WilliamLam.com

virtuallyGhetto gets a bit less ghetto ...

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Please do not be alarmed with the new look, I promise the content will continue to stay technical and ghetto still 🙂

As some of you may have noticed, I finally took the plunge last Friday and migrated off of Google's Blogger platform and onto WordPress. I have actually been looking at an alternative platform for a couple of years now but never got beyond the research phase as it seemed like a daunting task. I decided to finally make the switch in 2014 and with the help from fellow blogger Ben Thomas, I was able to finally transition to WordPress after two weeks of tinkering around and testing. Do not get me wrong, Blogger is a great platform for anyone looking to quickly get started with blogging and it is very easy to use and best of all, it is free. When I first started virtuallyGhetto back in May of 2010 (wow, almost 4ys ago!), I chose Blogger for two simple reasons, it was easy to use and most importantly I could use a custom domain without paying additional fees.

At the time I really had no idea if this blogging thing would actually take off and whether people would care about the things that interests me. It took me almost another two years to decide if I wanted to start blogging and I really owe it to guys like Duncan Epping and Scott Lowe who convinced me to give this blogging thing a go. Over the years, Blogger has not changed too much and the platform had very small incremental enhancements here and there. I felt that it was really starting to fall behind other blogging platforms and was lacking in several areas, one of which was plugin extensions, which was much richer on other platforms. Another thing that really surprised me was how often the "search" functionality broke on my site; I am not sure how many readers actually noticed this. For a company that is the de-facto standard when it comes to search, I was quite shocked to see this happen on somewhat a frequent basis. It was usually faster and more efficient to search for something on Google than it was to search directly on my blog.

The lack of plugins and enhancements to the platform is what really motivated me to take a look at an alternative solution. Although WordPress was at the top of my list, I also took a look at some of the newer blogging platforms like Medium and Ghost. I decided to go with WordPress as it still has the largest community and these newer platforms were specifically aimed at users who just want to write. Their interfaces were very simplistic which is great for people who just want to write and not get bogged down by too many options but they were still too lacking from a plugin extension point of view that most bloggers expect today.

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Want a free VMware Fusion 6 Professional License?

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fusion-6-pro-license Here is an exclusive for my Twitter followers! Last week I had the chance to catch up with Simon Bennett, Product Manager for both VMware Fusion & VMware Workstation and just chat about some random topics. Simon was kind enough to offer me seven free VMware Fusion 6 Professional license keys, each valued at $129 USD. I personally already had a copy of VMware Fusion which I use all the time on my iMac whenever I need to quickly spin up Virtual Machines. I thought I would extend this generous gift from Simon onto my Twitter followers, since several of you mentioned you would like one after I tweeted about the gift.

I had thought about giving it to the first seven followers that responded and realized that would have been unfair to folks who were not watching their Twitter stream at that very moment (which nobody does, least I do not). So, if you want a super easy way to win a free VMware Fusion 6 Professional license key, take a look below an please CAREFULLY READ all directions.

How to Win:

Leave a short comment on this post on what this VMware Fusion license key would enable you to do, whether that is solving a particular problem or challenge.In addition, what is the one feature that you are most excited about for new users or what new feature would you like to see for existing VMware Fusion customers. Simple, right? I will randomly select seven winners from the list of comments in one weeks time, so make sure you leave your Twitter handle in the post else you will not be eligible to win. This is open to everyone, you do not need to reside in the US to win.

How to Qualify:

  • You must be following me on Twitter, I am at @lamw
  • Must not be a VMware employee, I will check 🙂
  • Include your Twitter handle in the comment, that is how I will contact the winners

Winners:

@wozik
@mstone333
@davidahewett
@dkguru
@hippotech
@romankallen
@mralexandr0

Why you should rename the default VSAN Datastore name

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Something that I have noticed early on when working with VSAN is that the VSAN datastore name is automatically selected for you and will always default to vsanDatastore. This is not a bad thing as it simplifies the setup of VSAN which is already dead simple. To enable VSAN, it is simply checking a box in the configuration of your vSphere Cluster just like you would when enabling vSphere DRS or HA.

From an operational standpoint, I think this can be a potential issue. What happens when you have a multiple VSAN Clusters under the same vSphere Datacenter object or even across different vSphere Datacenter objects? I recently came across this while re-building one of my lab environments, can you spot the problem in the screenshot below?

Here we have two VSAN Datastores within the same vSphere Datacenter. Datastore names under a single vSphere Datacenter must be unique. I am sure some of you may have already experienced this with local datastore names using the default "datastore1". vSphere will automatically append "(n)" to the name where n is the number of instances seen in the environment.

In this next example, we have two VSAN Datastores but they are split across two vSphere Datacenters. Since unique name is enforced at the Dataenter boundary, it is even worse now because you have the same name used across both VSAN Clusters.

Even though a user will most likely drill down into a specific environment when provisioning a Virtual Machine, I think it is critical to have a good naming scheme for your infrastructure. What happens when you have someone run an audit of all your VMs and all they showed for their datastore name was "vsanDatastore" and you had multiple VSAN Clusters? Would it not be more useful to have a bit more details in the datastore name to help map it back to some logical/physical container that is a bit more meaningful? I personally would think so and would help in times of troubleshooting where time is of the essence. 

Luckily this can easily be remediated since a VSAN Datastore operates just like any other datastore in which you can rename it. VSAN itself does not use the name to uniquely identify the datastore, it implements a unique UUID for each of the VSAN datastores. Simply renaming the VSAN Datastore to something more appropriate such as including the name of the vSphere Cluster will come a long when you need to correlate a Virtual Machine back to a particular compute/storage resource. 

I wonder if it would be a useful to have a feature in VSAN to automatically append the vSphere Cluster name to the default VSAN Datastore name? What do you think?