William Lam

Exclusive vGhetto discount on homelab hardware from MITXPC

04.12.2017 by William Lam // 4 Comments

On a regular basis I already receive a number of inquires from both internal VMware folks as well as external partners and customers about VMware homelabs and the type of hardware that can be used. After demo'ing our recent USB to SDDC project, the requests have literally tripled! Most folks are generally inquiring BOM details and/or where to purchase the Intel NUC or the SuperMicro E200-8D.

In particular, the SuperMicro E200-8D has probably received the most amount of interest lately. In fact, I am also interested in one after having an opportunity to play with one during the Melbourne VMUG. One thing I had noticed while talking to several colleagues who have purchased this system both locally within the Bay Area as well as overseas such as Australia was that one particular reseller kept coming up over and over again. That vendor was MITXPC which is a local bay area company located over in Fremont which specializes in Mini-ITX systems.

The reason MITXPC was being used by the majority of these folks was simple, they had the best price for the SuperMicro E200-8D which was significantly cheaper than other vendors including Amazon.

Vendor	Price
E200-8D on MITXPC	$799 USD ($783.02 w/discount code)
E200-8D on Amazon	$849 USD

Having heard good things about MITXPC, I decided to reach out to them and see if there was anything special they could do for the VMware Community. I was able to get a special discount code that would offer folks an additional 2% off their entire purchase at MITXPC. For those of you who have been holding off on a refresh your home lab or itching to build your own, this is a great time! If you would like to take advantage of this offer, simply use the discount code VIRTUALLYGHETTO2OFF when you check out. I would like to give a huge thanks to Eric Yui of MITXPC for working with me on this and helping out the VMware Community.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with MITXPC.

Native VCSA bootstrap installer in vSAN 6.6

04.11.2017 by William Lam // 5 Comments

Almost four years ago, I documented a really cool vSAN capability here and here, which demonstrates how to bootstrap a vSAN datastore onto a single ESXi host. This powerful capability, which was by design, enables customers to easily standup new infrastructure including the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) in a pure greenfield environment where you only had bare-metal hardware to start with and no existing vCenter Server.

As you can probably guess, I am a huge advocate for this capability and I think it enables some really interesting use cases for being able to quickly and easily stand up a complete vSphere environment without having to rely on an external storage array or playing games with Storage vMotion'ing the VCSA between local VMFS and the vSAN datastore for initial provisioning.

Over time, this vSAN capability has gone mainstream not only from a customer standpoint but also internal to VMware. In fact, the use of this feature has made its way into several VMware implementations including but not limited to VMware Validated Designs (VVD), VxRail, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and even in the upcoming VMware Cloud on AWS. This really goes to show how useful and critical of a feature this has become for standing up brand new VMware infrastructure which runs on top of vSAN. Huge thanks goes out to the original vSAN Architects who had envisioned such use cases and designed vSAN to include this functionality natively within the product and not have to rely or depend on vCenter Server.

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Can you spare a few minutes for some feedback on VMware Documentation?

04.10.2017 by William Lam // 2 Comments

I am always looking for ways in which we can improve our products and documentation should be no different. In fact, documentation should be treated just as important as the product feature itself. I am very interested in your thoughts and comments and this will also help with a project I am doing internally at an upcoming R&D offsite.

With that, I had recently published a very short 8-question survey on Social media asking for feedback regarding VMware Documentation which you can access in the URL below:

https://goo.gl/forms/cLaUhTMRAeZGpLxz1

If you have any feedback, good or bad, please take a few minutes to fill it out. We can only improve or continue to do what we are doing if we get feedback from our customers.

Several of you mentioned you were interested in the results and to be transparent, I am sharing the current results that are non-free form text (that gets a bit tricky for obvious reasons). As of writing this article, there have been a total of 118 responses submitted and the preliminary results can be seen below. Does this match up to your experiences of using VMware documentation? If not, please consider providing your feedback. Also, feel free to forward this survey to others as well and thank you for your time and support.

1. Where do you normally go to find information about VMware products (e.g. how to, configuration, etc)? [multiple choice selection]

2. Are you normally able to find what you are looking for when using VMware documentation?