Category: VMware

It’s been a while since I have last made a post, but a lot of things have been happening, a lot of new and exciting things – and I would like to share them with you.

After 8 and a half years, today marked my last day working within Education Queensland. it’s been a fun journey, having started out at a local primary school doing a traineeship one day a week, to moving through to a large high school in the end.

In my time working within EQ, I have gained a lot of knowledge that has put me in the position I am today. When I started, I knew enough to get by and to be able to troubleshoot. Once I moved out of my traineeship, I then moved on to a small high school that I was the sole technician, I was walking into a site that had been left unattended for 6 months, this is when things got interesting – The first thing was I had to work out how this site had been set up, second, “How do you use Novell?!?!”   That’s right, I had never used Novell. Luckily, it was still running and I just left it alone most of the time (We were less than 6 months away from being migrated to Windows to come uniform with the rest of EQ). The next great thing was I got to a lot of stuff about Macs and gained a really great friendship with the Apple developer in head office, I spent a lot of time testing and learning about Mac development.    I then had to move on to another site afterwards, back to a primary school which had more students and more computers, but this was a great place to experience how I could make the most of a small budget, it was a really great experience.

Now the big one, The last  3 years have been my biggest. Each student in one year level had a laptop, this then grew to over 3 year levels while a fraction of the remaining two had their own laptop as well – This was easy, just a lot of logging jobs with the vendor for warranty or accidental repair.
That wasn’t just it, this site was amazing in what it could bring out of me, in the early days I started to study for my MCSE, I then slowly but then suddenly got involved in maintaining the vSphere infrastructure.

June 2013, I remember that month as the month my IT focus shifted and moved in a new direction which has since allowed me in just over a year to accomplish and be apart of some amazing things that can only get better. All of a sudden, I started to read and watch videos on virtualization, within 3 months I was already doing a full site migration from Hyper-V and designing new infrastructure for another company while still working daily at the school.   Into the start of this year, we did a full migration from vSphere 4.x to 5.5.  The amount of research and lab testing I did at home really taught me a lot.  Since June last year, in almost no time I was attending VMUGs, planning potential trips to vForum (timing didn’t work out), buying lots of books from Amazon and getting involved in whatever online group I could involved in Virtualization. The best so far was becoming a vExpert this year. It’s been a great journey.

Now, after that “quick” history lesson, I am proud to announce as of Monday I start my new job working at 6YS Cloud Computing as a System Engineer. This is going to produce some new learning challenges and I am excited. I want make mention at this point of Craig Waters (@cswaters1) post Keep Challenging Yourself as he touches on getting out of his comfort zone to challenge himself to learn and grow. This is what I am hoping for, New Challanges, and I know there will be some from day one as I will need to learn Citrix quickly, and I can’t wait! 


I like to call this “End of Chapter 8” as it is the 8th significant time in my life so far. Chapter 9 is about to begin. 


Thank you for reading. 


Keiran. 

I rebuilt my lab today from scratch after having used AutoLAB for a little while and as much as I love AutoLAB and highly recommend it, I needed to go back to basics so I can lab up AutoDeploy and a few other things that are automated using AutoLAB.

I finished setting up my domain with a DC, vCenter/Starwind iSCSI, and 2 hosts. I had gone through and added my licenses and set up my networking – or at least I thought I had!  I was finally up to a point where I thought I would start placing some VMs onto the hosts and thought I would start by just deploying a couple of Virtual Appliances so that I could make sure my iSCSI was running and I could get network access correctly.

I started by deploying vMA Virtual Appliance, easy – Accept the license agreement > set static IP > Done. (Plus a couple of other tick and flick options).   Awesome ready to start it up… wrong!  I receive an error.  vami.netmask0 

2. Select the IP Pools tab associated with the Data Center and click “Add”

 5. Power on and test the the Virtual Appliance.

Simple.


Thank you for reading and I hope you find this helpful.

Regards
Keiran.

P.S. Please leave a comment or contact me about this post, or any other post.

When starting your VDI design you need to understand your client’s needs, and they might not be as simple as you may think. Many things can turn your simple VDI infrastructure into a complex infrastructure just by having mixed needs of the users. Your company that you are building the environment for may have several departments, with each department requiring a different experience.

Take for example an engineering company. If you are familiar with engineers straight away you will probably jump to the conclusion that you will need an infrastructure that can do high graphics rendering – That’s a good start, but what the other departments? There may be receptionists, CEO, contractors, project managers, and many more that all require different access to software and processing power.

Understanding your users paramount – oversubscribing their resources or under subscribing can have a detrimental effect on either that users experience or on another.

There are certain components that you need to pay close attention to, and can be rated in a different order to Server Virtualization:

Disk is very important, when you think about it a standard desktop used by your average user is running on a single hard drive. When you add several more users accessing that particular drive at once and reading the same data source, things become a little bit slow and frustrating. The way to combat low IOPs and disk contention is to understand how many IOPs a single 7.2k hard drive and then times it by the number of users – This number could end up being quite high, but it will give you an idea of what your users are using.
There are several options on how you can deploy your disks, you can either run them from a SAN using Fiber Channel, Fiber Channel over Ethernet or iSCSI. You can also now leverage vSAN with Horizon 6, this is not only giving you a simpler design, but may also increase your performance while driving down infrastructure costs.

IOPs is not the only aspect of the disk that needs attention, size is also critical, particularly if you have users who like to store their items on the “Local” disk and not on any of the mapped storage drives, etc.  As part of the configuration control that you as an administrator has, you can use certain settings to help prevent the user from storing their data on what is potentially the local disk by setting up profile redirection – both windows server and horizon have the capabilities of this.

CPU is one area that you will need prior knowledge to make sure you can get it right. Unlike server virtualization where you can be more sure of the VM requirements, VDI can be a much larger kettle of fish. It’s best to research and find out what the OS, applications and user requirements are before over/under subscribing CPU resources.

Memory  is quite simple to work with in a VDI design as over subscribing is not a good idea as you do not want your users to experience the effects of the swap file. A good way to avoid any swap file usage is to make sure that your hosts are sitting comfortably with a good amount of memory.

There are three layers that make up a virtual desktop experience for the user. The three elements are Persona, Application and OS. By separating these you are then creating less administrative support required.

Figure 1.1

As figure 1.1 shows, you are able to create a master image that has your configuration set for all the users, next you have your ThinApp that is again a master application, followed by each users persona. Any settings or changes the user makes is stored as part of their persona. This allows the administrator to focus on only needing to provide an operating system and application per department needs, if not the entire company.

Hopefully this has given some insight into some of the components and design aspects that need to be understood before implementing a solution.  

The key is to know what your users require, where your resources will be used and where will they sit idle if you provide too many resources.

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to contact me.

Thanks for viewing.

-Keiran.

I have been presented today with an opportunity to design and implement a small VDI setup for an Open Day my organisation is having in two weeks to show what we are aiming to provide as a solution next year. For those that don’t know, I currently work as IT support in a secondary school here is Brisbane; we have just started looking at BYOD options for 2015 and VDI is looking like an option.

My first thought was “Sweet, time to rack stack, run up a couple of VMs and connect a few different devices.”  Sounds pretty easy, well.. to be honest, this is really the first I’ve had to deal with VDI. I’ve played around with Citrix XenApp at home, but nothing like this.

So with this as a slight bump, I have decided to embark on a 2 week challenge to study/learn, design and implement a small scale enterprise VDI infrastructure using VMware Horizon View.

Tonight and tomorrow night are going to be a couple of slow evenings with content as I find what I need, however, I am off and reading up.

Day 1. 

Tonight wasn’t quite the best night to start, limited time as I had other plans beforehand, but none the less, I have got straight in and started with the basics. I have watched 2 CBT Nugget videos of the Horizon View 5 – VCP5-DT with Greg Shields (@concentratdgreg) series and read the first chapter of Building End User Computing Solutions with VMware View by Mike Laverick (@Mike_Laverick) and Barry Coombs (@VirtualisedReal) : http://www.lulu.com/shop/mike-laverick-and-barry-coombs/building-end-user-computing-solutions-with-vmware-view/ebook/product-20368612.html

There are multiple components that go hand in hand to create a View infrastructure. Each of these are required to do specific tasks to streamline the experience for the end user. 

Connection Server:  The Connection Server is designed to be the link between the end user and the environment to which they are connecting to. This server authenticated the link and opens the view for the user to see. This can also be referred to as “The Broker”.  The Connection server leverages AD for authentication purposes. 

View Composer: The View Composer is service/application that sits along side your vCenter Server to build Master Images or link clones. 

Agent: Installs inside the VM OS to add extra functionality to the VM. 

Client: The client is installed on the End User computer to allow the user to connect to the connection server and pull up their Virtual Desktop environment. 

View Administrator: Connects to the Connection Server to control and manage the View infrastructure. Used to instruct View Connection Server to work with ESXi Servers. View Administrator also controls vcenter Server and View Composer.

Security Server:  The Security Server is designed to sit inside your DMZ or private network to securely connect your clients to your environment.


Each component downloads as a separate .exe from the VMware website. 


As I said early, this was a short night, and hopefully within the next couple of days I can get stuck into large amounts of content. Tomorrow I will be starting to put my lab together and will hopefully have some pretty pictures to add to these posts.

Thank you for reading. If you have an suggestions or comments. please leave a comment below or contact me.

Thanks.

Keiran.

It brings something warm to my heart every time I see a twitter post, or a blog about something new, or something exciting happening at VMUGs all around the world. I still feel fairly fresh to the VMUG community scene, only having joined mid last year, and only attended several VMUGs since joining, but it is a great community to be a part of and I feel very welcome.

Hello Everyone!

I just want to say a big thank you to everyone who has read my blog, I know there isn’t that much on here and possibly some stuff is also available on other blogs and websites. I am, however, grateful to be accepted as a vExpert for 2014.  This has been a great feeling as it allows me to know that I am recognised for my contributions and involvement in VMUGs and the greater community.

As I mentioned in my last post, I am currently working on a new project that is still in the works, but team and I are very excited about what it will bring. I hope you keep your eyes out as it will hopefully be ready in the next week or two.

Applications are now open for round 2 of this years vExpert intake. If you would like to apply please follow this link to find out more. http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2014/04/vexpert-2014-q2-applications-open.html

Thanks again to you all. If there is anything you would like me to research and write about, or any suggestions for the blog, please leave a comment or contact me by my contact details on the contact page.

Thank You.

Keiran.

It’s been over a month since my last post, I have been involved in a side project that I am very excited about and in the process of developing. However, more to come on the later on.

What’s worse than having a VM, disk, controller, RAM stick or even a host fail?  Well, what about not knowing it has failed???  Have you ever turned up to work, gone and grabbed a coffee on the way through to your desk, sat down and started reading through the emails you received over night to get them out of the way only to have the phone start ringing off the hook.
“I can’t access the company portal.”
“I can’t send any emails”
“I’m getting a weird message about something called a server being offline?”

Straight away you jump into the vSphere client to check what is going on, low and behold, a host has failed and several VMs have not migrated and restarted, as per the cluster HA policy.

How could have you known sooner so that you could get those VMs back up and running before getting your morning coffee?  Enter, RVTools and vCheck.

RVTOOLS – http://robware.net/index.php/5-sectionarticle/category/29-rvtools-home

This is an awesome little program design by Rob De Veij from Amsterdam.  It is full of excellent information for you to oversee your vCenter infrastructure. Started in 2008, the program has evolved to include many features from just your individual VMs with information about their hardware through to whether or not they have a heartbeat. Your datastores and their sizes and the percentage or free storage left.

RVTools is a simple install and simple to use. Once installed, just open the desktop icon and log onto your vCenter, just as you would with the vSphere C# Client, it even allows you to use your Current Logged On User account.

Figure 1.1 – vInfo

In Figure 1.1, you will see the number of tabs that are available to display huge amounts of information, but keep it all quick and simple to view. In vInfo, apart from how many CPUs, and how memory is allocated to the VM, you will also find fault tolerance enable/disable, FT bandwidth and latency, the HA restart priority for each VM and isolation response. There is so much more.

Figure 1.2 – vDisk

Figure 1.3 – vPort

The last tab is vHealth, it is a very handy tab to have as it quite specific on any errors, or non compliance that may be in environment. It will tell you if a host/Vm is unable to be reached, or if a datastore is running out of room and has less than 10% left of storage. 

VMware has just released 2 weeks ago an updated blueprint (v3.1) aimed at the new VCP5-DCV exam for vSphere 5.5.  In the past, VMware has released exams that just add extra questions for the minor releases – However, 5.5 was a bit closer to a major release than a minor, which includes some major differences and therefore supporting the need for a new exam.

Welcome to the second part of the storage segment. This time I want to cover setting up a nested iSCSI target in VMware Workstation. The idea is to create a shared datastore for the training lab so that you may be able to play around and use different features of vSphere that use shared storage. I am using OpenFiler but you can use FreeNAS, NAS4Free, StarWinds iSCSI Target for Windows, etc.

1. Create a New VM with 1 CPU/1GB Ram/ 13Gb HDD
2. Add a second HDD to the VM large enough to hold a couple of VMs from ESXi (40 – 80Gb recommended)
3. Connect the OpenFiler ISO to the CD Rom in VMware Workstation
4. Start the VM and select Boot from CD
5. Click Next > Select Language 
6. Select the small 13Gb drive and make sure it is set as Boot drive > click Next and accept Erase all data. 
7. Click Edit > Put in IP address settings for your network > Click OK > type hostname > type Gateway and DNS
8. Click Next > type in root password > click next and wait for install process
9. Click reboot
10. Once restarted open up your web browser and go to https://:446
11. Log on with Username:  openfiler   Password: password
12. Click on Services and click enable and start on iSCSI Initiator and iSCSI Target
13. Select Volumes > Click Create New Physical Volume
14. Select /dev/sdb depending on which drive is not your OS drive.
15. Change your partition size to suit and click create
16. Select Add Volume on the right > Give the Volume a name and select the disk
17. Select iSCSI Target > Click Add for the Target IQN
18. Select Add Volume > type a name for the LUN > Select the size for LUN > select block filesystem
19. Select iSCSI Targets > LUN Mapping > Click Map

Thank you for viewing. If you have any comments, suggestions or would like me to cover a topic, please leave a comment.

To start off the New Year, we all have resolutions that we set (eat less, exercise more, work harder, etc.). My wife and I have decided that we should go walking every morning before work, and any afternoon that isn’t interrupted by finishing work late. This I believe is achievable as we are working together and motivating each other at the same time.

RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks)  can be configured at the hardware or the software level each have their advantages and disadvantages. RAID done at the hardware level  gains the advantage of having a controller to work through the data that needs to be written to the drives. RAID done at a software level relies on the CPU to read and write data.

There are many types of RAID that you can choose from, each providing their own form on redundancy or performance.

• RAID 0 “Stripe” = Two or more disks sharing data between to increase performance and capacity. The multiple disks will be seen as one large drive, this also increases performance as data is split between the drives and is read at the same time cutting down read times.
  RAID 0 is not designed for production uses and does not offer redundancy if a hard drive fails. In most cases you will not be able to retrieve data as part of it may be sitting on the dead hard drive.
• RAID 1 “Mirror” = RAID 1 is the first level of redundant RAID. It requires at least double the amount of drives you are going to use for data.  If one drive is only required then an identical drive is required to copy data to. RAID 1 works by writing data at the same time to both drives creating a failover drive. Data can be read from both drives allowing for higher read performance.  RAID 1 can be scaled out to multiple drives, this can be achieved by presenting two lots of RAID 0 drives – This is called RAID 0 + 1 where there is two sets of RAID 0 are mirrored – The other is RAID 1 + 0 where multiple mirrored drives are placed into a RAID 0 set, this is also referred to as a NESTED RAID.

  

  

  

• RAID 5 & RAID 6 “Parity” – In these two RAID levels a parity mathematical calculation is used across three or more drives providing the advantage of RAID 1 with the capacity ability of RAID 0.
  RAID 5 allows for one disk to fail without disruption to data, however it does also come with a disadvantage of losing a drive to the total capacity as it is required as the spare to keep the production environment available. Once a replacement drive has been sourced to replace the dead disk, data is replicated back to the new disk to rebuild the RAID array. A Hot Spare is recommended to keep in the chassis in case the drive fails when the data center is unattended to start the rebuild process immediately.
  RAID 6 works on the same principal as RAID 5 however it allows for two disks to fail as it loses two drives as spares.
  Be aware that the rebuild process is very rough on the disks as they are still working the production environment while also rebuilding the new disk. The best time to rebuild is during after hours when disks are less likely to be used. 

Depending on where these drives will be installed and what they are used for can determine which RAID level you require. 

For example, if you are wanting to just install your OS on a redundant set of drives and create a separate RAID for data, then a Mirror level would save you money and provide a one-disk backup. 

Most, if not all storage vendors have a recommendation list for what they believe to be best practice. In a SAN storage design, RAID 5 or 6 is highly recommended as it provides a high level of redundancy. Some vendors recommend having a hot spare per shelf, or per 30 drives, however, this does change between each vendors, so it is best to check with them.

Choosing your RAID design is simple if you consider Capacity/Performance/Redundancy. Although, if you choose the wrong RAID level then you may be in trouble as you will be required to go through the lengthy process of copying the data off and recreating the RAID. 

Part 2 will be on Storage network and design. Stay Tuned! 

Thank you for reading, if you have any comments, questions or recommendations for future posts, please don’t hesitate to contact me.