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• vSphere 5.1 Document Links

  A complete guide for all your essential vSphere 5.1 docs

  http://vsphere-land.com/news/vsphere-51-link-o-rama.html

  Great Reading!

• VMware - Kubernetes thoughts

  I've been working with VMware a long time and it works really well when you want to separate environments (IE VMs, clusters), have a single management tool set and save money via server consolidation.

  We are now turning a new leaf as we move away from datacenter centric environments to application centric environments. I think that Kubernetes potentially will become the gateway to infrastructure. Being able to take an action directly against the ESXi kernel that run Kubernetes removes a lot of complexity.  However, I do believe that VMs and containers will be here for a long time, apps aren’t that easy to refactor.
  
  There are many ways of doing Kubernetes. I do think VMware got it right by making Kubernetes part of the vSphere platform natively (ESXi kernel). This makes Kubernetes containers a 'first class citizen' on infrastructure instead of Infra-VM-OS-Container-app. This new way allows applications to scale as the application requires. That means that we will be able to manage 'both 1st class citizens (VMs and containers)' with one tool (VC) on one platform (vSphere) that enables operations and developers to do their job more efficiently! VMware DRS will still to the resource placement for workloads-the scheduler is very good at what it does.
  
  This means that automation will be built-in to the platform to simply scale based on application's needs via policies and configurations. Today we simply automate what humans are doing as repetitive tasks, scripting things to be more efficient. But what we don't do is script application needs. As an example, imaging an application that needs more resources. You can now 'spin up another VM/container' or script logic to spin up another VM on another host. This builds resiliency into the application layer while keeping configuration consistent. Now we will be able to simply configure a policy to always have 3 containers up and running in a pod which can be built across hosts (IE ESXi cluster) and scale up as the application requires. The new way of automation where we won't need other agents, or to react, but the system will simply do it based on the configuration/policy is the future.
  
  Kubernetes has a logical construct called a namespace which can be a collection of many things including VMs, PODs, and services along with other objects. A namespace allows for polices to be applied to it just like if it was a VM or storage or network, awesome right! Think about Kubernetes cluster running beside a VM cluster in the same Virtual Center that allows developers to run API commands directly to Kubernetes – there’s no need to learn a new tool.
  
  Also, I would like to note that Kubernetes will run across all of the cloud providers as VMware is on top of them today. This should allow for multi-cloud models that are app centric! What if we were able to run an application with a node on-prem and 2 nodes in different clouds?
  
  There are a lot of things that will mature over the next year. It will be great to learn and grow as a powerful platform continues to enable organizations to build modernized applications and support them.

  
  

   

• Hyper3 vs. VMware

  MS's new version seems to include WAN vMotion... wow without OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization) or at least that what I’m reading. It will be very impressive to have WAN vMotion for many reasons including DR/BC>...  Great article here on CIO:

  http://www.cio.com/article/690019/Microsoft_Cracks_Live_Migration_Problem?taxonomyId=3112

  The MS version of HyperV3 will give us the right things we "need" not wants. VMware gives us something’s for free or at least until you move to Vsphere5 and get hit with the vTax. They did make some changes to licenses but not enough to stop people from looking at other products that get the job done! HyperV-3 vs vSphere 5 - http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/hyper-v-virtualization-windows-server-8-vsphere,1-16.html

  I truly think that over time we will see the virtual scene change to more of a tiered approach. VMware is the lead today but what the future brings is going to have to wait and see! I think based on cost and seeing some try to put virtualization directly in at the chip level, its going to get fun for us engineers and admins.

  Ivan Pepelnjak has a great article on VXLAN-LISP-OTV ----http://blog.ioshints.info/2011/09/vxlan-otv-and-lisp.html

  Great reading from Thomas Mauer - Hyper-V & UCS combo: http://www.thomasmaurer.ch/2011/05/how-microsoft-hyper-v-and-the-cisco-ucs-changed-our-lives/

• The Future of IT

  For some I agree that it is going to be harder to justify VMware costs in the future (but it really does help to drive costs down). I believe there is a major importance of Windows 8 and Linux in the future. However I do believe from the infrastructure arena that the virtualization layer will be a major component to get companies to the Cloud. The future of technology is Clouds (hybrid/private/public) which is compute, networking, and storage as shared services which is the cornerstone of virtualization.
  
  

  VMware’s virtualization is the Key to all of the technology advances of the last 10 years.  VMware is closely tied to all of the cores, Server, IP network and Storage. I currently do think that the vApps and security components need a lot of work. To have full integration of virtual apps (virtual/cloud aware apps) well less just say we are a long ways from that.
   
  VMware is the “cornerstone” of the architecture tying all other needed components together (Server Core, IP Core, Storage Core and IO Engines (IE - Microsoft, Linux, AIX, etc). It is the product that spans all datacenters within a true enterprise.
   
  VMware is the component that makes Microsoft useful and effective for IO engines and end users.  As well as geographically dispersed datacenters with Geo and Intra Datacenter load balancing and spanned IP networks with Active - Active workload between datacenters (IE: OTV or VXLAN (not ready yet)). Virtualization will help get us out of the ‘4 walls” of the datacenter as we need to eliminate the limits\constraints of a single physical network. We need for datacenters to be more agile.
   
  Microsoft\Windows is now only a small component of the datacenter IO engine layer. The need for Microsoft/Windows Clustering is small to none now that Hardware HA (VMware, IBM, HP, and Cisco) is so fast. PLUS: Now that we have Virtual Load Balancers within the industry that maintain 100% uptime within a single datacenter and across geographically dispersed datacenters “clustering” is just an abstracted term used to indicate a SERVICE.
   
  I have always had the skills and mind set of - Future Vision/Technical/Business Oriented = Provide technical knowledge to add value to the business as you lead them to more/bigger business (faster). I will continue to grow my Cloud knowledge and help others with this new technology.
  My belief is the OS (whichever that may be) is the IO engine for business applications. So the OS will be closer to the business as opposed to an infrastructure layer. The business applications live within the OS at this time and the foreseeable future. I also believe the business’ belief in relation to infrastructure components is “it should just run”.

  These are only my opinions and do not reflect anyone or any company's opinion or view - Ronald Barefield

• Collect VM Hosts license per host

  So I was asked how to audit the VMware license in use vs portal? Meaning what we have vs what VMWare portal says we have vs what are we using. License is a big cost for most. For me I was thinking for sure there is a tool to do a compare, hmmm not that I can find. Sure you can look in your VMware portal to see what you have paid for. However if you are in the middle of a migration/upgrade it could become a mess to see what you have and how much you have paid for. So the fun begins…
  This is a very large organization with many different levels of license as well as versions. At that point I was asking if there’s a tool to compare what are allotted vs used vs portal. As you know license can be a mess to maintain but surely there’s a tool to do an audit, well not so fast. I did search the web however i did not see what I was looking for, however I was thinking, surely someone has done this. So I turned to my social media friends for help. I put out a twitt to ask about a script to put this information. Sure enough some folks started to point me to scripting, and someone had one…. Thanks Jonathan Meed.
  Requirement is to gather the following:
  
  ·         Hostname
  ·         License key assigned to the host
  ·         Name of the VC managing the host
  ·         License type
  ·         Flexibility to collect the information for multiple Virtual Centers
  
  So I got a script from Jonathan and massaged it some however I couldn’t get it to do what we needed. This was on me as I was trying to understand each piece of the script. Great Job Jonathan!
  So I did a little reading:
  API - https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vc-sdk/visdk41pubs/ApiReference/vim.LicenseManager.html
  Understanding ‘Functions’ - http://www.thomas-franke.net/including-scripts-functions-modules/ 
  
  At this point I decided to just create a script. I asked a friend Matt Derk for some help, he knows scripting pretty good. In any case here is what we came up with and it works,,,, yay
  Disclaimer – We tested against VC 5.5
  
  First set the script to collect data from multiple virtual centers:
  I saw an error at first so we worked through this to stop the prompting for invalid cert.
  
  # Set to multiple VC Mode
  if(((Get-PowerCLIConfiguration).DefaultVIServerMode) -ne "Multiple") {
      Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -DefaultVIServerMode Multiple -InvalidCertificateAction Ignore -Confirm:$false | Out-Null
  }
  
  Then we wanted to allow for inputting multiple hosts:
  #Define VC hosts – IPs or FQDN
  $VChosts = @(
  "VC1.ron.com",
  "VC1.ron.com",
  "VC3.ron.com"
  );
  Write-Host "Connecting to VC Server(s)"
  
  Then connect to the hosts: We didn’t really want to prompt so the script will use the session you are logged in with. If you want to use different creds, right click and choose ‘Run As’.
  
  Connect-VIServer -Server $VChosts
  
  Then we need to define some variables for the data we want to grab
  #Define variables for license and host functions
  #API - https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vc-sdk/visdk41pubs/ApiReference/vim.LicenseManager.html
  
  $servInst = Get-View ServiceInstance
  $licMgr = Get-View $servInst.Content.licenseManager
  $licAssignMgr = Get-View $licMgr.licenseAssignmentManager
  
  Now let’s throw in a function to do this work:
  
  function Get-VMHostId($Name)
  {
      $vmhost = Get-VMHost $Name | Get-View
      return $vmhost.Config.Host.Value
  }
  function Get-License($VMHostId)
  {
      $details = @()
      $detail = "" |select LicenseKey,LicenseType,Host,VC,Total,Used,ExpirationDate
      $license = $licAssignMgr.QueryAssignedLicenses($VMHostId)
      $license = $license.GetValue(0)
      $detail.VC = ([Uri]$licAssignMgr.Client.ServiceUrl).Host
      $detail.Host = $license.EntityDisplayName
      $detail.LicenseKey = $license.AssignedLicense.LicenseKey
      $detail.LicenseType = $license.AssignedLicense.Name
      $detail.Total = $license.AssignedLicense.Total
      $detail.Used = $license.AssignedLicense.Used
      $details += $detail
      return $details
  }
  
  Now run this against all hosts and puke out the data to a file. The script is setup to create the path/folders if not there.
  
  # Run Query Against All Hosts
  $vmhosts = Get-VMHost
  $details = @()
  foreach ($vmhost in $vmhosts) {
      $vmhostname = Get-VMHostId $vmhost.name
      $detail = Get-License $vmhostname
      $details += $detail
  }
  $details
  if(!(Test-Path -Path C:\Temp )){New-Item -ItemType directory -Path C:\Temp}
  write-host "output being save to C:\Temp\Host-Licenseinfo.csv"
  $details | Export-Csv -NoTypeInformation C:\Temp\Host-Licenseinfo.csv
   
  I can assure you I’m no pro at this but hey it works…. J However it seems that the “expire date” is in a different area and couldn’t get it to work within one script so we created second one to grab that. I know it’s not ideal but a manual combine is better than none.
  Sample output; now you can sort and do all kinds of things with the data.
  
  
  
  
  

   

   

   

   

   

  I am sure others can make these better. Thanks for reading and happy auditing your license.

  Thanks Matt & Jonathan for your time and consideration.  

   

  Download script:  Licenseinfo-01.txt

• Runecast - test run

  A few days ago I read a post by Mike Webster and was introduced to a product that peaked my interest.. (http://longwhiteclouds.com/2017/04/08/runecast-your-way-to-a-more-trouble-free-virtualization-environment/ ).

  I have to spend time reviewing logs, dashboards, vCheck reports and other tools to keep virtual environments in a stable and healthy state. I have always wished there was a method to look at issues and match them up with VMware KB articles/data. I always want to be proactive and know of any potential issues or improvements to the configurations that I could do (before a customer would be impacted). I was like wow this is really cool to be ahead of issues as well as understand the issue/s.

   

  I got time to install this and I have to say -- I am very wow'ed!!!!

  

  What is Runecast?

  Proactive tool that continuously checks your environment, vCenter, ESXi servers and VMs to ensure they are running at peak performance with no known configuration issues or security issues. IE --- > Proactively use VMware KBs, best practices and security hardening guidelines to protect your environment.

  

  The really cool thing is you can stay up to date on industry issues that could impact your environment. Runcast is a virtual appliance (OVA) and can be updated from the internet or it can be updated via an ISO image (offline update). It is updated with information that has been mined from the VMware KBs and is used to proactively check log and configuration for issues in the virtual environment. It also has security configuration checks.

  Installation

  Installation was extremely simple, Runecast provides a virtual appliance (OVA) file that can be downloaded from the web and deployed via virtual center.

  After configuring the VC permissions I clicked the “Analyze Now” button and the scan began. You can also schedule scans. I was also able to export findings. All good stuff.

  Within a few minutes data started flowing into the dashboards and it found some known issues in the environment… my environment is rather large – many VCs, 100s+ hosts and over 1000s VMs, I also have a mix of versions – vSphere 6.x-5.x

  I immediately started to check into the Best Practices area (dashboard) – seemed like the good place to start. As I soon found out I do have some critical known issues and configuration issues with in the environment – good work Runecast

  Then I moved to the Issues List which is nice as it color codes issues in different categories (critical, major, Medium and low). I am not 100% sure how these are calculated but they do align with how I generally look at issues within an environment. I also notice some really cool info around PSODs and how it relates to hardware drivers and firmware updates.

  I expanded to find some full details from and the KB article: 

  

  My environment will take some time to fix however with this view of issues/updates and the information in the KB, we could make the virtual environment a lot better in a proactive way. In a production environment this could save a lot of time so that issues are found faster and reported. We could actual enable an operation team to see the dashboards or via emails.

  Security hardening is shown for my entire environment – for future discussion

  Detailed log analysis is viewable – I didn’t get to this feature other than doing some searches so I’ll work on this more in the future.

  Conclusion

  Awesome Tool! I ran the app in my environment to try it out; it found reconfiguration issues, missed settings and missing patches. In an enterprise environment a human error and reconfiguration accounts for a large number of issues.

  I would strongly recommend running an analysis to check your virtual environment to see if things are running at peak performance and how can it improve your proactive state for better stability. 

   

  Check it out: https://www.runecast.biz/

   

  Runecast - few items would like to see updated or how-to docs:

  I would like to understand the categories better

  How to export the report with the findings

  What is the plan to add other products into Runecast (IE other hypervisors/hardware vendors, etc...)