It’s not often that I push for votes or request votes for anything, but I am keen to win this one!
PuppetLabs are doing a competition where you submit GIF animations depicting an IT “horror story” with humor. My entry is below and I would love if you could check it out and hit the Vote button just below my entry GIF on the link to follow…
William Lam has done some excellent blog posts on using the simulator included with the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance), to setup a simulated vSphere environment. Just the other day at VMworld Europe, he presented a session for vBrownBag entitled “NotSupported Tips/Tricks for vSphere 5.5“. In this session he introduced the new simulator, he dubs “VCSIM 2.0”, which is the latest iteration included with the VCSA 5.5 appliance.
I had previously had a brief look at the VCSIM included with 5.1, but after seeing its limited functionality, did not pursue its use for development testing. However, after learning about the features introduced in VCSIM “2.0”, I just had to take a further look…
To see how to setup and start VCSIM, have a read of Will’s blog post here. However, at a high level, this is what you need to do to start the simulator with defaults:
Deploy and fully configure the VCSA 5.5 appliance. Make sure DNS (forward and reverse) is working and the embedded database is properly configured, otherwise the vpxa service will have trouble intialising
Ensure you have no issues with the embedded DB being reset (i.e. don’t do this on a production VCSA!)
SSH in to the appliance
issue command:Β vmware-vcsim-start default
Customising the default VCSIM ESXi host model
Today, I needed to replicate a certain condition in our lab environment. Specifically, I needed the ESXi hosts to have 32 CPU cores. By default the ESXi hosts that are simulated have 8 cores. I did a bit of digging around in theΒ /etc/vmware-vpx/vcsim/model folder and figured out which files were referenced when launching the simulator with the default option. By default, the host model in the ESX50 folder is used, so naturally, in order to configure custom ESXi hosts, we need to edit the files within this folder.
Initially, I found one file, “HostHardwareInfo.xml” and changed the CPU core count value to 32. This appeared to work – starting up the sim, and looking at the Web Client, I saw that the simulated hosts were now showing 32 CPU cores. I also changed the RAM up to 32GB (from the default of 16) just to test another option, and this was also showing up. However, upon loading up the MOB (Managed Object Browser), and navigating to the these hosts, I saw that the properties under the host summary->config->hardware were telling another story – they were still set to 8 cores and 16GB RAM. A little more digging revealed that another file, “HostListSummary.xml” also needed to be updated.
So in order to setup your custom ESXi host models for the default VCSIM profile, make sure you update both of these files.
Here is the small change I made to increase the Host core count to 32 cores.
Make sure you backup these files before changing them, so that you can roll back if you need to. There are other ways of creating your own profiles for the simulator, but I could not find any documentation on how to create custom hosts. The only bits I could find were relating to creating your own datastores. You can also use the default profile template to create your own profile in it’s entirety, and this is a better long term solution, however to get things up and running quickly with the default profile, the above works nicely.
Note that all properties and methods pertaining to each managed object found in the API appear to be set up and created when using the VCSIM, so this makes a great development/testing/lab tool. Kudos to VMware for releasing this with the VCSA, and thanks to William Lam for pointing it out and blogging about it!
Alan Renouf and Luc Dekens led a more advanced PowerCLI session first thing on Thursday morning. There was a good turn up, even after the VMworld Party the night before. This session was of more interest to me, covering off the more advanced features of PowerShell and PowerCLI.
Some of the content I found of interest was:
Event filtering with PowerCLI and the handy GUI/utility Alan/Luc have made to help navigate the events objects. (Event objects in the vSphere API start off on a base object “Event” type, with different derivatives that inherit from this base type for different kinds of events). Interesting for me, as I have actually written an iPhone (iOS) application that uses the VMware SDK to filter out and display information about different kinds of events from your vSphere infrastructure.
VMware Fling called “Web Commander” – this is a web application which appears to be running off PHP as far as I could tell. It gives end users the ability to easily call various PowerShell / PowerCLI scripts from a UI – which is great for operators, or those that are less comfortable playing with a shell π I can see a good use case for this in just about any environment. It allows users to call scripts and use textboxes to pass parameters over to your scripts.
PowerShell remoting and PSSession creation/disconnection and reconnection to help improve execution times for scripts. Luc showed a nice way to setup a remote machine which can initialise PSSessions, and allow them to be reconnected at a later stage.
New vSAN cmdlets coming out with the newer PowerCLI iterations
You can find more information about the session from Luc and Alan’s personal blogs:
Here is a list of sessions I managed to attend on Wednesday:
Getting started with Horizon Workspace: Use cases and Configuration
Demystifying VMware Mirage: Tips and Tricks for Success
Horizon Workspace is really quite well featured, and provides a centralised location for the workforce to access all the apps, desktops and data that is relevant to their role in the company. VMware use this internally, and it is a great example of how one can mobilise a large workforce.
The Mirage session felt quite lengthy, but it did have a wealth of information and best practices tips that were discussed. The session did start to feel a little bit tedious toward the end, but that was mainly due to the many slides of tips & tricks. Perhaps a slightly higher level look at the best practices would have suited the session time better. However, anyone who attended should now have a very good idea of how to approach a Mirage deployment from the start to the finish.
Vendor time / Solutions Exchange
I had a good wander around the solutions exchange and chatted with various vendors. Some of the interesting areas I looked at were:
Nutanix
Simplivity
PernixData
nVidia
PuppetLabs
Cisco
VCE
I must say thanks to Simplivity and Nutanix for their vExpert gifts – I collected an awesome Raspberry Pi, and vExpert Beer glass from both π
Hands on Labs
I got some more time on the HOLs section and managed to do some more PuppetLabs modules. This is a great framework/product and I’ll definitely be looking into it further in the future. It was also good to catch up with Steven Thwaites at the PuppetLabs stand – previously known from Xsigo, and have a chat with him around all the awesome PuppetLabs framework and functionality.
Bloggers / Community lounge
I spent a bit of time early morning catching up with other bloggers and networking. I had a good chat with Erik Bussink, and we also had a bit of a look at some troubleshooting his vMetrics plugin he grabbed from this blog which was having trouble connecting to WordPress. Incidentally, he has some awesome information about Infiniband and using it in your lab environment with ESXi – go check out his blog for more info if you are interested!
VMworld Party
Hanging around after the main conference event until 7pm, meant we could jump straight across to the VMworld party. The event was put together well, with some impressive layouts.
In the center area was a large roller disco, with the main stage up front hosting two or three acts throughout the evening. Food and drinks were plentiful and there were various arcade games scattered around the area. I had to fire up some old school Street Fighter, so we had a few vs. games of that among others.
A short while back I provided assistance with technical reviewing and feedback while this book was in development. Packt Publishing are kindly giving away 2 copies of the eBook to my Twitter followers. The only condition required is to sell your soul to the devil and and retweet this tweet of mine: The tweet
Otherwise you can check out the book (aimed at those starting out with VMware Workstation) over here: http://bit.ly/1cBlpFa