VTwinDude's Blog

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.

 

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...) 

A complete guide for all your essential vSphere 5.1 docs

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

Great Reading!