HeathReynolds.com

• EUC with Dell EMC XtremIO: – http:// www.emc.com/en-us/storage/xtremio/vdi-storage.htm • EUC with VCE: – http://www.vce.com/solution/applications/vdi • EUC storage navigator: – https://www.emc.com/en-us/storage/vdi-storage-navigator/index.htm • Dell EMC XtremIO Blog: – http://xtremioblog.emc.com / • Reference Architecture for VMware Horizon 7: – http:// www.emc.com/collateral/white-papers/h15250-vdi-with-xtremio-and-horizon-enterprise-7.pdf Added link to Graphics Intensive Reference Architecture: http://www.emc.com/collateral/white-papers/h15431-implementing-visually-intensive-wp.pdf  

I've been working with VMware Big Data Extensions more with a couple of customers as we look at providing Hadoop as a Service (HaaS) leveraging the Serengeti API. So what is Big Data Extensions (BDE), and what is the Serengeti API, and why would I use it? What is it? BDE is an orchestration layer for deploying and managing Hadoop clusters. It's deployed as an OVA and registered as a plug in in the vCenter web interface. What is unique about BDE is that it allows VMware administrators to manage Hadoop clusters as a single instance, and provides all of the under the hood orchestration. Is supports both deploying the cluster as well as scaling the cluster. BDE is available to all Enterprise + ESXi customers and supported by VMware. You can get it here: http://www.vmware.com/go/download-bigdataextensions While BDE is the commercially supported release it's built on a project that VMware released to the open source community call Serengeti. The open source Serengeti proj...

I was working thorough a proof of concept for a customer backing up Cassandra to an S3 object store this weekend. Since I already had the EMC ECS community edition running in the lab I had an S3 object store ready to go, but I needed to install a signed certificate on it to make my customers backup  of Cassandra data to object storage work. If you are looking for an object store to play with EMC ECS is available free for non-production use. You can get it here , and the EMC CODE team has been nice enough to package up docker containers of the nodes. Why do I need to do this? You will want to leverage a signed cert any time your clients need secured access to the object store. You can use a cert from your internal certificate authority as long as it is added to the trusted root of your clients, or one from a public trusted certificate authority. Let's dive into the technical details after the break.

I have run into this same issue at a couple of different customers, it doesn't get much press considering how broad the impact of this issue. Normally this manifests itself as slow deploy from template operations at customers with larger vsphere environments, and the root cause is a vcenter bug relating to how deploy from template operations are performed.  VMware KB: Cloning or deploying from a template takes longer time after upgrading to VMware vSphere 5.1 Update 2 and… If we look at this KB article we can see that the way that vCenter does the clone operation changed with 5.1u2 and 5.5. In versions previous to this vCenter told the DESTINATION ESX host to perform the clone operation, starting in 5.1u2 and 5.5 vCenter began telling the SOURCE esx host to perform the clone operation.  This doesn't cause issues in small environments where all ESX hosts have access to all datastores, but what happens in larger environments? In larger environments the performance w...

Sometimes in the lab I have to make some interesting choices in how I make things work, that might not specifically be the best practice. I ran into one of these decisions today, as I needed to create static routes in the vCenter Server Appliance to create connectivity to a vRA install in the lab. This VRA install was behind an NSX edge router, while vCenter was on the same VLAN as the uplink of the NSX edge. In this case I'm using the 5.5 vCenter Server Appliance, but this would probably work on other versions of the appliance. I logged into the host with SSH, and checked the routing table ( route -n ). In this case my vCenter appliance had the IP address of 192.168.1.120, and the only route I had was to the default gateway of 192.168.1.1. I need to create a specific route for the 192.168.110.0/24 network, and point it to the upstream interface of the NSX edge at 192.168.1.124. I could add the route using the route command, but it would need to be reentered after a reboot. ...

I've been getting questions lately on the most effective way to license Horizon View with VSPEX Blue, the answer like many things in this world is "It Depends". Luckily the VMware licensing guide for View does a good job of laying it out. VSPEX Blue is a great EUC platfrom, and VMware is easing the licensing confusion. The Horizon View Licensing FAQ has a good illustration of licensing combinations of Horizon with the EVO:Rail and the loyalty program, I found this really useful working on a "start with 100 desktops" design and wanted to pass this on. They even have EVO:Rail add-on specific SKUs for Horizon now, helping with the licensing overlap (still exists with VSAN on advanced and enterprise but getting better). http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/horizon-view/VMware-Horizon-View-Pricing-Licensing-FAQ.pdf