Kielder Marathon Completed

For those of you who don't know me I'm a keen runner for both fitness and enjoyment.  I've completed the Great North Run twice now which is a half marathon with my best time being 1h 32m 10s.  I've always wanted to complete a marathon and this year I decided to train and hopefully complete the Kielder Marathon which is knows as as Britain's most beautiful marathon.

I trained solid for 3 months increasing the distance on my Sunday long runs until I knew I could complete the distance.  Race day was Sunday 6th October but unfortunately I had a gum infection on the Friday before and was on both antibiotics and pain killers for the weekend which completely wiped me out and it would have been stupid to attempt the distance the way I was feeling.  I was extremely disappointed not being able to complete the marathon and get my medal and T-shirt so I though I'd email the organisers and see if I can complete the run the Saturday afterwards and prove that I completed the distance with a GPS watch.  They were more than happy and agreed to send the medal and T-shirt to the reception where I could collect upon finishing.

So, today I completed the full 26.2 miles in 4h 9m 7s which was one of the hardest runs I've completed not due to the distance but the elevation.  I've included my report for the Garmin website and a few photo's from the run below.  It's safe to say that now I've checked this off the list I think I'll be sticking to half marathons and trying to get my time under 1h 30m.

 

 

VMware Certified Associate Exams

VMware have recently released some new entry level exams call VMware Certified Associate or VCA.  There are currently three courses and exams available, soon to be four, and consist of:

• VMware Certified Associate – Cloud (VCA-Cloud)
• VMware Certified Associate – Data Center Virtualization (VCA-DCV)
• VMware Certified Associate - Workforce Mobility (VCA-WM)
• VMware Certified Associate – Network Virtualization (VCA-NV) (Comming Soon)

Each exam has an accompanying online course that is available for free from the VMware Certification Website.  You don't need to sit these courses before attempting the exam but obviously it is recommended.  These courses and exams are ideal for people want a good overview of the associated VMware products and gain a certification in them.  The cost of the exams are £80 plus VAT and can be booked via Pearson VUE once you have authorisation via the VMware Certification Website.  VMware have an offer on at the moment whereby if you book the exam before the end of 2013 you will receive a 50% discount.  If you also book the exam before the end of October and use the voucher code VCA13ICS you will be able to sit the exam for free.  I've sat a passed all currently available VCA exams and found them to be very fair.  I've never worked with Horizon or the vCloud Suite so I found the online training valuable and very informative.

vSphere 5.5 First Impressions

In my homelab I always like to keep it up to date with the latest VMware releases so when vSphere 5.5 went GA late Sunday evening (UK Time) I was quick to download all the necessary binaries.  In my currently lab I run vCenter on a Windows 2008 R2 VM with a dedicated SQL server for the required database.  I've dabbled in the vCenter Server Appliance for a few nested labs but it was time to migrate fully to the VCSA during the rebuild.  I've also dabbled in the web client (Not as much as I should have) so during my rebuild I forced myself to completely use the web client, which included working via a Windows 8 jumpbox VM using Microsoft Remote Desktop Gateway Services.  So, this post is about my first impressions using the vSphere 5.5 suite during my homelab rebuild

vCenter Server Appliance

This is the first time I'm using the VCSA for production in my homelab.  As mentioned, I've previously used it for nested test environments due to the simplicity of installation and configuration and the latest version is exactly the same.  I had absolutely no issues with the installation and configuration of the VCSA which included the newly re-written SSO.  The local admin credentials are now administrator@vsphere.local instead of the very strange admin@System-Domain.  One thing worth mentioning is that the root account password for the VCSA is only valid for 90 days.  Since this is a homelab I was quite happy disabling this but in production you may have this requirement so it's worth noting:

When configuring the VCSA to authenticate with my domain the options have also changed.  You can now use Active Directory (Integrated Windows Authentication) as long as you configured an account that can authenticate to the domain during the initial configuration of the VCSA:

Chris Wahl (Blog / Twitter) has a great article about the new configuration options here.

Web Client

The web client was always something that I dabbled with but would always retreat back to the C# client when things got tough.  The 5.1 version of the web client was very clunky and wasn't the easiest to work with over a remote RDP session via Remote Desktop Gateway services.  With the rebuild of my lab I forced myself to solely use the web client for all tasks which included all host and storage configurations.  It took a little longer than it would have using the C# client purely because most of my time was spent trying to find the correct location for the settings such as settings for the Path Selection Policy for a particular storage device.  Once I had invested the time in locating the settings it was smooth sailing from then on.  The new web client is definitely a lot smoother and more responsive which makes it a lot easier to work with both locally and remotely.  I'm a big fan of the recent items menu option that was added as part of 5.5:

So all in all the new web client definitely gets a thumbs up but you have to invest the time and force yourself to use it.

Network ACL's

New for 5.5 is the ability to add ACL's to port groups to filter packets based on the various parameters of the packet header.  This feature is only supported on the Virtual Distributed Switch (VDS) and can be based on the following three different qualifiers:

• MAC SA and DA qualifiers
• System traffic qualifiers - vMotion, Management, FT, NFS, VM, VSAN, iSCSI and Replication
• IP qualifiers

I've configured an ACL on a test port group that I have a SQL2012 server attached to .  The ACL blocks ICMP traffic from ANY IP address to the SQL2012 VM:

As I continue to explore the new vSphere 5.5 features I'll be sure to post anything interesting that I find.

North East VMUG - 03/10/2013

The next UK North East VMUG has been finalised and will be on Thursday 3rd October from 12:00 and take place at:

CastleGate
Simpson Room
Melbourne Street
Newcastle Upon Tyne
NE1 2JQ

Direction Here

Once the full agenda with times has been confirmed I will update this page but here are some highlights of what we have planned:

• Joe Baguley, VMware – Keynote
• David Owen - Training & Certification
• Andrew Wood, Atlantis Computing – Delivering on the VDI Reality
• Dan Watson, VMware – NSX
• vBeers: We will adjourn at 5pm and reconvene at The Bridge Hotel for vBeers and a buffet courtesy of SITS Group

This time we have a diverse event including a keynote from Joe Baguely, VMware CTO for EMEA, an overview of VMware training and certification from one of our members along with some real world advice and a session on the new network virtualization technology NSX, which looks set to become key over the next couple of years. Finally, Atlantis are sponsoring our venue and will give a session on the benefits of their solutions, particularly in optimising IO and storage traffic for VDI.

Sign up and Register here

Big thanks go out to our Sponsors for the day, Atlantis Computing and SITS Group.  Without their help we wouldn't be able to put on these free events.

VMworld Barcelona Schedule

I've finished (I think) scheduling my VMworld Barcelona trip so I thought I'd post it up.  I'm hoping there will be a vExpert and / or vBeers meetup on one of the evenings but so far it's looking pretty stacked:

If anyone fancies meeting up on any of the evenings then get in touch.

PernixData and their new FVP Technology

There has been quite a buzz around PernixData and their new FVP technology after they came out of stealth mode a while back.  Just this week they went GA with FVP 1.0 and I was finally able to get my hands on the 60 day free trial.  So, exactly what is FVP and what does it do?  FVP basically improves read and write performance for virtual machines by using SSD's in your ESXi hosts to cache the data for subsequent reads and de-stages to your storage for writes.  The software can be made fully redundant in the event of a host going down to ensure all data is consistent and written to back end storage.  Frank Denneman (blog / twitter)  has some great posts on how the technology works from the backend.  What I wanted to do was put it to the test to see what sort of results I received from my home lab.

Installation

Installation was pretty straight forward.  There is an .exe for the management server which I installed on a separate Windows 2012 server and a host extension package which needs to be installed on the ESXi hosts.  A back end SQL database is required but SQL Express is more than adequate.  The installation guide that comes with the software is very thorough and walks you through all the steps.  Once all the software has been installed and the management software has been configured to talk to your vCenter server then you simply install the plugin and a new PernixData tab is available within vCenter

Configuration

Configuration is very simple as well and Jason Nash (blog / twitter) has an excellent post and video which I recommend you watch as it shows you how to configure your first FVP cluster and start viewing the results.

Results

I've had FVP running in my lab for just over a day and the results speak for themselves

I've configured my FVP Cluster in write back mode which caches reads but also writes directly to the SSD without it having to wait for the the underlying storage to acknowledge the write and then de-stages the data through time

I'll write a bit more about it once I've had it running in the lab for a few more days but so far I'm extremely impressed with the software.  If you have a homelab and a few spare SSD's I recommend you give it a try. Now all we need is for PernixData to give vEXPERTS a few NFR licenses for home use.

Home Lab Upgrade - More Power!!!!

Recently I've been struggling to run more and more workloads so I decided it was time to upgrade my trusty lab to something with a bit more power.  I've had my current lab for well over a year and it has served it's purpose extremely well.  With the very generous vEXPERT licenses provided by VMware I've wanted to play around with vCloud Director and Horizon for a while now but obviously lacked the horse power to run these.  My current lab consisted of the following:

• 3 x HP Microserver N36L (8GB Ram Each)
• 1 x RouterBOARD RB751
• 1 x Linksys SRW2016 16 Gigabit Switch
• 1 x Synology DS412+ (4 x Crucial m4 256GB Sata 3 SSD)

After weighing up different options I finally decided on the HP ML310e G8 due to the following:

• Lower power utilization
• Dual onboard gigabit Nics (With shared ilo)
• Ability to support 32GB Ram

The idea was to replace the 3 x Microservers with 2 x ML310e's and replace two of the 256GB SSD's in the DS412+ with 2 X 1TB drives and add the SSD's into the hosts.  Both hosts would be loaded up with 32GB ram and I've keet the 500GB drives that they came with as additional storage if needed.

So, what does the lab look like now and how much power does it consume:

Power consumption varies between 180w and 200w (Includes hosts, switch, routers, NAS, Cable modem and an IP Phone) which is pretty much what the Microservers were taking so I've very happy with the outcome.