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Exclusive vGhetto discount on homelab hardware from MITXPC

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On a regular basis I already receive a number of inquires from both internal VMware folks as well as external partners and customers about VMware homelabs and the type of hardware that can be used. After demo'ing our recent USB to SDDC project, the requests have literally tripled! Most folks are generally inquiring BOM details and/or where to purchase the Intel NUC or the SuperMicro E200-8D.

In particular, the SuperMicro E200-8D has probably received the most amount of interest lately. In fact, I am also interested in one after having an opportunity to play with one during the Melbourne VMUG. One thing I had noticed while talking to several colleagues who have purchased this system both locally within the Bay Area as well as overseas such as Australia was that one particular reseller kept coming up over and over again. That vendor was MITXPC which is a local bay area company located over in Fremont which specializes in Mini-ITX systems.

The reason MITXPC was being used by the majority of these folks was simple, they had the best price for the SuperMicro E200-8D which was significantly cheaper than other vendors including Amazon.

Vendor Price
E200-8D on MITXPC $799 USD ($783.02 w/discount code)
E200-8D on Amazon $849 USD

Having heard good things about MITXPC, I decided to reach out to them and see if there was anything special they could do for the VMware Community. I was able to get a special discount code that would offer folks an additional 2% off their entire purchase at MITXPC. For those of you who have been holding off on a refresh your home lab or itching to build your own, this is a great time! If you would like to take advantage of this offer, simply use the discount code VIRTUALLYGHETTO2OFF when you check out. I would like to give a huge thanks to Eric Yui of MITXPC for working with me on this and helping out the VMware Community.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with MITXPC.

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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New "raw" VM Storage Policy support in OVFTool 4.2 simplifies bootstrapping VMs onto VSAN

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Several weeks back I came across a handy little tidbit on an enhancement that was added to the latest version of OVFTool (4.2) that greatly simplifies the bootstrapping of a vCenter Server or any other VM for that matter onto a vSAN Datastore. This is generally used when setting up a pure greenfield environment where your vCenter Server may not be setup yet and you want to run it on top of vSAN which is fully supported configuration. The process of "bootstrapping" a VCSA onto a single node vSAN datastore is documented on my blog here. The high level steps are as follows:

  1. Temporarily change default ESXi VM Storage Policy to allow forced provisioning and FTT=0 (e.g. no protection)
  2. Claim disks for creating vSAN Diskgroup(s)
  3. Create vSAN Cluster
  4. Deploy VCSA
  5. Apply the default vSAN VM Storage Policy to VCSA VM
  6. Revert the temporarily change of default ESXi VM Storage Policy

With this new OVFTool enhancement, Step 1 and 6 is no longer needed from the standpoint of needing to change the default VM Storage Policy on the ESXi host using the ESXi Shell or using the vSphere API. Instead, you can now pass in a "raw" VM Storage Policy (SPBM) to apply to the specific OVF/OVA that is being deployed rather having to make a global change on the ESXi host. This also helps reduce the post-deployment steps as you only need to re-apply the default vSAN VM Storage Policy to the vCenter Server VM and not have to touch ESXi host settings once the vCenter Server is up and running.

To use this new raw VM Storage Policy feature in OVFTool, there is a new command-line option called --defaultStorageRawProfile which accepts the "raw" VM Storage Policy as you would normally provide to SPBM APIs such as "((\"hostFailuresToTolerate\" i1) (\"forceProvisioning\" i1))" for example.

The really cool thing about this feature is that you can take advantage of this directly with the new OVFTool argument passthrough feature that was introduced in the VCSA 6.5 CLI deployment utility. Combining these solutions together, you can easily simplify the "bootstrapping" of a VCSA onto a vSAN Datastore. Below is the snippet that you would include in the VCSA JSON configuration file used for deployment.

"ovftool.arguments" : {
"defaultStorageRawProfile" : "((\"hostFailuresToTolerate\" i1) (\"forceProvisioning\" i1))"
}

Although a tiny enhancement, I think this is a pretty neat capability, especially being able to make use of it natively within the VCSA configuration file. It is definitely great to see us continue to simplify how VMware management infrastructure is deployed and definitely stay tuned on what else we have cooking in the future for this particular area 🙂