Category: Design

New Year New Goals for 2017

For the year 2017 I have 3 certification I would like to achieve.  Not only to advance my career, but to also further my knowledge and my passion for technology. Some people may feel that certification are not really necessary or serve no real purpose.  That you shouldn’t need a certification to just prove you know something,  certifications are a great way to containerize what you should learn about a subject.  I feel by not pursuing a certification I would not get as deep into learning about a technologies as I should.

AWS Certification is my first goal of the year. I think it is going to be an very important skill going forward in IT.  The cloud is everywhere and is constantly growing, and AWS is currently the market leader. I think of cloud as a automated way to run a data center.  When you need to accomplish something such as deploying a VM or provisioning networks, you do it by utilizing and automated tasks.  There are some real private clouds, but in general is seems most private data centers are still doing this the old fashion way.  Manually deploying new VM’s or configuring the network by hand.  That is why AWS is so important because they have already designed an automated way for you to deploy your workloads.  Leaving you to architect and design how to run your workload on top of it.  The real skill is knowing how to use AWS, and understanding the entire compute stack.  With understanding the entire stack  you can really go anywhere in IT.

Next on my list is the VCAP-6 DCV Implementation.  VCAP stands for VMware Certified Advance Profession.  Before you can pursue these certifications you must have first earned you VCP or VMware Certified Profession.  I have a real passion for virtualization, and I love everything that goes along with it.  My long term goal is  to accomplish the VCDX, but I know that is still very far off.   There are many steps to this goal, and VCAP is just one of many along that journey.  With the implementation certification I will show I understand how to fully deploy vSphere into the datacenter.  On the surface the  deployment does not really seem all that difficult until you realize how many settings or “nerd knobs” there are with it.  To accomplish this I hope to get some real off site training.  If this happens it will be the first time in my career that I will have had actual training on something.  I always find it ironic that companies are willing to spend millions of dollars on equipment, but not 5,000 dollars on actual training.  I will also use Pluralsight which I have a free subscription with for being in the vExpert program.  Thank you Pluralsight for giving that to us.  Finally I will read lots of blogs and white papers.  The VCAP tests cover so much that you really have to learn all you can before taking the test.  It shows that you have real knowledge and are a subject matter expert on it.

Finally my final goal for the year is VCAP6- DCV Design.  Design is probably one of the hardest parts of IT.  When  you ask what is the best way to do something the infamous answer in IT is “it depends”.  Because its not always a one size fits all.  Best practice does have its place, but the real knowledge is knowing what the best way to do something, and not just the best practice.  I think that this test will be the hardest for me.  My career has always been focused on the doing and the the designing.  It will be a learning curve, but will be good challenge and really further my skills.

Accomplishing these 2 VCAP test will give me the VCIX or VMware Certified Implementation Expert.  Proving that I now have the knowledge to deploy vSphere in the Data Center.  Hopefully I will be able to accomplish all 3 of these goals within the year of 2017.  If I do then maybe I will move on to the VCIX-DTM or some other challenge.  If you have any career advice please leave a comment below.  Thanks for reading this post and have a good 2017.

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2 Node vSAN Design for a Remote Site

I was recently asked to design a solution for a remote site.  The requirements were it had to be cheap, run a few virtual machines, fail over capability and have shared storage The workloads are going to be very light so there is no need for powerful servers.  I had a few options with this.  Technically one server could run the entire workload, but that does not allow for any failure so I needed at least two servers.  This would provide a fail over capacity of only 1.  Bare minimum but acceptable for this use case.  These two servers would need some kind of shared storage. One option would be using a small storage array such as the DELEMC VNXe.  I have used these previously, and they were a great solution for the time, but the times are changing and I think hyperconvergence is the future.  With vSAN 6.5 there were a lot of new features that it would make it a perfect solution.

Previously with any Hyperconvereged solution you needed 3 nodes.  3 nodes are used to check for everything being online.  If 1 out of the 3 nodes goes down the other two nodes can check with each other to verify that the node actually went down.  To get away with using 2 nodes you use an external witness.  This external witness could run on a separate server on the site or at the main data center.

With vSAN you have one SSD per Disk Group (DG) to be used for cache.  Since this had to be a cheap solution my area on constraint was cost, and everything had to be a minimal design to get the job done.  Each server would have 1 DG with an 800GB SSD and 4 4TB 7.2k HHD.  This allowed for FTT=1 or only 1 host could be lost.  There is some risk with this design.  There is always a chance that in a maintenance situation one of the host would be in maintenance mode, and  this would leave a single point of failure.  Because there would only be 1 DG available on the one online host, but this is an acceptable risk for the constraint of cost.

One of my favorite new features with 6.5 is direct connect.  With this you can now directly connect two hosts to each other instead of running through a switch.  Each of these server have 2 1GB ports and 2 10GB ports. The remote site switch infrastructure is only 1GB.  Now 1GB can be a serious limitation for storage, and I wanted to avoid that.  With direct connect you can directly connect the two host to each other, and all storage traffic would then go across that link.  Leaving the 1GB ports to be used by the VM traffic.

As you can tell this is an bare minimum design for vSAN and hyperconvergence.  It does meet all the requirements such as Cost, Availability, Share Storage.  In the event of a host going down HA can restart all the VM’s on the second node providing minimal downtime.  This provides the optimal solution for the requirements of the design.

 

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VSAN on Ravello

First off I would like to thank Ravello for making this happen.  As being part of the vExpert Community Ravello has give us free use of their services.  Which allows me to design and build Software Defined Data Centers all in the cloud running on AWS, Google or Oracle.  I would also like to thank VMware for their vExpert program.  Because of this I have licenses to be able to setup all these labs and grow my knowledge.

This article is going to be a high level overview of setting up VSAN on Ravello.  In future articles I will go deeper into how to actually set it all up.

For this design I was wanting to setup a Proof of Concept for VSAN.  I had only used Ravello a few times so I was not exactly sure how to use Ravello to accomplish what I wanted.  My Design consisted of 5 instances on Ravello.

  1. Domain Controller using Server 2012 and DNS.
  2. 3 ESXi Host each one configured with a 100gb drive for VSAN cache and a 1TB drive for data.  With VSAN your cache drive should be 10% of the total datastore.  So if you have 3 host each with 1TB then the cache should be 100gb.  If you turn on FTT of 1 (RAID 1) or mirroring you will lose half your storage so 1.5tb usuable.
  3. A jump VM running Windows 7 for RDP from my home computer.
  4. vCenter

design

First came the network design.  I wanted to seperate out the traffic for each layer of networking.

  1. Management – Traffic for the ESX host itself.
  2. Data/VM – Traffic for running VM’s
  3. Storage – Traffic for VSAN
  4. vMotion- vMotion Traffic

Now its time to build everything.

  1. Setup Domain Controller
  2. Add each ESX host to domain
  3. Add the jump VM to the domain
  4. Deploy vCenter  and join domain

Deploying vCenter on Ravello can be tricky.  Ravello is essential virtualization on top of virtualization.  I am running an ESX host on top of Ravello virtualization, which is a layer of virtualization running on top of AWS or Google.  They are also running a layer of virtualization on top of there physical hardware.  I had some issues trying to get the appliance to work with Ravello.  For now I will have to stick with the Windows version.

cluster

Notice from the above image the yellow signs.  They are there because there is not any shared storage and HA will not work.  You must also turn off HA before you can enable VSAN. Now that I have setup all 5 of my instances and applied all the networking settings it is not time to deploy it.  It takes about 10-15 minutes to get all the instances up and running. Now come the cool part of setting up VSAN.

  1. Setup the VMKernel port on your vswitch for each host.  Make sure to check the VSAN setting and use the same name.
  2. Go to each host and mark the cache disk ad SSD.  This will allow the host to use is for cache.
  3. Right click on the cluster and enable VSAN and choose manual mode for adding disk.
  4. Now claim the disk.
  5. VSAN is now Setup!!!!

Notice now the yellow icons are gone?   Now the host have shared storage, and can utilize HA.

vsan-on

Sometime soon I plan on building up a SDDC lab on ravello.  This will use most of the VMware products and utilize Veeam for backup.  Thanks for reading and leave a comment if you have any questions.

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