William Lam

Community stories of VMware & Apple OS X in Production: Part 4

08.14.2014 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

Company: AutoTrader.com
Product: VMware vSphere
Hardware: Apple Mac Mini

[William] - Hi Chris, good afternoon. I know we have chatted a few times on Twitter before but for the folks that do not know you, can you quickly introduce yourself and what you do?

[Chris] - My name is Chris Nakagaki and I work for Autotrader.com as Sr. Systems Engineer. My current role involves day-to-day operations of VMware vSphere products in addition to defining best practices around the virtual infrastructure. Not to mention, help drive automation in my organization. Occasionally, I'll post something useful on my tech.zsoldier.com blog.

[William] - You had sent me an email after I published the first community story around how VMware leverages Mac Mini’s. I hear you are doing something pretty cool with the Mac Mini’s as well for your organization? Could you share some details on how your organization is using VMware and Mac Minis?

[Chris] - A couple of our subsidiary companies, in this case (vAuto and AutoTrader.com) essentially needed OS X VM's for QA testing of iOS applications, and general Mac browser testing. Rather than delivering individual Mac Mini to every developer and/or VMware fusion, etc. vAuto first approached us and we came up with this idea of clustering some Mac Mini's. They wanted to run ESXi on them to host relatively small VM's that could be centrally managed and accessed from any number of developers and with the Apple EULA, this was the only option due to the restriction. Besides that, it was just a really cool idea since we're all Mac/Apple fans anyways

[William] - That’s awesome, never seen a customer come up with both the request and a solution at the same time 😉 Have you had any experiences running vSphere on the Mac Mini’s before? Any challenges you faced while exploring this solution?

[Chris] - Thankfully you (William Lam) had run into a lot of the problems for us already. So it was really easy to setup using the custom ISO and VIB you created to put our little 'MacCloud' together. The other non-software aspect we ran into though was the fact that the Mac Mini's do not have an out of band management interface. So we are currently looking for some smart power supplies and/or iKVM so that we can actually place these in our 'real' datacenters.

[William] - Hey no worries, I rather be the guinea pig and get all the kinks out so customers like yourself can just enjoy the benefits of running vSphere and ESXi on Apple hardware! How large is the MacCloud right now and what is the current hardware and software configuration?

[Chris] - Our MacCloud is only 3 Mac Mini's right now as we're still kind of 'feeling' it out. But soon after vAuto started using it, the word got out and we setup some test systems for our AutoTrader.com developers. In addition, our client engineering group uses a tool called Casper to manage our Macs. He needed a Distribution Point, preferably a system that had AFP, so we set him up with one and he was able to use it to deliver updates/applications. And the I/O for VSAN is so good with the SSD's, it screams.

Each Mac Mini is the 'Server' version, i7@ 2.6GHz, 1 SSD (128GB), 1HDD (1TB) and 16GB memory using USB to boot into ESXI. For the software, we are currently using vSphere Enterprise Plus and the vCenter Server happens to be the VCSA. The MacCloud is also being monitored by vCOPs

Here is a picture of the front/back of the Mac Mini rack:

[William] - That’s amazing, it sounds like the environment is really satisfying your developers and I can see why word has spread. So, did I read that right? You are currently using VSAN on the Mac Mini’s!? How has the performance been and what made you decide to leverage VSAN?

[Chris] - The minute VSAN went into beta, that's all I could personally think about for my own home lab with the Mac Mini's. That just naturally translated when the business had a need and I could satisfy my curiosity in one fell swoop. So being that these workloads aren't heavy I/O, I haven't been all that concerned with it. The VM Storage Policies have been all left at default because I don't see a need to change right now.

My team and I are actively keeping a pulse on all the users of the VM's hosted on here though. vCOPs shows that everything is working efficiently, but we want to make sure that is translating to a good user experience. The Casper DP is one in particular that I'm curious about since the disk I/O profile on that one should be a bit more consistent.

[William] - That is really cool to see customers already leveraging VSAN for their production usage and great to hear the experiences has been solid so far. You mention the use of vCOPs for monitoring the VMs, are you also using vCOPS to monitor the underlying Mac Mini’s and how do you handle hardware issues?

[Chris] - Honestly, right now, we're just relying on the vCenter CIM service to tell us if it finds a hardware problem. The first obvious problem I have with that is I'm not so sure it would notice a hard drive failure. Like VMware, we'd probably just bring it into a local Apple store and have any components still under warranty replaced. 'Normally' we have SNMP traps sent from vCenter to HP BSM. Being that this is such a small environment with lots of questions, we simply use vCOPs to alert us of any unusual behavior or problems. Many of of our vCenter alarms are 'self-correcting' alarms.

[William] - It sounds like your MacCloud is quite mature with so many different capabilities. Any plans in the near term to expand, I can already see more developers asking for similar setup? Will you be increasing your Mac Mini VSAN Cluster or potentially create a new one?

[Chris] - Most likely yes. My hope is that Apple and VMware will see the value in these community initiatives to hopefully make a 'support' Mac Mini with some native 10Gb capabilities. In the meantime, I can only see this growing to some really awesome potential.

[William] - Awesome to hear! Well, I do not want to take up any more of your time but before we conclude. Is there any tips or recommendations you would offer other fellow vSphere Administrators looking to run vSphere on Mac Mini? Any words of wisdom that you can offer?

[Chris] - Download William's ISO, upload and install the VIB from local system. Remote VIB install doesn't work because of static line (might be specific to windows) and last but not least. TRY IT!

[William] - haha. Thanks for the plug!

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.

Quick Tip - How to enable "remote" disk for Nested ESXi?

08.13.2014 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

I always love to hear about new tips and tricks from Internal VMware folks, especially ones that I can share with the community. The other day, my colleague Paudie O'Riordan had a pretty interesting problem that he was trying to solve pertaining to a re-production he was helping out with. After he found the solution, he thought I might find it interesting and he shared the details with me.

Paudie was looking for a quick way to force a disk to show up as "remote" versus "local" in a Nested ESXi VM during the installation process.

The disk type will depend on how the disk was presented to the ESXi host, but sometimes even local devices may show up as remote, especially if the disk controller is not in pass-through mode. Instead of having to setup a complex iSCSI setup, Paudie found that if you selected LSI Logic SAS as the virtual SCSI Disk Controller for your Nested ESXi VM instead of the default LSI Logic Parallel, that automatically any disks placed on that controller will automatically show up as remote.

This is definitely a handy tip you may want to bookmark, especially if you are looking to test any type of Kickstart configuration where you may be dealing with remote devices or practicing for your VCP/VCAP exams and playing with ESXCLI claim rules.

VMworld vBrownBag Tech Talk : Nested Virtualization & Dev/Test/Home Lab Panel

08.12.2014 by William Lam // 4 Comments

VMworld is only a couple of weeks away and I can not believe this will be my 7th VMworld! My, how time has flown by so quickly. I have been pretty busy these last couple of months finishing up some internal projects as well as starting up a couple of new ones. I had been thinking about submitting a vBrownBag Tech Talk as I have done in past years, but there has just been too much going on. Giving it some more thought, I thought it would be cool to put together a panel of community folks to discuss some of my favorite topics like Nested Virtualization as well as Development/Test and Home Labs.

I am please to announce the VMworld vBrownBag Tech Talk : Nested Virtualization & Dev/Test/Home Lab Panel which will include Sean Crookston, Doug Baer, Nick Marshall and myself as the panelists. I was originally hoping to have a few more folks from the community, but due to the late submission, we ran into scheduling conflicts. I am very excited for this session which will take place on Wednesday, August 27th from 11:45am to 12:15pm (30minutes). I wanted to give a huge shout out to Sean Massey who was originally scheduled to present right after ours but decided to offer us his time slot as 15minutes was going to be tough for a panel discussion. Much appreciated Sean!

Due to the short amount of time, we really want to make the most out of this session and most importantly, make this as interactive as possible with the audience. We would like to collect any questions or topics that folks might be interested and we will pick a couple for the panelists to answer or discuss. We will also have topics that we may raise but it would be much more interesting to hear from you! Please leave a comment if you wish to ask a question and perhaps those that get selected, may even win a prize?

We hope to see you at the Tech Talk and lastly, this is going to be a MUST attend session ... that's all I can really say 🙂

BTW - I also would like to give a shout out to Doug Baer who will be running a VMware Knowledge Expert discussion related to the HOL Lab Environment on Tuesday, August 26 at 1pm PST. Though his focus will primarily be HOL, but as many of you know the underlying technology is Nested Virtualization. A couple of us will also be attending that session, so if there are any questions you would like to ask but did not get a chance to during the Tech Talk, you can also find us there.