Tag:

VMware

vCenter Converter 6.6 BETA

by Roger Lund April 26, 2024

written by Roger Lund

Those who haven’t saw this, VMware by Broadcom has release a VMware vCenter Converter 6.6 Beta.

”

VMware by Broadcom is thrilled to announce the Beta release of the vCenter Converter 6.6. After the success of the previous two editions, which have accumulated more than 200K downloads combined, we’re delivering to our customers the latest version of this popular tool. The Beta is available for downloads from the dedicated website. If you haven’t registered to the vCenter Converter Beta program, you can do so by submitting this form.

vCenter Converter 6.6 closes important gaps from functional perspective, by finally providing the capability to convert KVM-based workloads, including AHV and RHV formats. We are also covering the support for RHEL 8 & 9 as source OS, as well as latest Ubuntu versions: 22.04 and 20.04.

Read more at https://blogs.vmware.com/code/2024/01/22/vcenter-converter-6-6-beta-is-now-live/

”

April 26, 2024 0 comments

AI vExpert VMware VMware VSAN ESA vsan

VMware VSAN ESA Re-balance

by Roger Lund October 15, 2023

written by Roger Lund

After I moved my VM’s to the vsan, I saw this warning.

So lets go ahead and enable auto re-balancing,

Lets go to the cluster, Configure, vSAN, And Services.

A screenshot of a computer

Description automatically generated with medium confidence

Lets click on edit, Under Advanced Options

A screenshot of a computer

Description automatically generated with medium confidence

Lets change automatic re-balance to enable, and click Apply.

A screenshot of a screen

Description automatically generated with low confidence

Now lets go to monitor, vSAN and Re-syncing Objects

A screenshot of a computer

Description automatically generated with medium confidence

As you can see, there are items with the intent to re-balance on the right.

And now there are none.

A screenshot of a computer

Description automatically generated with medium confidence

I asked Chat GPT the following to see what it thought about why we need to do this.

me: “in VMware vSAN, why is re-balancing important?”

ChatGPT

VMware vSAN (Virtual SAN) is a software-defined storage solution that pools local storage resources of ESXi hosts to provide a highly available and resilient shared storage solution for virtual machines. Re-balancing in vSAN is an essential operation for various reasons:

Even Distribution of Data: Over time, as workloads change, new data is written, and old data is deleted, the distribution of data across the disks and hosts can become uneven. Re-balancing ensures that the data is uniformly spread across the cluster, maximizing the utilization of resources.
Performance Optimization: An imbalanced cluster can lead to some disks or hosts being more heavily utilized than others. This can result in performance hotspots. By re-balancing the data, the I/O load is spread more evenly across the cluster, which can enhance overall performance.
Capacity Management: If one disk or host becomes fuller than others, it might run out of space even when other parts of the vSAN cluster have ample free space. Re-balancing helps in ensuring that storage capacity is used effectively, and no node runs out of space prematurely.
After Adding or Removing a Disk/Host: When you add new hosts or disks to a vSAN cluster, they start empty. vSAN’s re-balancing operation ensures that the new resources are utilized efficiently. Similarly, when a disk or host is removed, the data from that resource needs to be redistributed to maintain the desired fault tolerance levels.
Ensuring Compliance with Storage Policies: vSAN allows you to define storage policies that determine factors like fault tolerance and stripe width. If the data isn’t balanced properly, it might not meet the requirements of these policies. Re-balancing helps in ensuring that the data complies with the set policies.
Maintenance Operations: Before performing maintenance tasks or updates on a host, you may need to evacuate the data. After completing the task and bringing the host back, re-balancing can help restore the data distribution to its optimal state.
Health and Monitoring: vSAN health checks monitor for imbalances in the cluster. Re-balancing helps in rectifying those imbalances, thus ensuring the cluster remains in a healthy state.

It’s worth noting that VMware vSAN has automated mechanisms to handle some level of re-balancing operations in the background. However, there are scenarios, especially in rapidly changing environments, where manual intervention or closer monitoring might be necessary to ensure optimal performance and capacity utilization.

what do you think, is it far off?

That’s all for today 😊

October 15, 2023 0 comments

vExpert VMware VMware VSAN ESA vsan

VMware VSAN ESA with Intel Optane 900P drives.

by Roger Lund October 14, 2023

written by Roger Lund

Intel was kind enough to supply me with Intel Optane 900P drives for my Lab. As you know I am part of the VMware vExpert program, that allows things like this.

So naturally, the first thing I want to do is configure the VSAN ESA Express Storage Architecture. https://core.vmware.com/vsan-esa

Since AI is on our minds, I thought I would ask it to give us a overview and do a intro. Of course I used our favorite Chat GTP4.

This was done with VMware vSphere 8 update 1.

“

Greetings, dear readers! As an artificial intelligence developed by OpenAI, known as ChatGPT, I’m here to introduce you to a fascinating subject that’s changing the game in data storage and management: VMware’s Express Storage Architecture (ESA), especially in the context of the recently released vSAN 8 U1. This article has been commissioned to provide you with an understanding of ESA and to walk you through setting it up with Intel Optane PCIE 900P’s in Cisco UCS Hosts.

VMware’s vSAN 8 U1 marks a significant advancement in data storage with its introduction of ESA. This development enhances dis-aggregated storage, a robust and successful method for customers to share vSAN storage resources with other vSAN clusters or compute-only clusters. With the incorporation of ESA, users can now mount remote vSAN datastores housed in different vSAN clusters, leveraging an ESA cluster as an external storage resource for a vSphere cluster. All this while maintaining the ease of use that customers have come to appreciate from vSAN’s Original Storage Architecture (OSA).

Another salient feature of vSAN 8 U1 is the support for vSAN stretched clusters with disaggregation in vSAN, made possible by the OSA. This feature optimizes network paths for specific topologies, leading to improved performance capabilities in stretched cluster configurations.

Lastly, vSAN 8 U1 allows for dis-aggregation across clusters managed by different vCenter server instances, offering a level of scalability and flexibility previously unattainable.

However, this high-level overview only scratches the surface of what VMware’s Express Storage Architecture truly brings to the table. The meat of our exploration lies in how we can set up ESA using Intel Optane PCIE 900P’s in Cisco UCS Hosts, and that’s what we’ll focus on in the upcoming parts of this article.

So stay tuned, and together we’ll deep dive into the nuts and bolts of this innovative storage solution, exploring the possibilities and benefits it can bring to your organization’s IT infrastructure.
“

I then asked the following.

“now give a overview of how this ESA behaves differently than vSAN in lets say vsphere 7.x in this scenario. 3 UCS C220’s with 2 Optane drives each.”

“
VMware’s Express Storage Architecture (ESA) introduced in vSAN 8 U1 brings notable changes in the way vSAN manages and operates storage, especially compared to previous vSAN versions like those integrated into vSphere 7.x. For the purposes of this overview, let’s consider a scenario where we have three Cisco UCS C220 hosts, each equipped with two Intel Optane drives.

In the traditional vSAN environment you might have encountered in vSphere 7.x, storage resources are pooled together across the cluster, with each host contributing storage to the vSAN datastore. vSAN then handles the distribution and management of this storage resource, providing the illusion of a single, unified datastore. This distributed nature of vSAN allows for high resilience, as data is typically mirrored or erasure-coded across multiple hosts. However, this traditional architecture does not readily support the sharing of vSAN storage resources with other vSAN clusters or compute-only clusters.

Enter VMware’s Express Storage Architecture in vSAN 8 U1. ESA introduces the capability of storage dis-aggregation, allowing the vSAN storage resources to be shared with other vSAN clusters or even with compute-only clusters. So in our scenario, if one of the UCS C220’s with its pair of Optane drives was part of a separate vSAN cluster (or was a compute-only cluster), it could still access and use the storage resources of the other two hosts via ESA. This results in enhanced flexibility and utilization of storage resources.

ESA also supports dis-aggregation in vSAN in both standard and stretched cluster configurations, although some limitations exist. While it brings added capabilities, there are features such as cross-vCenter Server capabilities, support for stretched clusters, and de-duplication that are not currently supported in ESA but are part of the traditional vSAN architecture.

The integration of Intel Optane drives plays a crucial role in both these architectures. In vSAN 7.x, Optane drives can be used as cache to dramatically improve the performance of the vSAN cluster. In vSAN 8 U1 with ESA, the same drives can still be used for caching, but they can also be used more flexibly because of the dis-aggregation feature. This means the performance benefits of the Optane drives can be enjoyed by all clusters with access to the dis-aggregated storage.

In conclusion, while the traditional vSAN as found in vSphere 7.x provides a solid and robust storage platform, the introduction of ESA in vSAN 8 U1 brings a level of flexibility and interoperability that was not previously possible, opening up new ways to maximize your infrastructure’s efficiency and performance.

“

Next I go to the datastore, and change the storage policy

Why? Lets see what Chat GPT says about it.

I asked “I set the storage policy to ESA Default Raid 5, explain how it differences from vSAN of old.”

“
The Express Storage Architecture (ESA) in VMware vSAN 8 has introduced significant changes to how RAID-5 is implemented and managed compared to previous versions of vSAN. This new architecture aims to provide improved performance, space efficiency, and adaptability. Here are the key differences when you set the storage policy to ESA Default Raid 5 compared to the traditional vSAN:

Performance and Space Efficiency: In previous versions of vSAN, using RAID-5 resulted in some performance trade-offs due to the computational complexity of erasure coding, despite its better space efficiency compared to RAID-1. With vSAN 8’s ESA, RAID-5 can now deliver the same level of performance as RAID-1, meaning you get RAID-1-like performance with the space efficiency of RAID-5. This is made possible by ESA’s log-structured file system and optimized data structure.

Erasure Coding Schemes: The traditional vSAN used a 3+1 RAID-5 erasure coding scheme, where data was written as a stripe consisting of 3 data bits and 1 parity bit, across at least 4 hosts. The ESA in vSAN 8 replaces this with two new RAID-5 erasure codes – a 4+1 scheme (4 data bits and 1 parity bit across at least 5 hosts) and a 2+1 scheme (2 data bits and 1 parity bit across at least 3 hosts). These new schemes offer better space efficiency, especially for smaller clusters.

Adaptive RAID-5: vSAN 8’s ESA introduces an adaptive RAID-5 feature that automatically adjusts the RAID-5 erasure code based on the host count in the cluster. This means the system will optimize the RAID-5 scheme for your current configuration without requiring manual intervention. This is a key improvement in terms of ease of management and ensuring optimal data resilience.

Data Resilience: The ESA Default Raid 5 provides better resilience in face of host failure. When a host fails, the system automatically adjusts to maintain data availability while also keeping the prescribed level of resilience.

Overall, these differences mean that when you set the storage policy to ESA Default Raid 5 in vSAN 8, you’re using a much more space-efficient, resilient, and performance-optimized version of RAID-5 compared to previous versions of vSAN. This all translates into a higher effective storage capacity, better performance, and simpler management for your vSAN clusters.

“

Let’s go ahead and set it!

A screenshot of a computer Description automatically generated with medium confidence

If we go to the VSAN services, we can see it now has the policy.

A screenshot of a computer Description automatically generated with medium confidence

Next we are going to migrate a VM to the workload

A screenshot of a computer Description automatically generated with medium confidence

Under VM Storage Policy, select the policy, and the vsanDatastore.

A screenshot of a computer Description automatically generated with medium confidence

A screenshot of a computer Description automatically generated

Click Finish

Lets go ahead and Migrate a VM to it.

A screenshot of a computer Description automatically generated

To show more movement, I queued another VM to migrate.

Ok, lets click on the cluster, monitor, vSAN and then performance, and click backend.

A screenshot of a computer Description automatically generated with low confidence

We can see some traffic.

Lets change to real time. Under the drop down.

A screenshot of a computer Description automatically generated with low confidence

To note, I only have a single 10GB link per host, until I can run some more cabling. And I am migrating from a Hybrid Truenas array.

More to come on this front for Sure!

October 14, 2023 0 comments

Kubernetes VMware

Getting Started with Tanzu Kubernetes in vSphere 8

by Philip Sellers January 20, 2023

written by Philip Sellers

This post is the first in a series of creating Tanzu Kubernetes on vSphere 8. I’m doing this my home lab, which I have decided to create with an Orange theme, because its not an Apple lab. (Yes, that’s cringy dad-joke territory.)

So what is done up to this point in the lab?

Purchased a Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro as my core switch & router
Setup several VLANs for vSphere use
- Management VLAN
- vMotion VLAN
- FT VLAN
- Storage VLAN for iSCSI
- VSAN VLAN (for later)
- Servers VLAN for VM workloads
Purchased 3 x HP Z640 workstations with Xeon processors, RAM and an SSD boot disk
Setup iSCSI from a Synology NAS
Added dual 10Gb NICs to each host and added a Ubiquiti 8 port 10Gb Switch
Used 1 0 G t e k b r a n d TwinAx/DAC 10Gb cables to connect things up
Installed ESXi 8.0.0 on each host
Deployed vCenter 8.0.0
Configured a Standard vSwitch and Distributed vSwitch
Setup iSCSI software adapters, configured, connected and provisioned 2 x 1TB VMFS datastores

Deploying TKG

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) with vSphere 8 has gotten significantly simpler, in my eyes. The wizards in vCenter 8 are great and walking a novice through the deployment of TKG in a simplistic way, however, there are somethings that flow better with the workflow if you’ve completed prep before hand.

Checklist of items to complete before the Workload Management wizard

vSphere Enterprise Plus licensing is required because DRS (and vSphere Distributed Switch) is required. HA also needs to be enabled.
You will need to make some basic network decisions around load balancing.
- You will either need to use native vSphere Distributed Switches (VDS) or NSX
- For vSphere Distributed Switches, you need a load balancer. Either deploying NSX Advanced Load Balancer or HAProxy load balancer are you two options.
- For NSX, you’ll use their internal load balancing features of NSX.
- NSX-T is supported and you can use a vSphere Distributed Switch (a converged distributed switch) but not a NSX Distributed Switch/N-DVS). You must migrate if you use N-VDS.
You need to setup and define vSphere Zones or your Tanzu is limited to a single vSphere cluster. Personally recommend setting up a zone (see below).
A storage policy is required.
Management Network – control plane VMs to the Supervisor cluster
Workload Network – traffic to the Kubernetes API, workloads, and services

vSphere Zones

Most customers are probably not leveraging vSphere Zones. This feature in vSphere is for multiple zone deployments when a customer scales to multiple colocation datacenters or clouds. I would recommend that even as you start your Tanzu journey, even if you only have a single zone – go ahead and create a single zone. This is one step in future-proofing your Tanzu installation. The whole idea of Kubernetes is enabling your cloud-native applications to be deployed across multiple clouds for resiliency. By creating your first zone, you create your first step in this journey. For more detail, see this article.

If you choose not to use vSphere Zones, you’ll need to choose a cluster to assign your Tanzu deployment onto.

New Networks for Tanzu and HAProxy (or NSX)

I created 3 new networks for Tanzu and HAProxy. The first is a Kubernetes Control Plane network. The second is a Load Balancer network. The third is a Kubernetes workload network.

The Kubernetes Control plane will be used for the HAProxy management network. This is where Tanzu will talk to HAProxy to configure and programmatically setup external access to your Kubernetes workloads. “Programatically” is the key here. Kubernetes will reach out to HAProxy and make all the magic happen automatically. While I’m talking about HAProxy – the same is true with NSX Advanced Load Balancer (aka AVI Networks) or NSX-T’s built-in load balancer.

The Load Balancer network is where your external endpoints for your workloads are going to be exposed. It is a range of IP addresses. For your production workloads, this is the network that should scale with the number of workloads you plan to have. Keep in mind, this is for the single zone (back to the previous concept) – so enough external IP addresses

HA Proxy Download and Config

Review the requirements of HAProxy Load Balancer from VMware. You can obtain the current OVA from VMware’s GitHub for HAProxy – https://github.com/haproxytech/vmware-haproxy.

As you deploy, take note of the following things that you will need during the configuration. Network settings and some backend network configuration for the HAProxy configuration is definitely required.

HAProxy Load Balancer Controller Endpoint – this is the API endpoint that Tanzu will call to configure HAProxy. This is the primary integration point of HAProxy with your Kubernetes and vSphere clusters.
Username and password configured during the HAProxy deployment
Virtual IP Address Ranges
TLS Certificate from the HAProxy appliance

I loaded the HAProxy OVA into my Content Library (aka The Barn) and then cloned a VM out from this location. It is a standard OVA deployment and you’ll be prompted for configuration to deploy. This guide does a great job of walking you through the HAProxy deployment.

Wizard, wizard

Welcome. The pre-requisites are listed and linked to documentation.

Decisions, decisions – What vCenter Server and what network technology will you use? The wizard adjust based on your choices. For a base level in the lab, I’m deploying VDS.

Next step is choosing where to deploy your Supervisor cluster – the Kubernetes cluster that controls all workload Kubernetes clusters in your deployment. This is where you can choose and associate a vSphere Zone to allow for scale and multi-zone resiliency.

You’ll choose a storage policy – easy peasy.

Next, your load balancer configuration – as noted from above for HAProxy, will be required to input and associate the stand-alone HAProxy or HAProxy cluster.

Next, you’ll use your planned management network

Lastly, your workloads will need a place to run. This is where the Kubernetes API, workloads and services will run – but the API needs to be accessible to interact with other services. Behind the covers, the Kubernetes cluster will run in its own private IP space, that is not of real concern.

Deploy.

Monitor.

Done.

January 20, 2023 0 comments

Kubernetes VMware

Error deploying VMware’s demo Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster on vCenter 8

by Philip Sellers January 6, 2023

written by Philip Sellers

For users getting started on vSphere 8 and Tanzu, after you get everything setup and configured, you’ll likely hit a snag. VMware’s GitHub hosts a quick start guide and YAML manifest for deploying your first Tanzu workload cluster. It will fail with the following error:

Error from server (unable to find a compatible full version matching version hint "1.18" and default OS labels: "os-arch=amd64,os-name=photon,os-type=linux,os-version=3.0".

vCenter and Kubernetes Versioning

Why does this error? This is a brand new cluster, after all? The answer is a versioning issue.

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is tied to the vCenter version and since we are running vSphere 8 and vCenter 8, the release has specific Kubernetes releases it supports. K8s 1.18 is not compatible. vCenter 8.0.0.10100 releases with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.6.1. The compatible versions for vCenter 8.0.0.10100 are Kubernetes 1.21, 1.22 and 1.23. The supervisor cluster deployed with vCenter 8.0.0.10100 is Kubernetes 1.23.10.

My VMware team has told me that each vCenter will ship with a specific K8 release and upgrading vCenter is the way to upgrade your Tanzu Kubernetes versions. In addition to the vCenter and Tanzu Supervisor Cluster being tied at the hip, VMware will support the current and two prior K8 releases on each vCenter version.

VMware, for its part, doesn’t do much to help the confusion of versioning – as Tanzu has its own versioning, separate from vCenter and separate from the Kubernetes releases. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid version 1.6.1 has K8 version 1.23.10 as its release. TKG 1.5.4 was K8 1.22.9, TKG 1.4.2 was K8 1.21.8.

Demo YAML File

Source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vsphere-tmm/vsphere-with-tanzu-quick-start/master/manifests/tkc.yaml

apiVersion: run.tanzu.vmware.com/v1alpha1
kind: TanzuKubernetesCluster
metadata:
  name: tkc-1
spec:
  distribution:
    version: v1.18
  topology:
    controlPlane:
      class: guaranteed-small
      count: 1
      storageClass: kubernetes-demo-storage
    workers:
      class: guaranteed-small
      count: 1
      storageClass: kubernetes-demo-storage
  settings:
    storage:
      classes: ["kubernetes-demo-storage"]           #Named PVC storage classes
      defaultClass: kubernetes-demo-storage          #Default PVC storage class

Troubleshooting the Issue

The first thought is, can my supervisor cluster see the library of Kubernetes images? How can I verify that? Google results point me to a post from Anthony S p i t e r i w i t h s o m e h e l p f u l t r o u b l e s h o o t i n g c o m m a n d s . After verifying that my content library was linked correctly, I ran the following command:

kubectl get virtualmachineimages

This output is a good sign. I can see that I have a LOT of images that are available to this namespace. That’s promising, but no silver bullet why I’m getting this error. Digging a bit further into Google results, I hit another kubectl command:

kubectl get tanzukubernetesreleases

BINGO. In the output, I noticed that the version I requested in the YAML was not “READY” or “COMPATIBLE” in the list.

What needs to be altered to allow this to run on vCenter 8 and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.6.1?

Its a simple change – just adjust the distribution version number to 1.21, 1.22, or 1.23. The error is very helpful, in that it says it can’t find a compatible version.

Working YAML

apiVersion: run.tanzu.vmware.com/v1alpha1
kind: TanzuKubernetesCluster
metadata:
  name: tkc-1
spec:
  distribution:
    version: v1.23
  topology:
    controlPlane:
      class: guaranteed-small
      count: 1
      storageClass: kubernetes-demo-storage
    workers:
      class: guaranteed-small
      count: 1
      storageClass: kubernetes-demo-storage
  settings:
    storage:
      classes: ["kubernetes-demo-storage"]            #Named PVC storage classes
      defaultClass: kubernetes-demo-storage           #Default PVC storage class

Further assumptions – for this file to work, you need to have created a “kubernetes-demo-storage” storage policy and assigned it to the namespace where you’re running this YAML. You also need to have the default VM Class of “guaranteed-small” assigned to the namespace and available for consumption. If that’s in place, run kubectl from the same directory as the YAML file and voila, you will get a working Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster for workloads!

kubectl apply -f ./tkc.yml

Happy clustering!

January 6, 2023 0 comments

VMware

VMUG is (still) donating proceeds of Advantage Memberships to Girls Who Code

by Philip Sellers January 4, 2023

written by Philip Sellers

The holidays may be past, but goodwill and charity don’t need to end. VMUG members who subscribe or extend their VMUG Advantage membership will get a 10% discount on the membership and enfuse a contribution Girls Who Code. All that is needed is to to check out with code GIRLSWHOCODE.

VMUG is offering an extra charitable benefit to members who subscribe to VMUG Advantage through Jan 14, 2023. It is a new year, new budget – save 10% plus feel good helping young women learn to code!

VMUG members selected one of four nonprofits by a Twitter poll, with beneficiary being Girls Who Code.

Members who subscribe to Advantage still have some time to get in and help this non-profit while also getting great benefits of your own. VMUG Advantage membership gives members evaluation licenses of many VMware products for use in your home lab and for learning, it gives training discounts and a discount to VMware Explore conferenc events. Advantage also gives members access to TestDrive by VMware.

January 4, 2023 0 comments

Home Lab

Why invest in a home lab in 2022?

by Philip Sellers November 29, 2022

written by Philip Sellers

A decade ago, home labs were all the rage in my Twitter circle. I had home lab envy – I’m not gonna lie. Visions of Synology and servers dancing in my mind.

Thinking back to that time, it was also when Dell and others were shipping truckloads of hardware onsite to conference to run hands-on-labs. It was BC. You know, Before Cloud.

Cloud changed much of this for IT professionals. Instant, on-demand resources for learning and exploring are common. I can spin up a demo environment and take a test drive on most solutions quickly and easily. Many of those solutions are Cloud-native today.

After moving in 2016, I never rebuilt my home lab. For the last 6 years, I have had tons of hardware at my disposal to tinker, until I had no time to tinker.

But then, a change.

Last month, I started buying hardware components on eBay and Amazon to rebuild my lab. But, why did I decide to revive a home lab in 2022?

Not everything is cloud. I’m working with a lot of customers in a hybrid stance and there’s a lot of traditional IT that still needs to be maintained, lifecycled and upgraded.

Sometimes the cloud labs are missing core pieces of the process. While I could leverage vendor provided lab environments, most of these demos don’t start at square one. Some don’t even allow you to do the installs and instead simulate the screens. I believe there is value and lessons to be learned starting from the bare metal.

I am a hands-on learner. It is a byproduct of years of being hands-on-keyboard as an administrator and engineer. Classes and online learning modules are good for me, but never as good as simply installing a product, configuring it, breaking it, fixing it and eventually mastering it.

Goals

In terms of goals, I would say first is learning and gaining the knowledge to pass certifications. Second, is a place to try things and vet ideas.

I recently started a new role at XenTegra as a Solutions Architect. While I’m a long-time VMware SME, there’s a lot of technologies I want to learn and experiment with. I also need time to get into the weeds of the products to attain certifications, proving and certifying my knowledge through accreditation. I need to brush off those VMware Horizon skills, since it was called View when I last ran it.

One of the best parts of my job is trying things – coming up with strategies and then making sure that they work. To tinker. I feel like I need a place where I can make that happen without interrupting others and their work. My teammates are doing similar lab builds on hosted resources, but those environments are built not just for learning, they are also for show and demo. The environments have different goals – the shared should always be ready for show.

When the time comes, to be able to demo functionality. While I don’t expect my home lab to be ready to demo at any given time, I do want the ability to log in remotely and check something or show off a UI or concept when my shared lab environments aren’t available. As with anything shared, I don’t have full control – but for this little nugget, its all mine. (Insert some sort of bad cartoon villain here. I heard a cackle as I wrote that line.)

Bottom Line

I’d argue that for many, it may not make sense to build a home lab in 2022. For me, maybe call me old-school. I’m looking forward to what I learn on the way and how I can use this tiny little cluster of goodness. I think that is one of my differentiators – while I can talk strategy and architecture all day long with you – I can also run the tech and know that it’ll live up to what I’m selling you. I love having both perspectives, and the ability to translate between the two.

November 29, 2022 0 comments

Graphical user interface, text, application, email Description automatically generated

vExpert Virtualization VMware vSphere

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0 Certificate Replacement via SSH

by Roger Lund October 29, 2022

written by Roger Lund

Today, I had an Interesting one. As this was a new install of VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0, or at least within a few days. And low and behold, it has a expired Certificate!? This is a technical write up, with the steps I performed to fix it in my own lab.

When I logged into the Host I Saw the following.

Graphical user interface, text, application, email

Description automatically generated

That isn’t good, lets go fix it.

Step 1. Google.

I found this write up by Jesus Vigo in Security

”

How to regenerate certificates on VMware host servers

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-regenerate-certificates-on-vmware-host-servers/

“By default, VMware host servers, like ESXi hosts typically generate new certificates when the hypervisor is installed on bare-metal hardware. Through the process of configuring the host and allocating resources, it is common for the server configuration to undergo many settings changes as you harden your device.

Must-read security coverage

Among the hardening steps your organization may employ, joining an Active Directory (AD) domain helps administrators to simplify management of underlying hypervisor used to host virtual machines (VM) by centralizing the management of user accounts and groups allowed to access to the server, as well as what changes they are authorized to make.

SEE: Information security policy template download (Tech Pro Research)

However, while the process to join the server to AD may be straightforward, it can and certainly will consistently fail if the SSL certificates used by the VMware host are expired, invalid, or otherwise corrupted. These all pose a difficulty in getting the server to authenticate domain accounts, which will leave users unable to maintain the server until it is resolved. But how can you fix this once it’s happened? Or worse yet, if you’ve never been able to join it to the domain in the first place?

“

Ok, lets get to it!

First lets enable SSH, Go to Manage , Services.

Graphical user interface, text, application

Description automatically generated

Select TSM-SSH, Name SSH and Click start

Graphical user interface, text, application

Description automatically generated

next, lets login via ssh. I used Putty.

Text

Description automatically generated

Lets move to the dir that has the SSL keys to back up the keys. Per the above write up.

cd /etc/vmware/ssl

Then run the following.

mv rui.crt rui.crt.bak mv rui.key rui.key.bak

But I got the following error.

Text

Description automatically generated

So we are going to move on.

Next type /sbin/generate-certificates

Then /etc/init.d/hostd restart

Text

Description automatically generated

Looks like that worked, lets see!

Log back into the VMware Host via the web interface.

Ta da!

Graphical user interface, text, application, email

Description automatically generated

Make sure to disable SSH, or reboot to do so.

Thanks for reading

Roger L

October 29, 2022 0 comments

Cloud News Software Virtualization

DH2i Closes 2021 As Another Year of Record Sales Growth, Product Innovation, and Strategic Partnership Development

by Phil Marsden February 11, 2022

written by Phil Marsden

DH2i Closes 2021 As Another Year of Record Sales Growth, Product Innovation, and Strategic Partnership Development

Strengthened Foothold Across Key Verticals and Transitioned to 100% Software as a Subscription Model

DH2i today announced that 2021 marked another year of record growth, with a 44% percent sales growth year-over-year, across both its DxEnterprise multi-platform smart availability software and DxOdyssey software defined perimeter (SDP) security software solutions.

“2021 was a transformative year for DH2i,” said Don Boxley, CEO and Co-Founder of DH2i. “In addition to our enviable sales growth, DH2i strengthened its foothold across key verticals, such as financial services – making strong gains in the multinational investment banking segment – as well as technology, healthcare, and media.” He continued, “We also continued to build-out a market leadership product feature set, transitioned to a 100% software as a subscription model, and strengthened and entered into new highly strategic channel and technology partnerships.”

DH2i’s 2021 Milestones:

Product Innovation

– DH2i Launched Free DxEnterprise & DxOdyssey Developer Editions – Database, System, and Network Administrators now able to ensure instance level workload and SQL Server Availability group high availability (HA) and build secure zero trust connections between on-premises, remote, edge, IoT, and cloud environments — without a VPN.

– DH2i Launched DxEnterprise (DxE) Smart Availability Software for Containers – Enables cloud-native Microsoft SQL Server container Availability Groups (AGs) in Kubernetes (K8s).

– DH2i Launched DxEnterprise v20 Improving Microsoft SQL Server High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) Performance – Improves the performance and resilience of transaction processing workloads found in financial services, as well as other sectors, running on top of Microsoft® SQL Server.

New Customers

– Docler Holding Selected DH2i’s DxEnterprise To Help Maintain Operations Uptime and Minimize Business Disruption Across Multinational Conglomerate – ICT, media and entertainment leader deployed DxEnterprise software and is now achieving near-zero planned and unplanned downtime for its SQL Server on Linux cluster.

Strategic Channel Partnerships and Global Expansion

– DH2i and Nubelity Entered into Strategic Channel Agreement — Expanding DH2i’s Latin America Footprint – Announced First Joint Customer, a premier Latin American Digital Bank.

Market Education and Thought Leadership

– Microsoft’s Amit Khandelwal and DH2i’s Connor Cox Presented “How to Deploy Highly Available AGs Across Containers in Azure” at PASS Data Community Summit 2021 – Webinar explained how to improve performance, scalability, and portability of IT environments with highly available SQL Server Availability Groups (AGs) that span containers in Azure.

– Pythian and DH2i Presented Live Webinar, “Highly Available SQL Server AGs in Google Kubernetes Engine” – Webinar explained how to set up and configure highly available SQL Server Availability Groups (AGs) between containers in Google Cloud Platform.

– Microsoft’s Amit Khandelwal Joined DH2i’s Connor Cox to Discuss, “How to Achieve Peak Availability for Containerized SQL Server in Kubernetes” – Webinar explained how to create hybrid AG clusters across SQL Server containers, achieve near-zero RTO, and avoid SQL Server HA/DR configuration and networking challenges.

– DH2i Joined Microsoft Azure Webinar to Discuss “How to Unlock Free SQL Server Licenses and Hybrid DR with DH2i” – Webinar explained how to use DxEnterprise, SDP-enhanced clustering software, to take advantage of free replica benefits while unlocking easy hybrid cloud, advanced fault detection/auto-failover, and superior performance.

– Microsoft and DH2i Presented, “Paving the Way to SQL Server HA on Linux in Azure” – Webinar explained how to achieve peak high availability with unmatched management simplicity, infrastructure and platform flexibility, and advanced fault detection with automated failover for nearest-to-zero downtime.

These and additional DH2i webinars are archived and available on-demand here: https://dh2i.com/webinars/.

Market Intelligence

– DH2i Pre-Pandemic State of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) Survey Revealed Inadequate Security Number One VPN Pain Point – Premier Virtual Private Network (VPN) survey of IT professionals across small-, mid-, and enterprise-sized organizations revealed almost 40% of respondents believed their network had already been breached by bad actor(s).

Tweet this: @DH2i Closes 2021 As Another Year of Record Sales Growth, Product Innovation, and Strategic Partnership Development https://dh2i.com/press/ #SQLServer #Kubernetes #Containers #HA #SDP #Data #Security

About DH2i: https://dh2i.com/

February 11, 2022 0 comments

News

Install Microsoft Windows Server 2022 on vSphere 7 Update 3

by Roger Lund November 16, 2021

written by Roger Lund

Welcome! Today we will install Server 2022 on VMware vSphere 7 Update 3.

We will go ahead and Create a New Virtual Machine.

As you see, I have added more ram and disk space. And Importantly changed the network adapter to VMXNET3, but I also change the disk type to Paravirtual.