WilliamLam.com

pyvmomi (vSphere SDK for Python) 5.5.0-2014.1 released!

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I just saw an awesome update from Shawn Hartsock, a fellow VMware colleague. For those of you who do not know him, Shawn works in our Ecosystems and Solutions Engineering (EASE) organization and is the primary maintainer of VMware's pyvmomi (vSphere SDK for Python) open-source project. The pyvmomi project was open sourced since last December which I had written about here, it has received over 3K+ downloads and has a very active community. Much of this success has been due to the hard from Shawn fostering an active community around pyvmomi.

The announcement today from Shawn is a new release of pyvmomi at version 5.5.0-2014.1:

As mentioned earlier, the pyvmomi project is a very active project and Shawn is constantly engaging with users looking for feedback, suggestions or requests for new samples to build. If you are interested in vSphere Automation and would like to leverage Python, be sure to check out the pyvmomi Github repository! Lastly, if you have written some cool scripts/applications or would like to request specific sample scripts, be sure to send a pull request to Shawn as we would love to see more contributions and collaborations from the community!

Community stories of VMware & Apple OS X in Production: Part 4

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Company: AutoTrader.com
Product: VMware vSphere
Hardware: Apple Mac Mini

[William] - Hi Chris, good afternoon. I know we have chatted a few times on Twitter before but for the folks that do not know you, can you quickly introduce yourself and what you do?

[Chris] - My name is Chris Nakagaki and I work for Autotrader.com as Sr. Systems Engineer. My current role involves day-to-day operations of VMware vSphere products in addition to defining best practices around the virtual infrastructure. Not to mention, help drive automation in my organization. Occasionally, I'll post something useful on my tech.zsoldier.com blog.

[William] - You had sent me an email after I published the first community story around how VMware leverages Mac Mini’s. I hear you are doing something pretty cool with the Mac Mini’s as well for your organization? Could you share some details on how your organization is using VMware and Mac Minis?

[Chris] - A couple of our subsidiary companies, in this case (vAuto and AutoTrader.com) essentially needed OS X VM's for QA testing of iOS applications, and general Mac browser testing. Rather than delivering individual Mac Mini to every developer and/or VMware fusion, etc. vAuto first approached us and we came up with this idea of clustering some Mac Mini's. They wanted to run ESXi on them to host relatively small VM's that could be centrally managed and accessed from any number of developers and with the Apple EULA, this was the only option due to the restriction. Besides that, it was just a really cool idea since we're all Mac/Apple fans anyways

[William] - That’s awesome, never seen a customer come up with both the request and a solution at the same time 😉 Have you had any experiences running vSphere on the Mac Mini’s before? Any challenges you faced while exploring this solution?

[Chris] - Thankfully you (William Lam) had run into a lot of the problems for us already.  So it was really easy to setup using the custom ISO and VIB you created to put our little 'MacCloud' together. The other non-software aspect we ran into though was the fact that the Mac Mini's do not have an out of band management interface. So we are currently looking for some smart power supplies and/or iKVM so that we can actually place these in our 'real' datacenters.

[William] - Hey no worries, I rather be the guinea pig and get all the kinks out so customers like yourself can just enjoy the benefits of running vSphere and ESXi on Apple hardware! How large is the MacCloud right now and what is the current hardware and software configuration?

[Chris] - Our MacCloud is only 3 Mac Mini's right now as we're still kind of 'feeling' it out. But soon after vAuto started using it, the word got out and we setup some test systems for our AutoTrader.com developers. In addition, our client engineering group uses a tool called Casper to manage our Macs. He needed a Distribution Point, preferably a system that had AFP, so we set him up with one and he was able to use it to deliver updates/applications. And the I/O for VSAN is so good with the SSD's, it screams.

Each Mac Mini is the 'Server' version, i7@ 2.6GHz, 1 SSD (128GB), 1HDD (1TB) and 16GB memory using USB to boot into ESXI. For the software, we are currently using vSphere Enterprise Plus and the vCenter Server happens to be the VCSA. The MacCloud is also being monitored by vCOPs

Here is a picture of the front/back of the Mac Mini rack:

autotrader-mac-mini-1

autotrader-mac-mini-2
[William] - That’s amazing, it sounds like the environment is really satisfying your developers and I can see why word has spread. So, did I read that right? You are currently using VSAN on the Mac Mini’s!? How has the performance been and what made you decide to leverage VSAN?

[Chris] - The minute VSAN went into beta, that's all I could personally think about for my own home lab with the Mac Mini's. That just naturally translated when the business had a need and I could satisfy my curiosity in one fell swoop. So being that these workloads aren't heavy I/O, I haven't been all that concerned with it. The VM Storage Policies have been all left at default because I don't see a need to change right now.

My team and I are actively keeping a pulse on all the users of the VM's hosted on here though. vCOPs shows that everything is working efficiently, but we want to make sure that is translating to a good user experience. The Casper DP is one in particular that I'm curious about since the disk I/O profile on that one should be a bit more consistent.

[William] - That is really cool to see customers already leveraging VSAN for their production usage and great to hear the experiences has been solid so far. You mention the use of vCOPs for monitoring the VMs, are you also using vCOPS to monitor the underlying Mac Mini’s and how do you handle hardware issues?

[Chris] - Honestly, right now, we're just relying on the vCenter CIM service to tell us if it finds a hardware problem. The first obvious problem I have with that is I'm not so sure it would notice a hard drive failure. Like VMware, we'd probably just bring it into a local Apple store and have any components still under warranty replaced. 'Normally' we have SNMP traps sent from vCenter to HP BSM. Being that this is such a small environment with lots of questions, we simply use vCOPs to alert us of any unusual behavior or problems. Many of of our vCenter alarms are 'self-correcting' alarms.

[William] - It sounds like your MacCloud is quite mature with so many different capabilities. Any plans in the near term to expand, I can already see more developers asking for similar setup? Will you be increasing your Mac Mini VSAN Cluster or potentially create a new one?

[Chris] - Most likely yes. My hope is that Apple and VMware will see the value in these community initiatives to hopefully make a 'support' Mac Mini with some native 10Gb capabilities. In the meantime, I can only see this growing to some really awesome potential.

[William] - Awesome to hear! Well, I do not want to take up any more of your time but before we conclude. Is there any tips or recommendations you would offer other fellow vSphere Administrators looking to run vSphere on Mac Mini? Any words of wisdom that you can offer?

[Chris] - Download William's ISO, upload and install the VIB from local system. Remote VIB install doesn't work because of static line (might be specific to windows) and last but not least. TRY IT!

[William] - haha. Thanks for the plug!

If you are interested in sharing your story with the community (can be completely anonymous) on how you use VMware and Mac OS X in Production, you can reach out to me here.

 

Community stories of VMware & Apple OS X in Production: Part 2

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After sharing VMware's story on how they leverage Apple Mac Mini's for their OS X build infrastructure, I thought it was only fair to reach out to Yoann Gini to see if he would also like to share some of his experiences working with VMware and Apple OS X. I was able to catch up with Yoann and you can find our chat transcript below.

Company: Fortune 500
Product: VMware vSphere
Hardware: Apple Mac Mini

[William] - Hi Yoann, I appreciate you taking some time out of your evening to share with us some your experiences working with VMware ESXi and Apple OS X. Your recent tweet was really the motivation behind this series, so thank you. Before we dive in, can you quickly introduce yourself?

[Yoann] - I’m a french computer scientist, working as a freelance consultant and trainer on Apple products for Enterprise and Education. I also work on network architecture and security, doing reverse engineering for fun in my spare time. All Apple OS X focused. You can find more details on my website.

[William] - Awesome. So, based on your tweet, I assume you have some experience working with Mac Mini's and VMware vSphere? Can you share with us some of the customer environments you have been in and how you have solved the challenges leveraging vSphere?

[Yoann] - Yes, I have two main setup with vSphere at this time (and my lab). One with 10 Mac Minis hosting up to 20 OS X VM which is basically building agent for an iOS forge for a Fortune 500 company (I can’t tell the number of iOS project build on it). The other one with three Mac Mini hosting two VM, one for Open Directory, DNS, File Sharing and the other for e-mail serving around 500 users.

[William] - Wow, Mac Mini's really being used in a Production environment! How cool! What was the reason for selecting the Mac Mini versus an Xserve or Mac Pro? How did the customer react to using a non-supported platform? Were there any challenges?

[Yoann] - When these two projects started, the Xserve was already stopped, so it wasn’t an option. For Mac Mini vs MacPro, it was only a matter of reasonable risk versus unreasonable cost. Mac Mini is unsupported by VMware and Apple as a virtualization node, but it’s really cheap and, it works. Mac Pro is supported, but it so expensive with the following challenges:

- don’t fit in a server rack
- can’t be exploited at 100% (especially the new Mac Pro with super duper graphical card totally useless for most server jobs)
- really can’t be exploited at 100% if you read the Apple EULA who seems to don’t allow us to run more than 2 (or maybe 3) Apple OS X per Mac hardware…

The last point is that the most important decision for one of my customers: buying expensive hardware officially supported can be OK if at least we can run a lot of Apple OS X VM on it. But the Apple limitation is a real PITA when you try to develop Apple OS X Server and Virtualization in the Enterprise. It so stupid that in at the end, customers prefer to place the same amount of money in multiple Mac Mini instead of one good Mac Pro. It allows hardware redundancy for the same price + an iSCSI storage and it leverage the risk due to unsupported hardware.

For me, the real challenge is here, the legal imbroglio with Apple legal things (and contacting Apple SE about this subject does not help, the only answer is, ask your legal department).

They also have other challenges: IT against everything with an Apple on it. It always fun to start a meeting telling the team in charge of Virtualization that they will have to support a non-supported small form factor system without a redundant power supply. But we always find a solution, Apple Consultants are used to this situation. It's a common denominator to all OS X and iOS deployment in enterprise.

[William] - Interesting, so it looks like the Apple EULA played a pretty large role in the organization's decision. At this point, you have selected the hardware platform and you knew you were going to Virtualize on vSphere. Can you talk a little bit about the applications, was this a new environment you were building out or was this a migration from an existing infrastructure?

[Yoann] - For the iOS forge, it was a new environment. The system was a Java based application and a pilot has been done in the past. So blank page here. A project leaded by company needs increasing with iOS software demand. For the more traditional server setup with all internal services like directory service, DNS, mail, etc. It was an existing setup on dying Xserve. We’ve done the migration on vSphere to take away all hardware problem (we’ve got more and more disk failure and random problem on the Xserve in the end).

[William] - For the environment which you had to migrate your existing Apple OS X systems running on the Xserve, what type of tools did you leverage? Were there any tips and tricks you used or things people should look out for if they are attempting a similar migration?

[Yoann] - We’ve taken the opportunity of hardware to Virtualize the systems and  migrate to a newer system version. So we’ve just followed the recommended migration path in this situation. We’ve installed a new system on the vSphere setup and then we’ve imported our data inside with a combination of directory export/import feature and rsync for files.

It was really simple with Apple OS X Server, you just have to ensure that your directory service is there and then put all the data in the good place before starting every services.Another option is use common Apple OS X imaging system like DeployStudio or Carbon Copy Cloner to create a image from your existing system and deploy it on your virtual system.

Is not as simple as vCenter Converter but when we’ve done our “state of the art” migration, we’ve got only a 5 min shutdown on a Sunday morning. All linked service like TSE, Citrix, Cisco Call Manager and custom app haven’t seen any thing. Only a reboot needed for Windows based system.

[William] - Very nice, it sounds like you got the process pretty much nailed down. How about after everything has been migrated over to vSphere. How does the customer manage the environment, are they running vCenter Server or are these stand alone systems?

[Yoann] - In this setup, we have a vCenter Server and we use the vSphere Web Client to handle it. By the way, it work like a charm from Safari on OSX, no more needs of Windows VM on our Mac to manage the setup and create new VMs.

[William] - I am with you on that, I too used to run a Windows VM just to use the vSphere C# Client. I’m glad I can use the vSphere Web Client on my Apple OS X system to manage my vSphere environment. In terms of Apple OS X guest management, how do you go about handling that and how do you go about provisioning new Virtual Machines?

[Yoann] - Just like any other Mac hardware, since ESXi supports NetBoot, I can use my existing provisioning system for free. I know that vSphere include some provisioning system to create VM on the flight when needed but I didn’t have the time to play well with it. At the end, Apple OS X VM are just like real Mac with HA in addition, I use all pre existing system without a change. It can even simplify my deployment (no need of Xsan and Load Balancer for HA for example).

[William] - Yoann, these are some great tips! I wanted to thank very much for taking the time and sharing with us your experiences with running Production Apple OS X workloads using VMware vSphere and Apple Mac Mini’s. Before I let you go, I wanted to ask if you had any recommendations for others looking to either Virtualize their existing Apple OS X deployments or looking to building out a new environment using VMware?

[Yoann] - Yeah, talking about HA, it remind me existing setup I have. I have some customer setup I’ve created and I still maintain who use Xsan (the Apple’s cluster file system) with Barracuda Load Balancer in front of two or more OS X Server to handle HA for all services (web, file sharing, databases, etc.).

It works but it’s hard to maintain and definitively not accessible for un-experienced system administrators. If I had to do it again, this kind of setup will end directly on a vSphere system with Fault Tolerance and things like that. It will be cheaper in so many ways (iSCSI instead of Fibre Channel, less time consuming, no need to have advanced knowledge on all network protocols, no need to play with clustered system like MySQL Cluster who’s a really PITA to make it work, etc.).

I also considered deploying free ESXi for all new setup, whether it is a Mac Mini or Mac Pro. The only challenge is that there is no vCenter Server with Free ESXi and you would need a Windows VM to be able to use the legacy vSphere C# Client. If you want or need to use the vSphere Web Client, you would need a vCenter Server license. However, the vSphere Essential Kit is not that expensive and it make sense for SMBs.

With this kind of a setup, it is really easy to manage: simple to deploy a new VM, simple hardware redundancy and can easily be expanded in the future. Keeping everything simple. Need to add a Windows server for accounting? Add a VM. Need HA? Add a Mac Mini and iSCSI storage. No service interruption.

If you are interested in sharing your story with the community (can be completely anonymous) on how you use VMware and Mac OS X in Production, you can reach out to me here.