WilliamLam.com

Search Results for: supermicro

Useful M.2 NVMe accessories for vSphere (VSAN/VMFS) Home Labs

by // 9 Comments

I recently acquired a new toy for the home lab thanks to Timo Sugliani who shared an article on Twitter a few weeks back for a new USB-based enclosure that supports an NVMe SSD device using the M.2 form factor.

I was excited to give the accessory a try, especially as the M.2 devices are used regularly for  vSphere home labs running on either the Intel NUCs or Supermicro E200-8D. Most of these platforms only support a single M.2 slot and this is an easy way to add additional high performance storage capacity with a small footprint. The other benefit with an external enclosure is that you now have a portable and reliable storage solution that can easily be moved from system to system, especially for those that have asked about running VMFS on USB-based device.

[Read more...]

Leveraging Instant Clone in vSphere 6.7 for extremely fast Nested ESXi provisioning

by // 19 Comments

The idea of "Instant Cloning" a Nested ESXi VM (running ESXi in a VM) is not a new concept. In fact, I had shared a solution back in 2015 using the private VMFork APIs. However, what has changed is the ease of consumption, primarily due to the re-architecture of Instant Clone in vSphere 6.7 (more details here and here) which resulted in a public and simplified API. Some of you might ask, why not simply clone a Nested ESXi VM or create a Link Clone? What benefit would I get by using Instant Clone?

The answer is not only speed, but the fact that the instantiated VM is fully operational and ready to start executing where as a traditional full clone or linked clone requires a full OS boot up that can take up to several minutes to deploy and configure. This may not sound like much for a small number of Nested ESXi VMs, but as you increase the number of instances, Instant Clone really shines while still maintaining speed and the instant availability of the VM. As you can imagine, this definitely opens up for some interesting use cases whether it be for personal home lab or educational purposes like VMware HOL. In addition, we also have customers who deploy Nested ESXi not only at high scale but also with a high churn rate for development purposes, think CI/CD type of a workload who can also benefit from Instant Clone.

So how fast are we talking about? Lets say you wanted to test out the latest version of VSAN in vSphere 6.7, you would normally deploy 3 Nested ESXi VMs, power them up and wait for them to be ready on the network. With Instant Clone, you can deploy three fully functional Nested ESXi VMs in just 30seconds! As the VMs are instantly available for consumption, you can start the VSAN enablement workflow immediately and even parts of that can be baked into the Instant Clone workflow. With the ease of provisioning Nested ESXi VMs, you can simply maintain a catalog of ESXi templates which are in "frozen" states and then leverage Instant Clone to deploy just-in-time Nested ESXi environments and discard them once you are done. Pretty slick if you ask me! and something I plan on using going forward.

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi is still not officially supported by VMware. Please use at your own risk.

[Read more...]

VMworld Hackathon Hardware/Software BOM

by // 13 Comments

I know many of you have been asking about the hardware setup that we had used in this years VMworld Hackathon. I finally got a chance to document the details and you can find the complete hardware and software BOM below. For VMworld US, we had two different HW configurations, one for the primary Hackathon which was also re-used for VMworld Europe but we also had another configuration for the Hackathon Training sessions which was new this year. For VMworld Europe, we re-used the primary Hackathon hardware, but we also had the opportunity to take advantage of the new VMware Cloud on AWS offering and built a similiar configuration that teams could also remotely connect to as well. The only difference between the on-premises hardware and VMWonAWS, is the latter required users to RDP to a Windows jump host. Both options were provided and teams could select either environment to use.

Note: Internally, CDW is one of our vendors for purchasing hardware/software and that is why there are links directly to their site. However, you may find better pricing by looking online, especially Amazon which majority of the components are cheaper except for the server which you can get an exclusive vGhetto Discount at MITXPC. I have added links to both CDW/Amazon where applicable and I recommend doing research to find the best pricing if you are on a budget.

Here is a picture of the setup at VMworld US:


Here is a picture of the setup at VMworld EU:

[Read more...]