Long White Virtual Clouds

VMware vCloud Director is Dead, Long Live vCloud Director

December 7, 2013 @vcdxnz001 5 comments

You might recognise the title in different terms. It’s very similar to “The King is dead, long live the King!”. As Wikipedia explains the original phrase was translated from the French Le roi est mort, vive le roi !, which was first declared upon the accession to the French throne of Charles VII after the death of his father Charles VI in 1422. In France, the declaration was traditionally made by the duc d’Uzès, a senior peer of France, as soon as the coffin containing the remains of the previous king descended into the vault of Saint Denis Basilica. So what’s this got to do with VMware vCloud Director I hear you ask?

Has VMware killed vCloud Director? What should you do if you have vCloud Director or if you’re thinking about implementing it? What does this mean for the vCloud Director based certifications such as VCP-Cloud, VCAP-CIA, VCAP-CID and VCDX-Cloud. I’ll give you my opinion of the answers to these questions in this article. It’s all about the Software Defined Datacenter.

Categories: Cloud, SDDC, Software Defined Datacenter, VMware Tags: SDDC, vCAC, vCD, vCloud Automation Center, vCloud Director, VMware, vSphere

Radically Simple High Performance Graphics Desktops and Increased Density Delivered Just in Time for VMware View 5.3

November 22, 2013 @vcdxnz001 6 comments

Today Nutanix (@nutanix) delivered major hardware updates to it’s radically simple Google like infrastructure platform for the masses. The updates included integration with new GPU and Teradici APEX encoding offload cards for the most graphic intensive desktops, while at the same time providing increased VM density and lower TCO across a new range of hardware options. This announcement came just in time for the VMware Horizon View 5.3 GA release, which was also today. The new Nutanix 7110 platform breaks the final barrier to delivering all applications to all virtual desktop users and powers video and graphics-rich applications with workstation-level performance. This is all achieved while maintaing simplicity customers have come to know and love, and without losing any availability and manageability normally associated with dedicated hardware required for workstation class CAD/CAM and 3D desktops and other high end graphics use cases. The Nutanix 7110 platform and VMware Horizon View 5.3 are a powerful combination for All Virtual Desktops, but wait there’s more.

Categories: Business Critical Applications, VMware Tags: APEX, GPU, Horizon View, Nutanix, VDGA, VDI, VMware, VMware View, VSGA

New Adventure to Redefine Radically Simple Architecture for Business Critical Apps with Nutanix

November 18, 2013 @vcdxnz001 7 comments

As some of you may have seen on the Register article Nutanix building an elite squad of crack VMware designers. After almost 4 years working directly with VMware in various capacities I’ve decided to take on an exciting new challenge. I greatly enjoyed my time working with VMware and learned a lot in the process. It truly is one of the best places to work in the IT industry and I would highly recommend it for anyone who gets the opportunity. In this new phase I will be able to work with VMware and directly contribute to the R&D of the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform. As I’ll be a full time employee of Nutanix I’ll be stepping down from day to day running of my consulting business, but rest assured this blog will continue and I’ll keep brining my unique perspective on all things virtualization, cloud and business critical apps.

I will be joining Josh Odgers, VCDX-090 (@josh_odgers), Jason Langone, VCDX-054 (@langonej) and Lane Leverett, VCDX-053 (@wolfbrthr) as the 4th VCDX at Nutanix. Nutanix now has more VCDX on staff than any other company outside of VMware itself. I’ll be joining an incredibly talented and innovative team helping to redefine the radically simple Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform for Business Critical Applications and Unix to VMware Migrations, an extension of the work I was doing for VMware. As part of the Solutions and Performance Engineering team, I’ll be working closely with Josh to bring you some great performance papers, case studies and reference architectures.

Why Nutanix? Why now? Why does Nutanix see value in hiring VCDX Architects?

Live Migration of Monster Oracle RAC Nodes without Client Disruption? Easy as VMware vSphere!

November 12, 2013 @vcdxnz001 1 comment

Those that are familiar with VMware technology will know vMotion well, and how reliably it works. VMware has worked hard on this for many years. But when talking to customers running traditional Unix systems for their Oracle databases, especially RAC, especially when under high load, and when the system is a monster, sometimes they are sceptical. To alleviate any concerns VMware teamed up with Cisco, EMC and Principled Technologies to produce a white paper demonstrating the vMotion of three highly utilized RAC Nodes doing thousands of transactions per second without any client disruption. This article to very briefly discuss the test and give you a link to the white paper so you can download it and read it for yourself.

Categories: Business Critical Applications, SDDC, Software Defined Datacenter, VMware Tags: Oracle, Oracle RAC, vMotion, VMware, vSphere

vSphere Metro Stretched Cluster with vSphere 5.5 and PDL AutoRemove

November 8, 2013 @vcdxnz001 Leave a comment

In my article vSphere 5.5 Jumbo VMDK Deep Dive I covered the new PDL AutoRemove feature of vSphere 5.5 briefly, including it’s impact on vSphere Metro Stretched Cluster Configurations (vMSC). The reason I’m writing this article is to let you know that there are some impacts to vMSC configurations with the default settings, and in these types of environments you’ll need to modify the defaults.

Categories: Business Critical Applications, VMware Tags: vMSC, VMware, vSphere 5.5

Cores Per Socket and vNUMA in VMware vSphere #vForumAU #vForumSG

October 20, 2013 @vcdxnz001 7 comments

During the Monster VM Design Panel at VMworld in San Francisco and Barcelona our panel was asked about vNUMA and the impact on performance of various different settings including modifying the number of cores per virtual socket. Mark Achtemichuk (Mark A for short) has written an article on the VMware vSphere Blog taking a look at this with some great test data to go with it. I’ll give you some highlights and then you can check out the actual article for yourself.

Categories: Business Critical Applications, VMware Tags: VMware, vNUMA, vSphere

Monster VM’s and Business Critical Apps Attack #vForum2013 Sydney

September 27, 2013 @vcdxnz001 Leave a comment

#vForum2013 in Sydney, Australia is coming up fast, and this year we will be Defying Convention Again. It’s at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre in Darling Harbour on October 21st and 22nd and we’re expecting to see up to 7000 attendees this year. It is going to be big, and it’s going to be special. More importantly for my regular readers and followers I will be there and I’ll be bringing you lots of Monster VM and Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Deep Dive content from around the APJ region and around the world, in conjunction with some great co-speakers. You will learn from my sessions what amazing things VMware customers are already doing and how you can take away valuable insight and apply it to your environments. To find out more, read on.

Categories: Business Critical Applications, SDDC, Software Defined Datacenter, VMware Tags: #vForum2013, VMware, vSphere

The Trouble With SSL Certificates and Upgrading to VMware SSO 5.5

September 27, 2013 @vcdxnz001 11 comments

SSL Secure

If you’re upgrading from vSphere 5.1 to vSphere 5.5 and you ARE NOT using Custom CA SSL Certificates then you might run into an error. The error will be encountered during the upgrade of SSO, and specifically the Lookup Service, and only occurs in specific conditions, such as when using the default VMware Self-Signed Certificates. If you run into this problem your upgrade process will roll back, but leave behind some upgrade files that need to be cleaned up. This article will briefly touch on the recommended solution to this problem.

Categories: CA SSL Certificates, Security, VMware Tags: SSL, SSL Certificates, VMware, vSphere 5.1, vSphere 5.5

vSphere 5.5 Record Breaking Network Performance

September 23, 2013 @vcdxnz001 3 comments

VMware recently published a record breaking network performance test where a single ESXi host showed close to line rate throughput over 8 x 10Gb/s NIC’s. The single host achieved close to 80Gb/s throughput using standard MTU size (1500B), 16 VM’s (each with 1 vCPU 2GB RAM), and 8 vSwitches, on top of a Dell R820 physical platform. Not only that this test shows 7.5M PPS, which is a very high rate of packet throughput for a single host. While not a realistic real world workload this demonstrates the power of vSphere and modern server hardware. This is a very impressive result in my opinion.

Categories: Business Critical Applications, VMware Tags: VMware, vSphere 5.5

VMware Certification – VCAP5-DCA Exam Experience

September 19, 2013 @vcdxnz001 25 comments

For those of you who follow me on twitter you’ll know that I recently sat the VMware VCAP5-DCA (VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Datacenter Administration) exam. I learned a few valuable things along the way that I think could help others prepare, and suffered a few glitches as well. So I thought I’d share this with you all. Hopefully this will help you successfully prepare for and pass the VCAP5-DCA Exam. For those of you who want to pursue VCDX this is one of the exams you will have to pass in addition to VCAP5-DCD (Datacenter Design) before you can submit a design for a defence.