WilliamLam.com

Visualizing live network traffic on the vCenter Server Appliance using net-glimpse

by // 2 Comments

Last week I came across a really interesting OSS project called net-glimpse which allows you to easily visualize your network traffic in real-time and making that available using any standard web browser. I thought it would be neat to see what this might look like running on the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). I got it up in running in just a couple of minutes and even shared the results on Twitter as you can see from the tweet below:


I had couple of folks ask about the setup and I figure I would post a quick write up. While looking at the project, I found that net-glimpse includes quite a bit of customizations in the colors, data collection and how data is displayed. Specifically, rather than relying on the well-known ports that have already been pre-defined, you can also add additional custom ports and specify the label that it should automatically used. This gave me an idea, instead of a generic visualization of the VCSA, we could get specific service information and have those label automatically get displayed.

[Read more...]

VMware 2017 Cycling Kit

by // 22 Comments

I know many of you have reached out over the years and have expressed interest in the VMware Cycling Kits which I have written about here & here. In fact, I still get pinged about this topic every couple of months even though the last time we had ran an order was back in 2014! Obviously, the demand is still high and who can blame you, the kits look freaking amazing 🙂

Earlier this week, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that we were working on a new 2017 VMware Cycling Kit! Kasey Linden, who works in our Federal team was leading this effort and was gauging interests internally. I was definitely interested and I had also suggested that we open this up to the general public as historically it was kept internal for logistical purposes. Not only did Kasey love the idea, but he plans to have the cycling kits available directly on the VMware Merchandise Store for anyone to purchase, which is huge if you ask me!

As of right now, the designs are currently being worked on with the vendor and once that has been approved, it will go live on the VMware Store. We are hoping this should happen around mid to late September.

[Read more...]

Uniquely identifying VMs in vSphere Part 3: Enhanced Linked Mode & Cross VC-vMotion

by // 7 Comments

Back in 2012, I had published two articles which provides details and guidance on how to uniquely identify a Virtual Machine for both a vSphere and/or vCloud Director environment. The primary use case for this information was for customers or partners who have developed their own provisioning solution which requires them to track their VM assets throughout their lifecycle, usually in some sort of configuration management database (CMDB).

Although these articles are almost 5 years old, the content is still very relevant today and I still continue to reference them both with customers, partners and even some of our internal R&D folks. Most recently, I had a question about whether the guidance in these article were still applicable or whether they would be impacted by some of the new VMware technologies and capabilities that had been introduced since writing those articles such as Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM) and Cross vCenter vMotion (xVC-vMotion).

[Read more...]