William Lam

Fun end of the year facts on virtuallyGhetto

12.22.2014 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

I woke up at 6am this past Sunday for no apparent reason. Perhaps my body is preparing me for parenthood? In any case, I could not go back to sleep and started to think about some of the blogs I have written this past year on virtuallyGhetto (finishing its 5th year). With the year almost ending, I thought it would be cool to check out some of the statistics on virtuallyGhetto for this past year and share some of the fun facts with my readers. The data below is gathered by a WordPress plugin called Jetpack which is a must have for any bloggers using WordPress and the WP Statistics Plugin.

I would also like to take this moment and say thank you to all my sponsors for supporting virtuallyGhetto and most importantly I would like to say thank you to my readers. Thank you for your engagement whether that is a comment on my blog, a discussion on Twitter, an email describing a problem or just saying hi at a conference. Thank you to everyone who has shared interesting stories, challenges and unique use cases on how you use VMware products and continuing to help us improve our products. 2014 has been an amazing year and I look forward to all the exciting things coming in 2015 as well as continuing to share and contribute back to the community through my blog. If there are any topics that you would like to see me explore further or continue to explore next year, feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I wish you a Happy Holidays tand have a fun and safe Happy New Years, see you all in 2015!

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Community stories of VMware & Apple OS X in Production: Part 10

12.19.2014 by William Lam // 2 Comments

Company: Fitstar
Software: VMware vSphere
Hardware: Apple Mac Mini

[William] - Hi Clay, thanks for taking some time out of your schedule this afternoon to talk with us regarding one of the projects are you are currently working on. Before we get started, can you quickly introduce yourself and your current role within VMware?

[Clay] - Good morning and thanks for having me! My name is Clay Alvord, and I am a Senior Prototype Engineer, here at VMware. I work with hardware vendors as they develop new equipment, and get it in the hands of the developers here. It allows our engineers to get early access to pre-release gear, in the hope that as the equipment comes to market, it's on our HCL at the same time. It also allows us to help debug the hardware as its developed, so we don't hit any critical surprises after release.

[William] - Thanks Clay, very cool role! So, I hear you have been working closely with a new startup who has built a really interesting design involving VMware & Mac Mini’s? Could you provide us some more details around the design and the type of application/workload the customer has planned for this infrastructure?

[Clay] - Thats exactly right. FitStar deals with a lot of high resolution video, so their storage requirements are above average for a company their size. Most of their servers live in Amazon's EC2 cloud, and so they are already heavy users of Amazon's services. Amazon has a product called Amazon Storage Gateway (ASG). ASG allows for local storage to be mirrored to EC2, or have the your most commonly access EC2 files cached locally.

What I have designed is a local storage array, with a an Apple Mac Mini running ESXi 5.5 and Amazon's Gateway (local) storage. This gives the users the speed of local storage, with the safety-net of having their data in EC2 at the same time.

[William] - How many Mac Mini’s are they currently running on-premises and what hardware configuration did the customer choose for their specific application requirements? Were there any constraints that you had faced due to the limited resources the Mac Mini’s provided?

[Clay] - They have 1 Mac Mini, and 1 Dell Poweredge. The Mac was a hard requirement, because the original design required us to run OSX server.

We opted for the Mac Mini as it fit the budget better, when compared to a Mac Pro. The Mac Mini is a Late 2012 and has a 3Ghz cpu, with 16GB of ram. Our biggest constraint is the memory in the system. We run 2 storage gateway VM's on the dell. Each one requiring 8GB of memory. We could not have it all on the Mac Mini as the Mini only supports 16GB in total and does not have room for future growth.

The Mac Mini has 3 Mac OS X VMs. 2 of them are OS X 10.10, each running OS X Server. One for dedicated Xcode buildbot, and app caching. The other for Time Machine services. The 3rd VM is running Mac OS X 10.9 Server and is purely for file sharing.

Here is a picture of Fitstar's setup:

Here are some additional physical and logical diagrams of the setup:

[William] - How much storage is currently being managed today and how is that presented to the VMs? Do they have plans on increasing either the storage or compute platforms as they grow?

[Clay] - The storage array has 2 RAID-6 luns, serving a total of 20TB to the Dell host over iSCSI. The host then breaks up the storage into 1TB disks that are then attached the two ASG VMs. The VMs, mirror the data to Amazon and then present new iSCSI targets to the Mac Mini host. From there we use Raw Device Mappings to attach the file server and backup server.

[William] - This looks like a really cool solution that you’ve architected with the customer. For a startup, I was kind of surprised to hear they went with vSphere versus going down an open source route and potentially using some type of Cloud Services? Do you know what the motivation was that lead the customer to choose vSphere and running an on-premise solution?

[Clay] - The motivation of going ESXi over an alternative solution had several factors. The first was Fitstar's familiarity with VMware, as well as my own. The second was this solution is the backbone of their company and they needed a world class solution that has not only a strong support system, but a HUGE community behind it. Lastly, it was the hard requirement to use ASG. Using ASG allows for the volumes to be directly mounted in a EC2 instance in case of an emergency. Amazon also states that the ASG vm's are optimized for ESX and Hyper V.

[William] - That is great to hear that even for startups, having an enterprise and highly available platform such as vSphere is critical to their business. Were there any challenges while designing and deploying this infrastructure, either from a deployment or operational point of view?

[Clay] - Definitely. This project was originally designed with just file services in mind. The original POC was a local storage array, and the Mac Mini. The Mini would run a ASG and 1 OS X VM.

When it was decided that we needed Xcode, Caching and Time Machine services, we opted for a dedicated VM for each of theses. The reason is that if there were issues or heavy load with any of them, it would not affect the others.

Some of the other challenges we had was getting iSCSI to play well with Mac OS X. We were planning on having the iSCSI connections go directly to the VMs, and bypass ESXi, but 3rd party drivers don't work with Amazon's version of iSCSI. As a result, we now connect to the hypervisor, and use raw mappings to the VMs. We opted for raw mappings so that if we mount a volume in EC2, it sees a HFS+ disk, not a VMFS one with HFS inside.

We also had trouble getting the OS X server services to work on virtualized hardware. ultimately we adjusted the vm parameters to expose the hardware ID's to the vm, and so OS X thinks it running on physical hardware.

We are still working on plenty of tweaks to the system. I have seen a OS X panic, and kernel logs point at VMware Tools as the culprit. We have filed a bug for this. We also have an issue that the nics in the Mac Mini are e1000, not e1000e. This occasionally leads to a PSOD. The work around we plan on introducing is Thunderbolt to ethernet adapters.

The last ESXi related hurdle is that in order for the VMs on the Mac Mini to auto start, the Dell and AGS VMs must be online, and the Mini has to have already scanned its storage adapters. So in the event of a power outage, when everything powers up, you must rescan storage on the mini, after the Dell is online, then power up the Mini's VM's. We have installed a battery backup unit, and are in the middle of automating the scan and power up of the Mini's VMs.

[William] - Clay, thank you very much for taking the time and sharing with us some of the innovative things our customers are doing with Apple and our vSphere platform. I really enjoy hearing about how our customers push our software to its limits and find new use cases that we had never thought about. Thanks again for sharing. Finally, before I let you go, do you have any words of advice or tips for other customers having similar requirements, especially those coming from a Startup? Any particular resources you recommend them checking out before getting started?

[Clay] - It was my pleasure. virtuallyGhetto has been a great resource for me in standing up the project. I have some tips and tricks related to this and some other things on my site www.geeksnthings.com as well.

If you are interested in sharing your story with the community (can be completely anonymous) on how you use VMware and Mac OS X in Production, you can reach out to me here.

Automating Deployment & Configuration of vRealize Operations Manager 6.0 Part 2

12.12.2014 by William Lam // 4 Comments

Continuing from Part 1 of this three part series, you should now have a fully deployed vRealize Operations Manager connected on the network. You should see the following "Get Started" page when connecting to vROps via a web browser.

In this article, I will demonstrate how you can perform the initial configuration of your new vROps instance which includes configuring a password for the "admin" account that will be used to access the UI interface afterwards. You will also have the opportunity to configure basic things like NTP settings as well as the role of your vROps instance. If this is your first deployment of vROps 6.0, you will need to create a new Cluster where other "Slices" or vROps Instances can join and contribute different functionality such as Admin, UI, Data, Data Collector and Replica roles. In this example, we will assume the installation will contain all roles within this single instance. In the future, you can easily expand and add other instances that provide specific roles and in a future post, I can show how that can be accomplished using the CLI/API if there is an interest.

To perform the initial configurations, I have created a simple shell script called configurevRops.sh which requires SSH connectivity to the vROps instance. Ensure that during your initial setup, you have either enabled SSH or have gone into the VM Console and enabled SSH access. The script will be using the following four commands found within the appliance:

/usr/lib/vmware-casa/bin/ntp_update.py
/usr/lib/vmware-vcopssuite/utilities/sliceConfiguration/bin/vcopsSetAdminPassword.py
/usr/lib/vmware-vcopssuite/utilities/sliceConfiguration/bin/vcopsConfigureRoles.py
/usr/lib/vmware-vcopssuite/utilities/sliceConfiguration/bin/vcopsClusterManager.py

There is only one mandatory variable VROPS_ADMIN_PASSWORD that needs to be edited prior to running the script which specifies the password for the "admin" account. There is also a CONFIGURE_NTP & NTP_SERVERS variables that can be edited to configure NTP. By default, I have this disabled this because the system will need to validate the NTP Servers. If you do not have valid NTP Servers or be able to reach the ones specified in the script, then you may run into an error.

Once you have saved your changes, you can simply run the script using the following command (please replace the IP Address with the IP of your vROps instance):

ssh [email protected] < configurevRops.sh

Note: If you would like to see more verbose details for each of these steps, you can remove the redirect to /dev/null for reach of the commands and can be useful in case something is not running correctly.

If everything was successfully configured, you should now be able to open a browser to your vROps instance and you should see the following screen asking you to now login:

Please login with the username "admin" and the password that you had set within the script. Once you have successfully login, you should now see the following wizard which will take you through the final steps of setting up your new vROps instance. Unfortunately, these last couple of steps could not be automated and will require some manual interaction before you are ready to start using your new vRealize Operations Manager.

If you do not wish to enable SSH by default and prefer a more programmatic approach on performing the initial configurations, stay tune for Part 3 where I will show you how to use the new vRealize Operations Manager Cluster Mgmt API also known as the CaSA API to perform this exact same configuration.