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• DC Preparedness - Great article on Datacenter Storm Sandy

  Storm Sandy causes havoc on some Datacenters in the Northeast.
  

  
  

  http://www.datacenterjournal.com/it/hurricane-sandy-highlights-need-for-disaster-preparedness/

• 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

• Vblock™ – 3 of the World Technology Leaders

  Vblock™ – 3 of the World Technology Leaders Come together (something rarely seen)

    To start out I am NOT an employee for VCE/EMC/Cisco. This is based off of my own opinions and experiences.  Now let’s get started J

  The future of technology seems to be about effectively using datacenter resources and underutilized hardware. I believe that you need to converge infrastructure components to effectively use a datacenter. To me, a Vblock™ is basically a Technology Appliance that allows organizations to raise the bar for infrastructure utilization. In order to maximize you’re spending (OPEX - operating expense) as well as your infrastructure utilization, you will have to have convergence and Vblock™ does this effectively.  I also believe that Vblock™ will allow you to build and get to a cloud model in a much faster well-organized way.

   

  What I believe and have seen with the Vblock™ is that it allows an organization to move more effectively toward a Private Cloud model as well as maintain a high-level of performance to their customers. The Vblock™ alone will NOT get you to a “cloud model” but it’s a major step in the right direction. Vblock™ allows you to have a converged infrastructure that allows you to pool storage, computing and networking to optimize datacenter infrastructure (lower TCO - total cost of ownership). Seemingly, you get better performance in a black box at a lower cost. Vblock™ has full scalability. It is flexible from storage to networking components to Cisco UCS blades & chassis (opinion - which in this day and age is one of the leaders in the industry for server hardware) and supports many different configurations. In my opinion Vblock™ technology allows you to virtualize and consolidate your systems while continuing to provide a high-level of performance that has been tested prior to running in your datacenter environment (validation of an outcome).

   

  Vblock™ (Standard components and devices based on my experiences):

  ·         Cisco UCS blade chassis 5108s.

  ·         Cisco B230s and B200s UCS Blade Models

  ·         VMax and VNX 7500 Storage Models (EMC storage devices).

  ·         Cisco networking switches (6140s & 55xx) and FCOE inside UCS blade for connectivity (Standard Vblock™)

  ·         EMC RecoverPoint™ SAN replication (Block Base) with native splitters on the storage devices.

   

  Vblock™ allows an organization to standardize on what I call a ‘complete infrastructure framework/platform’ with many different components (Compute/Network/Storage). This can simplify an organization’s support as well as help companies move away from a fragmented infrastructure. This convergence (pooling) allows you to share resources to infrastructure components at the same time. Vblock™ allows for higher density level in a datacenter which can reduce your physical footprint. I have seen where Vblock™ technology allows cost savings by reduction in hardware maintenance cost (smaller carbon footprint) as well as consolidation on the virtual side. UCS manager allows companies to profile their systems for specific settings based on what application may run and where it will run (server profiles) for fast deployments and provisioning. This builds in versatility when you have hardware failures. Finally, Vblock™ model has allowed for ease of management from my experiences.

   

  In addition, Vblock™ does enable disaster recovery plans/exercises and effective off-site recoverability to be more structured (i.e. simpler to perform) from my experience. That’s not only the Vblock™ but a major component of disaster recovery and business continuity. I have also experienced EMC RecoverPoint™ deployed with Vblock™ technology to perform state-full SAN replication on the backend with EMC storage to do block replication. This type of replication allows for a smaller RPO (recover point objective). I have also experienced EMC Data Domain® and Avamar® Grids deployed for effective virtual machine and database backup and restore capability. The replication from Vblock™ to Vblock™ allows us to focus on true “application” DRs vs. infrastructure DR opportunities.

  My Opinion:

  The Vblock™ is designed, to make IT life simpler (infrastructure framework) and more cost effective (an appliance) for an organization.

   

  The views and opinions expressed above are the author's opinions and not do not necessarily reflect his employer’s policies or positions and the author does not intend to so represent his employer.

• 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

• 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.

  
  

   

• MS Joins Support Tools

  So it looks like more and more people are getting into the remote support arena... including MS. I just found this out after looking at the new Chrome tool....  Sweet!

  http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsintune/hh307859.aspx

  Windows Intune™ helps you manage and secure computers in your environment through a combination of Windows cloud services and upgrade licensing. Windows Intune delivers cloud-based management and security capabilities through a single web-based administrator console. With Windows Intune, you can manage computers from almost anywhere.

  •  System Overview View status to assess the overall health of managed computers, check alerts to investigate key issues that need attention, run reports, and create computer groups.
  •  Computers Create and manage computer groups, view status summaries and details, search for computers, and view the list of computers.
  •  Updates Administer the software update process for managed computers.
  •  Endpoint Protection Help protect managed computers against potential threats with real-time protection, and automatic scans and updates of malware definitions. Quickly identify and resolve malware issues.
  •  Alerts View alerts to determine the overall health of managed computers, or to investigate issues that are occurring. Respond to alerts that are generated when users request remote assistance.

  •  Software View a list of programs that are detected on managed computers. Upload and deploy managed software to managed computers.
  •  Licenses Upload and track license agreement information for Microsoft software and non-Microsoft software installed on managed computers.
  •  Policy Configure policies to manage settings for Updates, Endpoint Protection, Windows Firewall, and Windows Intune Center on managed computers.
  • Reports Generate reports about software updates, installed software, and hardware on managed computers.
  •  Administration Download the most current client software, manage administrator accounts, configure update classifications and automatic approval rules, and alert notification rules. Manage Cloud Storage space.