So Who Does Use Linked vCenters?

OK, I am sure that most onboard and I put up my hand, I personally am a fan. When I talk to a lot of clients though, generally I find that most aren't.

Two linked vCenters in Web Client

In the old days we linked the instances together with the linked mode utility (or unlinked it with the same tool). Nice and easy and all of a sudden security and licensing information is shared between vCenter instances. The big gain though was that through the C# client (oh I do miss your usefulness sometimes in this depleting role world) I had a one stop shop to access up to 12 vCenters. Now it is even easier, just have the vCenters in a common Platform Service Controller (PSC) SSO implementation (common site/ multi site doesn't matter).

This in turn enables some very cool features beyond the original benefits. The one that drive me to link mine up was the ability to enable cross vcenter migrations. Being someone that is fortunate to have access to a well equiped lab I have enabled this with VPLEX for the stretched storage and use both SRM 6.1 and vMotion in vCenter to control the migrations (more on that in another blog post I think). 

This blog is not to tell you how to link, that is covered in a lot of other blogs written by very smart people. More I want to draw attention to issues that surface a lot with the newer Enhanced Link Mode with those add-on services that use the web client.

As I have just experienced an issue again I am writing this while it is fresh in the mind. What I see is that with a lot of product teams that do include Web Client plug-ins, there seems to be quite an absence of testing vCenters in Enhanced Linked Mode. Have you ever had this style of conversation:

me)              I am <inset problem description here> in the web client 

developer)   what version are you running

me)              The one listed in requirements

developer)   Are you using the Windows Version of vCenter or the Appliance?

me)              I am using the (whatever) in linked mode

developer)   ohh, we haven't tested that

Anyway some gotchas I seem to experience include:

• Only one vCenter is supported in the linked set for the plug-in
• Only the first vCenter is visible to the plug-in
• Plug-in is unable to differentiate (filter) objects out that are only present within the aligned vCenter (e.g. all datastores across all vCenters are displayed)

So the point of this entry beyond the rant is just to bring attention to the fact that there are some considerations when writing a plug-in for linked vCenters. If you are running into issues and you have got linked vCenters I would suggest that the first step should be test against a stand-alone vCenter. This helps isolate the issue and can help when you are talking to the support/product/vendor teams.

Welcome VxRail, VCE's Entry into the HCIA Market

You want the ease of a Hyperconverged appliance but still have all those advanced capabilities that service enterprise data centres, then the new VCE VxRail is for! This is not so much an evolution of the VMware EVO:Rail appliances but more a revolution.

Why do I say that? The Achilles heal of EVO:Rail was the lack of flexibility, all you could do was chose between two RAM configurations (no variant in disk or CPU), 128GB or 196GB which for some reason had the 196GB model referred to as the desktop service model... never quite got my head around that one, why wouldn't other services want a larger memory footprint? The other side was the fact that you could only grow your appliance service out by adding additional appliances, start with a 4 node 2U appliance and then grow in increments of 4 from there till you hit the 64 node ceiling (aligned to the maximum size for a HA / VSAN cluster).

Now think the VCE VxRail appliance here we have flexibility that can meet a huge range of use cases, your choices now include:

• Starting point is now 3 nodes (today) and growth can then be in single node increments up to the 64 node maximum
• CPU model options provide a range of 6 cores (single socket) through to 28 cores (dual socket) per node
• Memory configurations from 64GB through to 512GB
• Disk configurations of Hybrid (Flash + Spinning HDD) or all flash ranging from 3.6TB through to 19TB per node 
• Even networking options will support 1G connections on the low end nodes with the standard being dual 10G 

You can also now mix different model configurations and EVO:Rail appliances under the same management. Phew... all that flexibility but with the ease of use that comes with the VxRail appliance.

Some other cool features of note are things such as:

• All the coolness of VSAN 6.2 with Dedupe, compression, flash optimisation, erasure coding, snapshots, cross site HA (yes you can link two remote appliances into a vSphere Metro Cluster)
• VM Level replication with EMC RecoverPoint/VM (yep included) 
• Cloud based storage tiering EMC Cloud Array (yep also included)
• VCE Vision software for service health and interoperabilty compliance monitoring and reporting
• vRealize LogInsight for lag aggregation and analytics
• vSphere Data Protection (EMC Avamar)
• Appliance Market Place, your VxRail App Store for easy request / enablement of additional services

And that is not the end of it, too much to list :)

If you want to have a look for yourself have a look at this demo of the VxRail Manager I recorded!

More information is available at http://www.vce.com/products/hyper-converged/vxrail

Phew, vForum Day One Done!

Well just a quick one as thought it was time for a new entry and having just done day one at vForum at Luna Park it was a good chance for an update. I had the great oppurtunity to present in the EMC session today with Matt Zwolenski, our ANZ SE leader on some of our cool software based solutions.

This 40 minute section covered 4 demos (maybe to many for 40 minutes) that we produced out of the local solution center. I think it could be a week before my sleep catches up for that one. It is interesting just how much time filling a 40 minute segment can take up in preparation. This is amplified by my belief that if I am going to show it, I need to build it and prove it first. All demos I show I also buil and produce myself. Maybe that explains the dodgy Camtasia call-outs.

That said we showed:

• The ViPR Data services
• This is very relevant for VMware as it is now providing the Object Storage Services and the snpashot repository for the Database-as-a-Service offerings in vCloud Air
• VVols with the EMC VNXe
• A demo showing the 4 parts of implementing Virtial Volumes 1) Protocol Endpoint 2) Storage Provider, 3) Storage Containers 4) Storage Policies
• Recoverpoint for Virtual Machines
• Very cool replication technology now available at a VM granular level
• The VMware + EMC Hybrid Cloud
• Showed the vRealize suite servicing Virtual Machines,catalogues (vRealize Automation), VM mobility (vCloud Connector), Cost transparency (vRealize Business),  Storage-as-a-Service (vRealize Automation + ViPR)

As a techie I really do enjoy building this stuff and the technology from both VMware and EMC is very cool. It is hard to put a prep time on the work to produce the demonstrations but it was stretched over weeks. With 3 of the 4 solutions shown, done with release levels still in beta or earlier it did bring on some interesting challenges.

It does go a long way to show how far these technologies have come. The old days of any service management solution being an endless drag on professional services are definitely starting to move behind us.

Anyway day one done, one speaking slot and a live vBronwbag podcast completed. Once the vForum roadshow completes in ANZ I will publish the 4 demos into Youtube.