Wrapping up my very first DockerCon. I learned great new things, was introduced to new tech and reconnected with some old friends.
This was my first convention in a very long time where I actually just attended the show and went to sessions. It was really nice. While people would usually read my blog looking for tips and tricks on how to do technical things and not my philosophic rambling. So I won’t try to be a pundit on announcements and competition and all that. Some cool things I learned:
Share everything on GitHub. People use github as the defacto standard for sharing information. Usually it is code, but lots more is out there including presentations and demos for a lot for what happened at DockerCon. Exciting for me as someone that always loved sharing what I learn via this blog is that this is expected. I will post some of my notes and other things about specific sessions once the info is all posted.
Being a “storage guy” for the past 6 years or so between Pure Storage and EMC it was good to see how many companies in the ecosystem have solutions built for CI/CD and Container Security. So much different than other shows where the Storage vendors dominate the mind share.
Over the years friends and co-workers have gone there own way and ended up all over the industry. Some of my favorite people that always put a very high value on community and sharing seem to be the same people that gravitate to DockerCon. It was great to see all of you and meet some new people.
More to follow as I pull my notes together and find links to the sessions.
Experimenting with Kubernetes to orchestrate and manage containers? If you are like me and already have a lot invested in vSphere (time, infra, knowledge) you might be exctied to use Kubernetes Anywhere to deploy it quickly. I won’t re-write the instruction found here:
The vSphere option uses the Photon OS ova to spin up the container hosts and managers. So you can try it out easily with very little background in containers. That is dangerous as you will find yourself neck deep in new things to learn.
Don’t turn on the template!
If you are like me and *skim* instructions you could be in for hours of “Why do all my nodes have the same IP?” When you power on the Photon OS template the startup sequence generates a machine ID (and mac address). So even though I powered it back off, the cloning processes was producing identical VM’s for my kubernetes cluster. Those not hip to networking this is bad for communication.
Also, don’t try to be a good VMware Admin cad convert that VM to a VM Template. The Kubernetes Anywhere script won’t find it.
IF you do like me and skip a few lines reading (happens right) make sure to check this documenation out on Photon OS. It will help get you on the right track.
I had an issue with the Docker Swarm subnet automatically generated when I do:
$docker swarm init
Basically it was choosing the subnet my VPN connection was using to assign an IP to my machine on the internal network. Obviously this wreaked havoc on me being able to connect to the docker hosts I was working with in our lab.
I decided it would be worth it to create the docker_gwbridge network and assign the CIDR subnet for the network that would not overlap with the VPN.
I did this before I created the swarm cluster. So far everything is working fine in the lab and I am able to SSH to the Docker Host and connect to the services I am testing on those machines. There may be other issues and I will report back as I find them.
Look for a post about going to In-n-Out some time soon, it is my tradition.
Be sure to check out what we will be doing at VMworld at the end of the month. Click the banner below once you are done being mesmerized by Chappy. Sign up for a 1:1 demo or meeting, I’ll be there are would love to meed with you. See how focused a demo I give.
Sessions to be sure to see featuring the Amazing Cody Hosterman
SDDC9456-SPO: Implementing Self-Service Storage Provisioning with vRealize Automation Xaas
VMware vCenter is no longer meant to be the end-user interface for requesting and managing virtual machines and related resources. Storage is no exception. Join Cody Hosterman as he discusses how vRealize Automation Anything-as-a-Service (Xaas) provides the ability to easily import vRealize Orchestrator workflows to control, manage and provision storage via the self-service catalog offering vRealize Automation.
Wednesday, Aug 31, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
NF9455-SPO: Best Practices for All-Flash Data Reduction Arrays with VMware vSphere
As All-Flash Data Reduction arrays are becoming common place in VMware environments due to their performance, flexibility and ease-of-use, it is important to understand how to best implement and manage them with EXXi. Data-reduction and flash changes how an administrator should think about various configuration options within VMware and those will be discussed in detail. VAAI, Space Reclamation, virtual disks, SIOC, SDRS Queue depths, Multipathing and other points will be highlighted.
So lets say the power goes out and half of the vm’s on your “lab storage that uses local disks” go into an infinite BSOD loop. I was lucky as one of the servers that still worked was a AD Domain Controller with DNS. Since I usually don’t try to fight BSOD’s and just rebuild. I did so. One very helpful page to move the AD roles was this article on seizing the roles. Which I had to do since the server holding the roles was DOA.
You may or may not have heard about Pure Storage and Cisco partnering to provide solutions together to help our current and prospective customers using UCS, Pure Storage, and VMware. These predesigned and tested architectures provide a full solution for compute, network and storage. Read more here:
There are more coming for SQL, Exchange, SAP and general Virtual Machines (I call it JBOVMs, Just a Bunch of VM’s).
Turn-key like solution for compute, network, and storage
Know how much and what to purchase when it comes to compute, network and storage as we have worked with Cisco to validate with actual real workloads. Many times mixed workloads because who runs just SQL or just Active Directory. It is proven and works. Up in running in a couple of days. If a couple of months was not good (legacy way), and then 2-4 weeks (newer way with legacy HW) wasn’t good enough, how about 1-2 days? For reals next generation datacenter. Also, scale compute, network and storage independently. Why buy extra hypervisor licenses when you just need 5 TB of space?
Ability to connect workload from/to the publics clouds (AWS, AZURE)
I don’t think as many people know this as they should, but Rob Barker “Barkz” is awesome. He worked hard to prove out the ability to use Pure FlashArray with Azure compute. Great read and more details here:
No secret here we are working hard to integrate with backup software vendors. Some have been slow and others have been willing to work with our API to make seamless backup and snapshot management integration with Pure and amazing thing.
Just one example of how Commvault is enabling backup to Azure:
Check how easy it is to setup the Commvault and Pure Storage.
Ease of storage allocation without the need of a storage specialist
If I have ever talked to you about Pure Storage and I didn’t say how simple it is to use or mention my own customers that are not “Storage Peeps” that manage it quite easily then I failed. Take away my Orange sunglasses.
If you are looking at FlashStack or just now finding out how easy it is now. Remember no Storage Ph.D. required. We even have nearly everything you need to be built into our free vSphere Plugin. Info from my here Cody Hosterman here.
A common question I get from my customers is: Why does vSphere say my data store is full? when the array is 4% used? I usually make a quick explanation of how the VMFS file system has no clue that the block device underneath is actually deduping and compressing the data. So even though you provisioned 1TB of VM’s the Array might only write a fraction of that amount. This can get many different reactions. Anger, disbelief, astonishment and understanding. This post is to visually show that what vSphere is thinking is used on VMFS will not necessarily be reflected the same on a data reducing array (including FlashArray).
When vSphere says I am FULL
Even when the FlashArray says plenty of space
You can tell from my environment testing vRealize Automation and Orchestrator that there is a lot more being “used” in vSphere than is written to the array. In your head start to do the match though. 3.4 times 8.19GB does not equal 169GB. That is because we do not claim thin provisioning as actual data reduction. This includes any set of “zeros”. Space not provisioned to a VM at all, the empty VMFS space AND the empty space provisioned to a VM (lazy or eager zeros) not consumed or written to by the VM. Since my enironment is mostly empty VM’s you can see the Total Reduction is ridiculously high.
Some solutions.
1. Use Thin Provisioned VM’s with Automatic UNMAP in vSphere 6. Read more from Cody Hosterman here. Direct Guest OS Unmap in vSphere 6.
This will give closer accounting of VM provisioned space and space consumed on the array. It is still not aware of the compression and dedupe behind the scenes on the array.
2. vVols provide the storage awareness needed to let VMware know the actual consumption per VM. Come see at the Pure Storage booth at VMworld.
Use the plugin!
At least you can quickly see that the 169.4GB will be reduced by 3.4:1 (for actual written data) all in one screen.
The best just gets better? Pure1 Manage is Pure Storage’s SaaS based management tool for Pure customers. Beside getting tons of health, capacity and performance information you now have some new. It is a pretty hard upgrade process that requires updating VM’s at each site and possibly some consulting services. Just kidding. It is already available, no effort from you required. Just login to pure1.purestorage.com.
Capacity Analytics
You are now able to use the Analytics tab to project out your current growth to determine when your array will be getting towards full. Very nice. Included with your Pure Storage FlashArray. No extra anything to buy. Sweet.
Support
Also, as a bonus, you can see the Support tab now in the Pure 1 Manage screen. This will let you see all open support tickets for each of your arrays. Simplicity wins every time. Keep checking the Pure 1 portal as our team rolls our great new innovations.
Have you registered for Pure Accelerate yet? You should do it right now.
The next great conference where you actually learn about what is pertinent to your passion for IT. Develop insight for what is next, and hear from your peers and industry experts about moving to the next generation of IT.
In 10 years you will tell people, yeah, I was at the very first Pure//Accelerate, I was there before EVERYONE else. You can be the IT hipster all over again. Before it moved to Moscone and had 30,000 people. You can move to Portland and drink IPA’s and post pictures of them to Instagram.
Pretty sure my friend Cody Hosterman has talked about this until he turned blue in the face. Just a point I want to quickly re-iterate here for the record. Run unmap on your vSphere Datastores.
Read this if you are running Pure Storage, but even if you run other arrays (especially all-flash) find a way to do UNMAP on a regular basis:
