My IT Blog

When I was around for VMworld, the topic which was discussed most on NSX and Automation. I was going through a link by  Romain DECKER and thought of sharing the same with you. What does the book covers:  NSX Micro-segmentation Day 1  NSX Micro-segmentation Day 2 Operationalizing VMware NSX Automating NSX for vSphere with PowerNSX VMware NSX Micro-segmentation Day 1  –  Wade Holmes Main topics : NSX Micro-segmentation Components, Plan and Design for Micro-segmentation, Creating a Security Group Framework, Policy Creation Tools Download link :  VMware NSX Micro-segmentation Day 1 VMware NSX Micro-segmentation Day 2  –  Geoff Wilmington Main topics : Methodology and Application Visibility, vRealize Log Insight, Application Rule Manager, vRealize Network Insight, Download link :  VMware NSX Micro-segmentation Day 2 Operationalizing VMware NSX  – Kevin Lees Main topics : People, Process, Tools, Consuming NSX...

Just off from the VMworld 2017 US event. As always VMware featured a number of great announcements at VMworld 2017 including VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware customers can now run new or existing virtualized workloads in the AWS cloud while maintaining their current VMware tools and skill sets This announcement provides an important shift in the hybrid cloud market for businesses looking to adopt the agile flexibility and services of cloud while preserving infrastructure and investments in the datacenter Another BIG announcement was VMware and Pivotal Launch Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and Collaborate with Google Cloud to Bring Kubernetes to Enterprise Customers.     New Pivotal Container Service™ (PKS) Delivers a Simple Way to Deploy and Operate Production-Ready Kubernetes on VMware vSphere® and Google Cloud Platform (GCP)        PKS Features Kubernetes Distribution Built on Kubo, an Open Source Technology Created by Pivo...

vSphere 6.5 brings a number of enhancements to ESXi host lifecycle management as well as some new capabilities to our venerable resource management features, DRS and HA.  There are also greatly enhanced developer and automation interfaces, which are a major focus in this release.  Last but not least, there are some notable improvements to vRealize Operations, since this product is bundled with certain editions of vSphere.  Let’s dig into each of these areas. Enhanced vSphere Host Lifecycle Management Capabilities With vSphere 6.5, administrators will find significantly easier and more powerful capabilities for patching, upgrading, and managing the configuration of VMware ESXi hosts. VMware Update Manager (VUM) continues to be the preferred approach for keeping ESXi hosts up to date, and with vSphere 6.5 it has been fully integrated with the VCSA.  This eliminates the additional VM, operating system license, and database dependencies of the...

VMware announces vSphere 6.5, the latest version of its industry-leading virtualization platform.  This new release of vSphere features a dramatically simplified experience, comprehensive built-in security, and a universal app platform for running any app. vSphere 6.5 accelerates the customer transition to digital transformation and cloud computing by addressing key challenges: 1.     Environments growing increasingly complex, 2.     Growing IT security threats, and 3.     The need to support both existing and new apps and services. Let’s take a look at some of the key capabilities. Dramatically Simplified Experience vSphere 6.5 elevates the customer experience to an entirely new level. It provides exceptional management simplicity, operational efficiency, and faster time to market vSphere 6.5 makes the  vCenter Server Appliance  the fundamental building block of a vSphere environment. The cor...

When we troubleshoot performance related issues, the first think which would hit our mind it "Storage". So let's have a sneak peak about the basic troubleshooting of the storage related issues.  Poor storage performance is generally the result of high I/O latency. vCenter or esxtop will report the various latencies at each level in the storage stack from the VM down to the storage hardware.  vCenter cannot provide information for the actual latency seen by the application since that includes the latency at the Guest OS and the application itself, and these items are not visible to vCenter. vCenter can report on the following storage stack I/O latencies in vSphere.  Storage Stack Components in a vSphere environment GAVG (Guest Average Latency) total latency as seen from vSphere KAVG (Kernel Average Latency) time an I/O request spent waiting inside the vSphere storage stack.  QAVG (Queue Average latency) time spent waiting in a queue inside the vSphe...

I’m often asked the question when looking at vSphere statistics – “What is the difference between PCPU Used and PCPU Utilized and why don’t they match?” Let’s take a look as it can be somewhat complex. First lets start with some definitions: Time Stamp Counter (or TSC) – is a 64 bit register available on all modern processors that counts clock cycles at a consistent rate and is not affected by changes in clock frequency. Unhalted Cycles – another count of ‘all’ clock cycles, but this one is dependent on the clock frequency and therefore the rate can change if the clock frequency changes (due to things like power management or Hyper-Threading). Wall Clock Time – refers to elapsed real world time. Okay now lets define our two counters using the above definitions: PCPU utilized (which is TSC based) = (non-idle state TSC cycles)/wall clock time PCPU used (which is unhalted cycle based) = (unhalted cycles)/wall clock time So assuming a non Hyper-Threaded system, and no pow...

When you are debugging the Orchestrator related issues in mid/large deployments , it is expected that the server.log file rotates rapidly.  In this case we need to increase the log file size and the rotation interval. Below are the steps to make changes to the config file to capture large number of files for troubleshooting.  Config File Location :  Appliance deployment:  /etc/vco/app-server/log4j.xml Windows deployment:  <install_Location>\app-server\conf\log4j.xml Steps:  1. Edit the file  log4j.xml 2. Locate the  <appender class="org.apache.log4j.RollingFileAppender" name="FILE">  section 3. Increase the size of the log file to 10 MB   <param name="MaxFileSize" value="10240KB"/>    4. Increase the  number files to be retained before rotation  <param name="MaxBackupIndex" value="5"/> Cheers :-)