VMware vSphere Predictive DRS

It’s no secret that this is a feature that I’m very excited about.  This feature although very useful on it’s own is going to open up the door for many new exciting capabilities with out VMware products in the future.

Predictive DRS

Resource contention is one of the most critical issues in any virtualized environment.  When contention occurs, applications slow down and your users are affected.  Up until now two different methodologies have been employed to mitigate the risk of contention, with varied results.  But now I want to introduce you to the new “game changing” method available from VMware: Predictive DRS!  But first a bit of a history lesson on the original two methods.

REACTIVE METHOD

The first of these is the Reactive Method which focuses on resolving unexpected resource demand.  The most widely used example of a reactive solution is VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler, or DRS. As the day progresses, workloads may need more resources, which can lead to contention on the host.  The reactive method moves VMs around to ensure all workloads get the resources they need and applications remain healthy. Note this method needs only a minimal amount of VMs to be moved in order to be effective, which means minimal overhead. The reactive method only moves VMs when contention approaches, so it’s possible (however remote) for users to feel some effects of the contention before it’s resolved.

Learn more about the other methods available with predictive DRS in the original article on VMware Cloud Management blog site.




 

Release Announcement – vRealize Operations 6.4

Today November 15, 2016 Vmware announced the GA release of vRealize Operations 6.4.  The release features the following new features and improvements:

  • Faster Root Cause Analysis
    • 1 click Alert Grouping – Sift through alerts to quickly identify noisy ones or the critical ones
    • Business context – Map VMs to vCenter folders (Application groups) to prioritize troubleshooting by impacted applications
  • Improved Workflows
    • KPI-driven Object Detail Page – Consolidated view: known issues + key metrics of self & infra
    • 1 click KPI Graphing – Correlated in seconds, Reduce the need to know complex metrics
  • Collaborate Better via ready to share OOTB dashboards for NOC, Storage, Network teams
    • Operations & Capacity Overview, VM Usage, Troubleshooting dashboards

Continue reading “Release Announcement – vRealize Operations 6.4”

VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Cross Cloud Services–VMworld 2016 Keynote

Many of you are at VMworld 2016 and had the opportunity to be at the Keynote Live this morning.  However there are those of us that are not at VMworld this year so I decided to put together some highlights from this mornings keynote.

The big theme for the keynote this year was the announcement of  VMware Cloud Foundation and Cross Cloud Services.   Although I say too much about Cloud Foundation beyond what what was discussed in this mornings keynote I think the below slide really helps shed some light.  Although you will hear Cloud Foundation compared to Nutanix, I see it as more than just converged infrastructure.  I see it more as a converged cloud.  If you look at the let side of the below image you can see that VMware Cloud Foundation includes, Private Cloud as well as VMware vCloud air, and the IBM cloud.  The benefit here is all of these environments are built on top of VMware technology.  To the right you see the Non-VMware-Based Clouds which includes Amazon, Azure, and Google CP.  These would be what’s part of the VMware Cross Cloud Services.

 

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VMware round of Q2 releases including vRA 7.1, vROPs 6.3, vRCS 2.1, Cloud Client 4.2, vRB 7.1 and more

Many of you may have already seen the news, but I like to create a roll up to make it easy to see what’s been newly released.  Yesterday Tuesday August 23rd 2016 VMware released a number of much awaited Management product updates.  See below for a breakdown of the updates per product.

 

vRealize Automation 7.1

 

What’s new?

vRealize Automation 7.1 is optimized for growing clouds thanks to significant improvements in the automated installation experience.

vRealize Automation 7.1 continue simplifying the primarily and secondary setup process by adding ability to automate the setup process among similar deployments leveraging the new Silent Installer. Cloud Admins are now able to scale out existing vRealize deployment by adding more vRA components and manage them automatically though the new Command Line(CLI) interface.

vRA 7.1 release is also equipped with a brand new Migration tool which allows you to perform safe and sound side by side upgrade (migration) existing vRealize Automation systems 6.2.X to the latest and greatest release. During the migration process the source production environment remains intact which guarantees a minimum downtime of the production environment.

Continue reading “VMware round of Q2 releases including vRA 7.1, vROPs 6.3, vRCS 2.1, Cloud Client 4.2, vRB 7.1 and more”

Platypus Project Update

platypusOver the weekend Roman, Grant, John and I released a significant update to the platypus project, which is essentially a very simple and elegant way to provide a Swagger based documentation of several VMware Products.  This project started out by providing a quick way to consume the vRealize Automation 7 API, but it has grown a healthy set of legs.

One of the goals of the project was to take publicly available specifications and make them consumable and adaptable by the larger community.

So,  what’s new? Everything.

  • Flexibility: When you run the docker container, there is the option to provide variables for Product Name and Product Version.
  • Product Support: The updated platypus project now includes vRealize Operations 6.2,  vRealize Orchestrator 7.0, and NSX 6.2.
  • Host Config: The host variable now provides the ability to input the hostname of an instance of the VMware Product in question (preferably a test/dev instance) and issue the REST API calls.

To get your hands dirty with the NSX version of Platypus, just issue the following command:

docker run –name platypus –rm -p 80:8080 -e PRODUCT=”nsx” -e VERSION=”6.2″ vmware/platypus

Interested in checking the platypus project out? Find out more at https://github.com/vmware/platypus.  If you are interested in contributing to the project, simply issue a PR.

Please leave your feedback or comments below, I’d love to hear from you.

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VMworld2015 Hands on Labs Open today!!!

VMworld2015 Hands On Labs open today!

Don’t forget to stop by the Hands On Labs and check out some of this years awesome labs that are available.  Last night we had the lab burn in and they are open to day.  There are labs for just about everything you can imagine.  Not sure what lab is right for you, that’s fine stop by and chat with some subject matter experts that will help you determine which lab is the right fit for you.    There are roughly 350 terminals in the HOL this year along with a customer connect area where you can BYOD to connect.  If that was not enough there are 4 expert led breakout rooms where you can reserve a spot and attend expert led sessions on the various technologies.

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VMware Introduces 24 product releases including the much anticipated vSPhere 6

Yesterday VMware was very busy announcing the release of over 2 dozen product which included two new products to the market these two new additions to the VMware portfolio are:

VMware Integrated Openstack – That’s right it’s out and it’s available now for you to download.
VMware Software Manager 1.0 – This probably not as exciting as VIO, but it will come in handy for finding, selecting, and downloading the content needed to install or upgrade a VMware Suite.

Below is a list of all the products released yesterday including links to their downloads, documentation, and release notes for your convenience.

Continue reading “VMware Introduces 24 product releases including the much anticipated vSPhere 6”

No clouds just people – I have an ask for all of you!

If you read  my blogs you know I’m usually all business talking tech and providing my readers with what I hope is useful information.  Today I’m writing to ask for your support.  My wife and I are raising money for Muscular Dystrophy by participating in the Harley Davidson Ride for life fund raiser.  Last year Ride for Life donated $1.09M dollars to the MDA as part of this charitable event and hopefully this year we can raise even more.

My ask of you:

If you have found the information on this blog useful please show your support by donating to Ride for Life.  My wife and I are trying to reach a goal of $3,000 raised for MDS through Ride for Life.  Any donation you can make is greatly appreciated.  You can make a donation by visiting my donation page at http://www2.mda.org/site/TR/General/22-NortheastDivision?px=3059956&pg=personal&fr_id=12249.   For every dollar raised a matching donation will be made by VMware Foundation up to $3,141.59 as part of their Matching Gift program for employees.  All donation must be in by 5/1/2015.

Regardless of whether you are able to donate or not I want to thank you all for following my blog and may you all have happiness and good health!

 

Thank You all,

Sid and Tina Smith

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Live Free and Ride Hard

 

vRealize Operations Manger – vROM – 6.0 Released

The much anticipated vRealize Operations Manager 6.0 released today.  This new release is a milestone further tying together components of the vRealize Suite.  With the release of vRealize Operations 6.0 and vRealize Automation 6.2 comes the integration of the two products.  However that is not all vRealize Operations 6.0 has some very exciting new features of it’s own.The release introduces the following new enhancements and features:

Scale-Out Deployment Architecture
This release provides distributed deployment with elastic scale and higher scalability.

Unified User Interface
This release introduces a single user interface to manage vSphere as well as non vSphere domains. You can create powerful, flexible custom dashboards enabling you to bring any information you want into the management console.

Licensing Management in 6.0
vRealize Operations Manager 6.0 has an independent license-management GUI that provides enhanced administration of license keys specific to vRealize Operations. Customers can now deploy mixed editions in a single vRealize Operations 6.0 instance.

Smart Alerts
Smart alerts combine multiple symptoms to generate a single alert that focuses on the underlying issue with clear recommendations and option to take action for remediation.

Enhanced Reporting
Enhanced reporting provides several out-of-the-box reports with the ability to generate fully customizable reports.

Capacity Planning and Project Management Capabilities
New capacity planning and project management capabilities extend beyond vSphere and across physical and application level metrics. Flexible capacity models can be adjusted to meet different business needs.

Custom Policies
Custom policies can applied for specific workload types, applications or clusters enabling more advanced monitoring of performance, capacity and configuration standards.

Automated Remediation of Problems
Integrated action and remediation capabilities with the ability to apply actions according to the recommendation for the alerts.

User Access Control Management
Improved user access control, including granular role-based access control.

Unified Storage Visibility
New storage visibility shows the correlation between the application group and the storage infrastructure supporting it, including HBA’s, Fabric and Arrays, along with the ability to trace operational issues all the way to storage.

You can download vRealize Operations here.

You can view the release notes here.