAS and create a distributed virtual San across multiple hosts excites me.

Why tier and put performance on a device that’s removed from the compute resource? It’s logical to start bringing it back closer to the compute.

Not only to you solve the HA/DRS issue but, given the right choices in DAS/flash/embedded storage there is potential to offer service levels based on low latency/high IOP data store design that takes away the common issue with shared LUNs presented as VMFS or NFS mounts for data stores. Traditional SANs can certainly still exist and this set and in fact will still be critical to act as lower tier high volume storage options.

For a technical overview of VMware Distributed Storage check out Duncan Eppings (@DuncanYB) Post here: There is also a slightly dated VMwareKB overview by Cormac Hogan (@VMwareStorage) that I have embedded below…note that it’s only the tech preview, but if it’s any indication of what’s coming later in the year…it can’t come soon enough.

Being able to control the max/min number of IOPs garunteed to VM/VMDK similar to the way in which you can select the IOP performance on AWS instances is worth the price of admission and solves the current limitations of vSphere in that you can only set max values to block out noisy neighbors.

Vendors that are already pushing out solutions around storage virtualization continue the great work…anything that sits on top of this technology and complements/improves/enhances it can only be a good thing.

It’s the year of storage virtualization…

Additional Reading:

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2013/03/06/why-the-world-needs-software-defined-storage/
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2013/04/05/software-defined-storage-just-some-random-thought/
http://www.nexenta.com/corp/products/what-is-openstorage/what-is-software-defined-storage
http://cto.vmware.com/2013-predictions-the-year-of-software-defined-storage/
http://virsto.com/blog/the-missing-link-in-software-defined-storage
http://www.nutanix.com/evolution-of-the-data-center/

I’m a passionate guy…those that know me generally would describe me as such. When I find something I love I tend to embrace it with all that I have and it becomes a driving force in life…I wear my heart on my sleeve in most aspects of life…be it family, playing cricket or work, and for each of those…passion manifests it’s self in different ways.

I’ve mulled over this post for about a week now…it’s been written and re-written a number of times as I try to best represent and explain passion and how it can contribute to a successful and rewarding career in IT. At the end of the day I can’t explain passion with any great level of verbal prowess…it’s too much of a basic raw emotion!

Passion is something you have, or don’t have…it’s a driving force that makes you strive to better yourself and it fuels the fire within to drives you to succeed and excel in anything you attempt in life.

Passion has the ability to lay down the foundation of a lasting legacy…

I posses a driving force when it comes to my work…I truly believe in the technology I work with…When talking with colleagues and clients alike, I am always passionate in my evangalization of those products and technologies.

My current passion lies within Hosting and Cloud technologies and i’m a big believer in what VMware is doing in the market at the moment. Previously I was (still am to a lessor extent) passionate around Hosted Exchange services and other Microsoft technologies…in that, the driver of passion can change depending on current circumstance and in my case, the agent of change was directly related to the way Microsoft started treating their partners…that and I was consumed by the vSphere, ESX, vCloud Virtualization stack and the power of transformational change it can offer clients…look no further than the EUC push for evidence of this change.

Not everyone possess passion, and I see examples of people without passion everyday…I can’t comprehend this…I can’t understand people that work without anything truly driving them…

One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.

— E. M. Forste

Again, it’s almost impossible to represent what drives me…but I know i’d rather be passionate in life than not.

Very quick post in relation to a slightly sticky situation I found myself in this afternoon. I was decommissioning a service which was linked to a VM which had a number of VMDKs, one of which was located on a dedicated VMFS Datastore…the guest OS also had a directly connected iSCSI LUN.

I choose to delete the LUNs first and then move up the stack removing the VMFS and eventually the VM. In this I simply went to the SAN and deleted the disk and disk group resource straight up! (hence the pulled reference in the title) Little was I to know that ESX would have a small fit when I attempted to do any sort of reconfiguration or management on the VM. The first sign of trouble was when I attempted to restart the VM and noticed that the task in vCenter wasn’t progressing. At that point my Nagios/OpsView Service Check’s against the ESX host began to timeout and I lost connectivity to the host in the vCenter Console.

Restarting the ESX management agents wasn’t helping and as this was very much a production host with production VM’s on it my first (and older way of thinking) thought of rebooting it wasn’t acceptable during core business/SLA hours. As knowledge and confidence builds with experience in and around ESX I’ve come to use the ESX(i) shell access more and more…so I jumped into SSH and had a look at what the vmkernal logs where saying.

Mar 11 17:55:55 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:48:38.873 cpu8:4222)NMP: nmp_DeviceUpdatePathStates: Activated path "NULL" for NMP device "naa.6782bcb00014ebe60000035e4de4314c".
Mar 11 17:55:55 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:48:38.874 cpu12:4265)WARNING: vmw_psp_rr: psp_rrSelectPath: Could not select path for device "naa.6782bcb00014ebe60000035e4de4314c".
Mar 11 17:55:56 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:48:39.873 cpu11:4223)WARNING: vmw_psp_rr: psp_rrSelectPathToActivate: Could not select path for device "naa.6782bcb00014ebe60000035e4de4314c.

So from the logs it was obvious the system was having major issues (re)connecting to the device I had just pulled out from under it. On the other hosts in the Cluster the datastore was greyed out and I was unable to delete it from the Storage Config. A re-scan of the HBA’s removed the dead datastore from the storage list so if I still had vCenter access to this host a simple re-scan should have sorted things out. Moving to the command line of the host in question I ran the esxcfg-rescan command:

[root@esx03 log]# esxcfg-rescan vmhba39
Dead path vmhba39:C1:T0:L3 for device naa.6782bcb00014ebe60000035e4de4314c not removed.
Device is in use by worlds:
 World # of Handles Name

And at the same time while tailing the vmkernal logs I saw the following entries:

==> vmkernel <==
Mar 11 17:56:16 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:48:59.768 cpu13:4118)Vol3: 644: Could not open device 'naa.6782bcb00014ebe60000035e4de4314c:1' for volume open: I/O error
Mar 11 17:56:16 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:48:59.768 cpu13:4118)FSS: 735: Failed to get object f530 28 1 4de4a1f8 3002130c 21000ff6 5abda09b 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 :I/O error
Mar 11 17:56:16 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:48:59.768 cpu13:4118)WARNING: Fil3: 1987: Failed to reserve volume f530 28 1 4de4a1f8 3002130c 21000ff6 5abda09b 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Mar 11 17:56:16 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:48:59.768 cpu13:4118)FSS: 735: Failed to get object f530 28 2 4de4a1f8 3002130c 21000ff6 5abda09b 4 1 0 0 0 0 0 :I/O error
Mar 11 17:56:16 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:48:59.769 cpu0:4096)VMNIX: VMKFS: 2561: status = -5
Mar 11 17:56:16 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:48:59.873 cpu9:45315)NMP: nmp_DeviceUpdatePathStates: Activated path "NULL" for NMP device "naa.6782bcb00014ebe60000035e4de4314c".
Mar 11 17:56:16 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:48:59.874 cpu15:4265)WARNING: NMP: nmpDeviceAttemptFailover: Retry world restore device "naa.6782bcb00014ebe60000035e4de4314c" - no more com mands to retry
Mar 11 17:56:16 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:49:00.232 cpu15:4120)WARNING: vmw_psp_rr: psp_rrSelectPath: Could not select path for device "naa.6782bcb00014ebe60000035e4de4314c".
Mar 11 17:56:16 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:49:00.232 cpu15:4120)WARNING: ScsiCore: 1399: Invalid sense buffer: error=0x0, valid=0x0, segment=0x0, key=0x2
Mar 11 17:56:16 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:49:00.232 cpu15:4120)WARNING: vmw_psp_rr: psp_rrSelectPath: Could not select path for device "naa.6782bcb00014ebe60000035e4de4314c".
Mar 11 17:56:16 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:49:00.232 cpu15:4120)WARNING: NMP: nmp_IssueCommandToDevice: I/O could not be issued to device "naa.6782bcb00014ebe60000035e4de4314c" due to Not found
Mar 11 17:56:16 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:49:00.232 cpu15:4120)ScsiDeviceIO: 1672: Command 0x1a to device "naa.6782bcb00014ebe60000035e4de4314c" failed H:0x1 D:0x0 P:0x0 Possible sen se data: 0x2 0x3a 0x0.
Mar 11 17:56:16 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:49:00.232 cpu15:4120)WARNING: ScsiDeviceIO: 5172: READ CAPACITY on device "naa.6782bcb00014ebe60000035e4de4314c" from Plugin "NMP" failed. I /O error
Mar 11 17:56:16 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:49:00.232 cpu15:4120)Vol3: 644: Could not open device 'naa.6782bcb00014ebe60000035e4de4314c:1' for volume open: I/O error
Mar 11 17:56:16 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:49:00.232 cpu15:4120)FSS: 3924: No FS driver claimed device 'naa.6782bcb00014ebe60000035e4de4314c:1': Not supported
Mar 11 17:57:18 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:50:02.431 cpu15:40621)WARNING: vmw_psp_rr: psp_rrSelectPathToActivate: Could not select path for device "naa.6782bcb00014ebe60000035e4de4314 c".
Mar 11 17:57:18 esx03 vmkernel: 393:13:50:02.431 cpu15:40621)NMP: nmp_DeviceUpdatePathStates: Activated path "NULL" for NMP device "naa.6782bcb00014ebe60000035e4de4314c".

From tailing through those logs the rescan basically detected that the path in question was in use (bound to a datastore where a VMDK was attached to a VM) reporting the “Device is in use by Worlds” error. The e rrors also highlights dead paths due to me removing the LUN while in use.

The point at which the host went into a spin (as viewed by seeing the Could not select Path for device in the vmkernal log) was when I attempted to switch on the VM and the host (still thinking it had access to the VMDK) trying to access all disks.

So lesson learnt. When decommissioning VMFS datastores, don’t pull the LUN from under ESX…remove it gracefully first from vSphere and then you are free to delete on the SAN.

On the one hand, as a collective you might think “…we had been lucky to avoid an attack up to this point” while on the other hand you are dealing with the misguided expectations of clients that you are protected against such attacks and when you explain the realities of a DDoS to a customer who is expecting 100% up-time the responses generally encountered is along the lines of “…I thought you said your service will never go down?” or “…I thought you have full redundancy?”

The absolute reality (that I have no problem in explaining to clients) is that most, if not all service providers are pretty helpless against a DDoS dependent on the size and scale of the attack. In our case we where able to mitigate the service disruption by re-routing all traffic to the affected IP to a NULL route at our carrier edge which reduced the load under which the firewall had been placed under which in turn caused the CPU to spike…making the DDoS successful in it’s end game.

So what can be done to mitigate the risk a DDoS presents? Service Providers can look at spending money by purchasing extremely expensive IDS systems and/or larger capacity routing and firewall devices that might only shield against and attack a little more effectively than less expensive options. An example there is that if a firewall device is capable of 10,000 connections per second and 100,000 total connections a DDoS will look to saturate it’s capability to a point where it’s memory and/or CPU resources are consumed trying to process the attack traffic…upgrading to a device capable of 20,000 connections per second and 200,000 total connections will only serve to buffer the resources that little bit longer which might give you more time to mitigate the attack…but the point that’s made here is that…

…service provider resources will always come off second best if an attack is large enough.

And this is the really scary thing for service providers…if someone (individual or organisation) wants to maliciously target your network and/or a client service hosted on your network and they want to inflict maximum service disruption…the best thing that can be done is attempt to mitigate where possible and ride it out.

There are a number of sites that track and list current and trending DDoS attack frequency and origin…one of the better ones I’ve come across is Prolexic’s real time Attack Tracker linked below.

Cyberattacks are happening right now – possibly near you. See DDoS attacks in real time and protect your business. bit.ly/Y9GApv

— Prolexic(@prolexic) March 1, 2013

Companies such as Prolexic generally provide services and physical devices that are linked to global networks that act to shield client networks from attacks similar to ways in which SenderBase.org shields email users from obvious SPAM. In discussions with Steven Crockett (Anittel CTO) he described a service which effectively re-routes traffic at the upstream providers end to route through overseas carrier networks who’s connectivity throughput allows otherwise crippling DDoS traffic to be filtered and cleaned before being sent onto it’s destination. This service isn’t site or service specific but involved routing entire subnets…so at this level it’s much more expensive and holistic than reverse proxy content delivery networks.

Working with a CDN will add protection in the form of a value-add service to current service offerings.

So what alternative measures can service providers take to add some level of protection to their key client/internal services. Unless the SP is loaded with more cash than it knows what to do with (at which point there is a case to scale out/upgrade the hosting platform itsself) the only option is to utilize the services of bigger companies that run dedicated Content Delivery Networks.

CDN companies are popping up all over internet, and while a company like Akamai have dominated the website caching market for many years, CDN’s are becoming more the norm whereby caching of static site content is making way for reverse proxy DNS redirection. In wake of the DDoS attacks experienced recently I’ve been testing a couple of the better known CDN providers. One of the those is CloudFlare. The way that a CloudFlare, or Amazon Web Services CloudFront works is by taking over a websites DNS records and use geo-routing to distribute visitors through their CDN network which also filters for potential DDoS or other malicious traffic that would otherwise hit the origin web server.

CDN services are charged generally on a usage basis which commoditizes the service, however CloudFlare charge per site, with their business plans going around the $200 per month mark. For a service providers customer after added insurance against a DDoS or even to generally attempt to increase site responsiveness and performance I believe it’s a no brainier in the age of increasingly brutal DDoS attacks to offer these services as a value-add. At the end of the day the more sites a Service Provider fronts with CDN’s the better able their own hosting network will be able to deal with the inevitability of a DDoS.

One final point to make on going down the CDN path is to ensure that customers understand that their sites are still subject to downtime…this is best illustrated by CloudFlare’s recent outage on the 3rd of March 2013, due to a router bug propagated into their network during a routine DDoS prevention exercise. To their credit, they where very open and transparent of the Root Cause while sites where offline for a period of time, there where options available to re-route the site DNS records back to the origin such is the flexibility of offering a service such as this to service provider clients.

A Hypothetical…

So what’s the title all about? DDoS Annihilation? In my opinion we are getting closer to DDoS events on such large scales that they will have the potential to take down the majority of all service provider and carrier networks which, in turn will have huge social and economic impact around the globe. We don’t have to wait for a Coronal Mass Ejection to blackout the planet…a massive DDoS has the ability to inflict severe damage.

Near on 1 Billion internet hosts used against us in an global DDoS?? No network has the ability to handle that!

This is where I took a step back and wondered how the hell to traditional service providers even attempt to compete with massive quota’s driven by the public cloud. Data Sovereignty aside, it’s human nature to get most bang for the buck, so when someone see’s 4TB for $29 (that’s about .007 cents per GB) vs a more traditional Australian Service Provider price of roughly 20c per GB you can start to get a sense of the uphill struggle SP’s face to offer a competitive service.

Now, it’s debatable as to the level of redundancy, resiliency, security and… most importantly backup cloud storage providers like MEGA or DropBox offer and build into their offerings and we all know the the issues DropBox has had over the past year with data loss and security. I did recently learn that Amazon Web Services S3 Storage Platform is rated at 11 9′s of availability! That’s 99.999999999 which is madness! But the reality is AWS can build those platforms at such large scales…that it blows away anything Service Providers can deliver from an availability perspective.

The reality is that Service Providers can’t simply be so misplaced/arrogant to assume that potential clients are not well informed of the relative pro’s and cons anymore. Up until the last 6 or so months…I freely put my hand up and acknowledge that I was of that belief.

So, how do we evolve and use these services for our advantage?

Hybrid Solutions = Value Added Differential

Just as enterprise and SMB’s are heading into a world of Hybrid cloud solutions, so can Service Providers look at offering Hybrid services utilizing the investment made into their own platforms. By designing more robust platforms that extend to public storage providers SP’s can start to add value to already strong services and differentiate between other providers.

As a quick example: Veeam are about to release a Cloud Edition of their very robust and reliable Backup and Replication Product. The addition of the ability to add public (or local) cloud storage to a backup job means that SP’s can offer VCaaS type offerings where clients get the best of both local, service provider and then public cloud storage and archive for their backup sets. The benefit here is that because it costs less to store data in the public cloud, you could use the public storage for long term or extreme DR scenarios while keeping the more pertinent offsite storage on the service providers end for closer/faster access to recovery points.

For the Service Providers, the idea is to generate a source of recurring income via the volume clients send to the public cloud and, also look at building in consultancy services to compliment specific design/builds for clients that require a not so out of the box solution…

In this SP’s need to be able to adapt and use the public providers to enhance their own solutions…it’s the only way the war can be won!

The Dell tech send me the link below which is a CENTOS LiveCD which can be downloaded and booted up on the server in question.

http://linux.dell.com/files/openmanage-contributions/omsa-70-live/

Once downloaded and attached via the iDRAC Virtual Media Manager you will automatically go through to the desktop where you can double click on the DSET Tool Icon. Let it do it’s thing and gather all the relevant info which is then packaged into a zip file under \tmp\data\

Ok, so now that you have the file…how do you get it off the LiveCD instance? The answer would be simple if you had interfaces configured with DHCP, but the majority of these servers are configured with NICs on VLAN enabled ports which are not easily switched over or able to be reconfigured without going through change management etc etc.

The Network Configuration GUI in CENTOS doesn’t have the ability to configure VLAN tagging on the interfaces so you need to jump into the shell and manually configure the network settings as shown below.

Create a new config file for eth0 and configure it as shown below…key here is to take note of the MAC Address, no include and IP or Subnet details and I disabled IPv6.

#vi ifcfg-eth0

DEVICE=eth0
HWADDR=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=none
TYPE=Ethernet
IPV6INIT=no
IPV6_AUTOCONF=no

Once saved, copy that file and save to ifcfg-eth0.x where is is the VLAN you want the interface to communicate in. This time you are adding relevent IP info along with specifying the device name as eth0.x and VLAN=yes which obviously enabled the VLAN tag config.

#cp ifcfg-eth0 ifcfg-eth0.x

#vi ifcfg-eth0.x

DEVICE=eth0.x
HWADDR=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
ONBOOT=yes
HOTPLUG=no
BOOTPROTO=none
TYPE=Ethernet
VLAN=yes
IPADDR=192.168.0.10
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
GATEWAY=192.168.0.1

Fire up the new interfaces and restart network and you have a VLAN enabled connection that you can now grab the DSET zip file off and send to DELL for analysis.

#/sbin/ifup eth0
#/sbin/ifup eth0.x

#/sbin/service network restart

As a side note, being the good VMware fanboy that I am, I used my Octopus Beta service to upload the file and make it available via the Octopus URL for sharing…because getting access to the Horizon Suite BETA is currently near on impossible

I love the deep/complex analytics of VMware Operations Manager but sometimes I feel a sense of being overwhelmed with the sheer amount of data presented by the default views of vCOPs and working with the Custom Dashboards can be a frustrating exercise if you don’t have a heap of time and patience.

This is where I have found CloudPhysics comes into it’s own…via it’s brilliant presentation of things that matter. I’m not going to go through the setup and config, but in a nutshell…from the site, register, login, download and deploy the VMware Probe Appliance, give it an IP and enter in your email address as it relates to your CloudPhysics login. It’s one probe per vCenter, but you can deploy multiple probes to multiple vCenters and links them back under the same username and CloudPhysics App.

When you log in, you are presented with the home screen below:

From relatively humble and basic default cards released around the VMWorld launch the team has been adding more complex and useful cards. HA Cluster Health and SnapShots Gone Wild are my personal favourites and offer a view into key areas of vSphere management. What’s also great about these cards is that they offer external jump links to VMware KB’s and offer basic information about subject matter. The organisation and presentation of the data pulled by the probe is simple yet effective in allowing you to get an understanding of how your environments are performing and which areas are under stress.

Released today was the DataStore Contention Card which looks at the performance of VMFS Datastores in your environment. The Default view selects the DataStore that needs the most attention. In my case I was surprised to see the Datastore below exhibit combined read/write latency that was off the chart!

The interface allows you to select a block of time at any level and see which VM may be contributing the most to the Performance Metric selected. Those metrics are shown below and include Latency, Outstanding I/O’s, IOPS and Bandwidth. You also have the ability to  Filter the view by vCenter, Datastore Cluster and Datastore.

The screen grabs don’t do the CloudPhysic’s Web Application interface justice so head over the site and download the probe to get started. It must be said that the product is only in BETA so use at your own risk, but I’ve had no issues with the Probe VM who’s specs are 2vCPU, 4GB of RAM and 16GB of storage.

From my discussions in and around the IT industry there seems to be a serious trend towards IT staff being overloaded due to resource constraints, cut backs or “fiscal management”…too few people being held accountable/responsible for too much without the ability to delegate or hand off. In our industry we work our asses off to keep systems running…one step forward…two steps back! I’m focused on controlling the crazy and giving myself enough time to not only wrestle back control of my workload, but also allow myself to pursue a more balanced work/life existence.

This world we live and work in can consume us…

In any case I am looking forward to 2013 on many fronts…the hosting industry is at a crossroads I believe…the move towards greater automation in the Software Defined space is about to come to the fore and it will be interesting to see if we, as Hosting/Cloud/Infrastructure professionals can keep up with what’s been forced upon us by industry trends…the continued merging of Networking into the Cloud Stack is still one I am not sure we are totally ready for…you only need to look at the requirements for VXLAN to be introduced into the stack to realise that it’s not something that can be easily retro-fitted into an existing/mature platform…

Public Cloud is an area I have a firm hate/love relationship with…but with Amazon Web Services taking hold in Australia and the rise of other Public offerings…this is the year where I learn to accept their existence and embrace the public platform as a necessary evil and one which must be looked at as a viable alternative to Service Providers Hosting Offerings…VMware, as an example is assisting vCloud Providers to bridge that gap by having solutions such as vCloud Automation Center allow automated workflows to provision, migrate and manage VM workloads across heterogeneous platforms such at AWS to vSphere. It’s also time for me to start looking at extending backup and DRaaS options into the Public Cloud to offer more variety and data resiliency.

I’ve come to the realisation that at some point you have to look beyond your means and look outside your platform for service options…That is to say that the hosting industry is leaning towards outsourcing the outsourcers…vendor partnerships are key.

As Hosting/Infrastructure Professionals it’s hard to push clients to use Public Offerings

To round off, I’ll be jumping back on the Certification bandwagon this year…I will need to complete my VCP first off…and then from there I’ll look at continuing to pursue higher levels of VMware Certification…and while the idea of working my way towards a goal of attempting a VCDX seems challenging and beneficial given the high regard that certification has in the industry…the reality is that I might not have enough time between work and home commitments to get to that level…

I look forward to continuing to post technical and opinion blog posts and hopefully I’ll be able to secure a vExpert for 2013 along the way…it’s been a great ride this last 8 or so months and the VMware community is by far and away the best and most engaged community in IT.