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Native VCSA bootstrap installer in vSAN 6.6

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Graphic courtesy of Emad Younis

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?

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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?


3. Please rate VMware documentation on the level of technical details provided [1 - Not Enough, 5 - Exactly Right]


7. Do you find it easy to provide feedback on VMware documentation?


8. If VMware documentation was collaborative, would you consider contributing content back (e.g. enhancements, typos, etc)?

Project USB to SDDC - Part 1

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A couple of weeks back, Alan Renouf and I co-presented at the Sydney and Melbourne VMUG UserCon, here are some great write-ups about the events here and here. We were very honored to have been invited out and to also deliever the closing keynote. Having traveled halfway around the world, we thought it was only fitting to share something really special.

For the last couple of months, we had been working on a small pet project that I personally had been referring to as the "vGhetto SDDC". This was not something we had not shared with anyone before and thought the VMUG UserCon was the perfect venue to demo our new project. For the session, we decided to rename the project/session to USB to SDDC (better ring than the previous title) which might give you a hint on what the project might be about.

The inception for this project really stemmed from the work we did at last years VMworld Hackathon which was another idea that both Alan and I had came up and worked with the VMware Code team to deliver at both VMworld US and Europe. Like all great Automation stories, the motivation for this project was born out of pure laziness. With the huge success of the Hackathon at VMworld US, there was a huge demand for us to also deliver it again at VMworld Europe.

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