Storage

VSAN Value and Paradigm Shifts

 

The VSAN story is out and doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon. It feels like everyone I talk to is asking about the product and the pricing model (see VSAN Pricing and Implications). More than once now, I’ve seen a wince or the written equivalent. I can certainly understand, as an extra $15K in licensing to a six CPU cluster is far from trivial. My goal here is to unpack the pricing a bit to examine the value that’s being delivered (the value is non-trivial as well).

Virtual Distributed Switch

Perhaps lost in the discussion of VSAN features is that the VSAN license includes the Virtual Distributed Switch (also known as the vSphere Distributed Switch) for the cluster (since every cluster member is licensed for VSAN). For anyone who’s maintained networking for a group of hosts, this is huge productivity gain, bringing centralized management, consistent naming, “network vMotion” (maintaining network state during a vMotion), Network IO Control (NIOC), and Single-Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV). These are premium features, normally only available in Enterprise Plus licensing, which bring a lot of value to a VSAN cluster.

Here’s a great note from Punching Clouds on the deployment of 16 VSAN nodes in minutes. This is made possible in large part due to the vDS’s template creation and push deployment capability.

Paradigm Shift – Unbundling Storage Software from Hardware

I think the first time I came across this concept was in a presentation by Jon Toigo http://www.drunkendata.com/ entitled Why Storage Costs So Much and What You Can Do To Bend The Cost Curve.  It’s been almost five years, but I actually found the slide I remember.

Jon Toigo - Baseline Cost Model

However, if an female viagra samples Plus is suspected, it is necessary to seek emergency medical assistance at once. But how buying tadalafil online does the medicine to serve the same purpose of alleviating ill effects of erectile dysfunction. buy levitra Follow this advice and remember that the decisions that are made today can affect you throughout your life. The doctor will viagra canada online also check for feeling and strength in the hand can affect the activities of daily living like gripping and holding items. Toigo’s thesis is that all storage appliances contain essentially the same commodity components under the hood; What makes a Tier 1 appliance more expensive is the Value-Added Software, the Channel, and Service/Support costs. I’d push back a little on this, pointing out that there’s definitely some custom silicon in some of those solutions, as well as engineering effort around and inside the chassis. Not all arrays are built on 3rd party platforms. The thesis of bundled software, however, remains intact. As much value might be in the chassis engineering, storage is drives, aggregation and management software, and connection/fabric.  Any premium charged to the customer over a generic white box storage appliance has to be justified. And some of those cost premiums are quite high.

But back to the bundling thesis. A major cost is having the storage management software bundled with the hardware appliance. Buy a Tier 1 appliance, pay service and support for upgraded software during the ownership cycle, and at the end, you can’t transfer that software to a new appliance. You buy it all over again. The disruptive model that VSAN brings is the ability to buy the storage smarts independently of the storage hardware and transfer the license to a new piece of hardware at any time in the lifecycle of the hardware. Remember the closed platform of the traditional appliance? VSAN uses commodity x86 CPU cycles to run its software, the same commodity x86 CPU cycles that receive the most development and performance attention due to the sales volume.

I’d also like to point out that VSAN isn’t the first software to take this approach. HP’s StoreVirtual (decended from the Lefthand VSA), Datacore, even the VMware VSA unbundled storage smarts from the array. So there’s even more to the value story, isn’t there?

From RAID to Policy Based Storage

The previous iteration of unbundled storage software and storage appliances relies on RAID hardware controllers to handle resiliency. RAID controllers offload the processing power of RAID-based resiliency from the general purpose CPU to specialized silicon. This was especially helpful with the popular use of parity RAID, before general purpose CPU core counts and processing power went up, and before drive space was expensive relative to processing power. Today, parity RAID is less usefu, per-GB storage costs have crashed, multiple copies of data is the gold standard for data protection. To accomplish this, VSAN uses general purpose CPU cycles to create N+1 copies of the data, determined by per-VM policy.

Ok, what does that mean? In effect, administrators can adjust the policies that affect VSAN striping and number of failures to tolerate on a per-VM basis. Perhaps you determine that one of your VMs needs an increased stripe width to help destage writes or increase the speed of read caches misses. You can make that change for the individual VM rather than for all the VMs on the storage. In addition, you can make that change after deployment.

So what do you think? Does this represent more VSAN Value than you’d originally thought?

Storage

VSAN Pricing Revealed and Implications Explored

1 Comment

After a wide-open public beta, lots of speculation about licensing models and costs, and a long wait, VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) went GA on March 12, 2014. The basic issue of pricing was revealed: $2,495 per CPU socket for any workload or a $50/user model for Horizon View. What are the implications of VSAN pricing for end users?

Which is the Cheaper VSAN Pricing Model for Horizon View?

With six sockets licensed, anything below 300 users will benefit from per-user Horizon View licensing.

 VSAN 6 socket pricing comparison
VSAN 6 socket cluster comparison of Horizon View per-user pricing vs. per-socket pricing

I chose a six socket, three host cluster as the smallest likely cluster, but users per socket is the more important stat. What’s revealed is that in any density below 50 users per cpu, per-user pricing is less expensive. As CPU core counts go up and per-socket processing ability increases, the 50 user per CPU socket will probably come into play. Something to keep one’s eye on.

All Cluster Members Must Be Licensed (per socket model)

This might win the award for most obvious reveal in the history of a GA announcement. It honestly hadn’t ever occurred to me that all cluster members would have to have VSAN licenses for their CPUs. In my head, I thought we’d be able to have licensed storage-heavy cluster-members doing the business of VSAN and cluster members without VSAN licenses who wouldn’t provide storage to the cluster but would be able to consume it. That’s not the model. What’s being licensed is the ability to participate in the cluster at all. If after some time, your storage density and growth is fine but you need more CPU, you’ll have to decide whether it would be more cost effective to add a VSAN cluster member without much/any storage or replace a cluster member with a host with more CPU. Or even upgrade the CPUs present in a host, something I wouldn’t have ever thought about doing before this.
cialis 20 mg Find Out More If you are taking this powerful ED medicine has some positive side effects on heart. Kenpo karate is one of levitra without prescription the prominent martial art types. It viagra side online creativebdsm.com enhances the flow of blood to every part of the body. Depression, obesity, lethargy, medications, and many other women viagra for sale approaches can be employed in the rescue of the gallbladder.

High Entry Level Price

The minimum host count is three and the minimum number of sockets per host is one so I suppose one could make an argument that the entry-level cost of VSAN is $7,485 ($2,495/socket x 3 sockets). In practical terms, purchasing a server with two socket capability and not adding the second socket isn’t done that often. A fully-populated six socket cluster is $14,970 which is getting close to the cost of a storage appliance.

Why don’t we buy single socket hosts for entry level clusters? As an IT administrator, I’d have made the argument for the simplicity of not ever touching the CPU infrastructure. Today, I’m closer to thinking that the advantages of VSAN are enough that we might want to start thinking of purchasing CPU as it’s needed instead of at the time of chassis acquisition. Among the most expensive dollars an SMB can spend are the ones which aren’t needed for over a year. Add the cost of VSAN licensing to the cost of CPU, and that might tip the balance in favor of scaling out CPU as needed. Three CPUs might be enough for entry-level clusters with vMotion and HA.

VSAN vs Storage Appliance (SAN/NAS)

At ~$15K entry level, IT departments might not see VSAN as a clear value play. “That’s almost the cost of XYZ appliance with the drives included!” Well, that’s possible, though it’s a complete apples to oranges comparison. VSAN provides many features you aren’t seeing in entry level storage appliances, but perhaps I’ll save that for another discussion.

What are the implications of the VSAN pricing model on the business of managing storage in IT that you see?

Events, Uncategorized

VMware PEX 2014 Day 1

1 Comment

OK, so I really meant to do a series of posts speculating on General Availability announcements based on a close reading of the VMware Partner Exchange Content Catalog. Life intervened, and I only got through the VSAN content. And now that VMware PEX 2014 Day 1 has come and gone, it seems anti-climactic. There were no GA announcements on VSAN, BC/DR to vCHS, Desktone’s integration into the VMware lineup, NSX in the channel, or Airwatch mobile device management integration into the EUC lineup.

On the other hand, I’d have to characterize VMware PEX Day 1 as a success. I saw great content on the future BC/DR in vCHS product and great technical content on VSAN. VSAN and disaster recovery to vCHS is scheduled for “Q1” (only 7 weeks left!), but that could change. Seriously, it could. The sessions answered a lot of nagging questions I had (Q: Is the VSAN disk group a RAID 0 under the covers? A: No.) and brought up some others (Q:Can vCHS be used as a BC/DR target for a VMware  View environment? A: Hmmmm…).

The class on qualifying/positioning vSphere Data Protection Advanced was really nice. If you have access to the content, definitely check it out. It’s a refinement of the existing material on vDPA, so if you’ve seen it before, it’s probably not earth-shattering. But an refinement nonetheless. The big differentiator was the ability to back up physical environment, namely SQL, Exchange, and Sharepoint. The impression I got was that this was application focused, not bare-metal. Anyone else think that too?

The Solution Center (exhibition hall) was quite interesting. I finally got to talk to someone at Hitachi Data Systems (“No, I don’t think we go through you at all for distribution”) about their solution stack. Their purpose-built flash storage was pretty interesting (though I can’t find it on the corporate web site). I didn’t see Cloud Physics at the Solution Center or on the list. What gives?
Composition includes the Radix bupleuri, Tuckahoe, radix scutellariae, fructus gardeniae, atractylodes, yam, rhizoma atractylodis, talc, angelica, peach kernel, safflower, licorice, radix aucklandiae, yanhusuo, honeysuckle, trogopterus dung. new.castillodeprincesas.com purchase female viagra This medication is available in the dosage of any medicine, tadalafil india cialis be it herbal or synthetic drugs. The generika cialis 20mg new.castillodeprincesas.com ICU provided in ambulance are commonly called as Mobile intensive care units or MICU ICU ambulance or MICU These are highly specialized mobile units equipped with paramedics to carry out on-site advanced treatments. What are the relaxation responses? When you’re into a massage process, a caring find out description viagra no prescription and a safe touch is an invitation to relax.
Oh, I sat down and got a free social media consultation, which focused on LinkedIn rather than this blog, but was still valuable.

Another interesting opportunity is asking random Partners what they’re seeing which is interesting.  Do they think VSAN will be as disruptive for low-end storage?

If you’re here at PEX and would like to meet up to chat about this stuff during breaks, after the day, or over dinner, ping me and we can set it up.

Events

PEX 2014 VSAN – Content Catalog Part 1

Leave a comment

The PEX 2014 Content Catalog is online, so I had quite a bit of searching, slicing, and dicing to do. My initial read-through was looking for clues about announcements which might happen before Partner Exchange, but I gave up on that very quickly. If you think you’ve found something I’ve overlooked, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. Maybe a problem I had was getting sidetracked by content. So it seemed more productive to think about the interesting sessions. This is the first of a few posts about interesting stuff I saw in the content catalog.

PEX 2014 VSAN Content

SDDC3521-BC – Software-Defined Storage & Virtual SAN (VSAN) – Sales Boot Camp
EUC3208 – Architecting VMware View with VSAN – The VCDX Way
TEX3060 – VDI Horizon View on vSAN
TEX3243 – Benefits of Using Virtual SAN (vSAN) with View

It’ll be interesting to see how VSAN’s sales positioning is going to be handled. Are they going to stick with lab and View as the primary use cases? That seems to make sense with the number of sessions targeting  the Horizon View (VDI) use case. The “VCDX Way” is especially intriguing.
It’s the part that keeps me alive in this tadalafil overnight shipping Internet business. It is a best supplement for aphrodisiac the cost of viagra is Musli Strong Capsules, which is a pure natural product made of these types of effective natural herbs for Aphrodisiac that enhance libido without causing any side effect. Eat 30 grams of pumpkin seeds everyday or taking pumpkin capsules is very effective. http://pharma-bi.com/2009/02/ cialis prescription After which the individual can easily buy the prescribed medicine from the pharmacy itself and wholesale viagra online ask them to deliver the pills at his home or office address.
So will VMware target the SMB SAN market, which is who actually seems to be clamoring for the product? The VSAN open beta is supposed to be amazingly popular. Of course, whether SMB storage is economically possible with VSAN will depend on the pricing. Since I can’t really extrapolate whether VSAN will be GA by Partner Exchange, it’s tough to do anything besides hope. February would seem to be a good date (offset from VMworld) with plenty of time to shake out first revision bugs and qualify configurations, additional use cases. and more best practices to release around VMworld. But that’s my small fish view on product strategy without any insight into where they are in the engineering effort.

SDDC3522-BC – Software-Defined Storage Technical Boot Camp
TEX3204 – Driving Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with the Right Direct Attached Drives for your Workload using VMware vSAN

More technically focused sessions which I personally find exciting. Doing a good POC (and partner teams to do them) is a big part of what I want to bring to partner engagements. The second session is the only hint of future product developments I’ve seen, with a discussion of an all-flash VSAN configuration (high-endurance SSD fronting standard-endurance SSD). What does this signal to you? Anything? What does it mean to you about a GA schedule, if anything?

Events

PEX 2014 – Making Plans for Hands on Labs

PEX 2014 - VMware Partner Exchange RegistrationPEX 2014 is actually going to be my first VMware Partner Exchange. Exciting! The full pass is booked and paid for. No turning back now! The early-bird deadline is January 6th, so book now to save some money ($300). This year the boot camps are from Feb 8-10 with the event proper on Feb 10-13. I won’t be making it out to the boot camps, but will be attempting to get on-site as early as possible on the 10th for the Hands on Labs. I seem to remember reading that at VMworld 2013, they had access to the labs for anyone on-site, regardless of access to an actual lab station. Considering that and the success of the internet-facing Hands on Labs, it might not be important to be there at an actual lab station, but it would be nice. I’m not betting on the labs being immediately Internet-facing, but it would be nice to have access in the evenings.

PEX 2014 HoL won't be anything like this chemistry lab
By Kurt Barnett (UNSW Canberra) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Wait, you do know about the Hands on Labs Online, don’t you? It’s a terrific way to get your feet (hands?!) wet with hands-on VMware product experience. There’s a lab manual and a lab environment for you to explore the real product and interface. It’s not a click-through glorified slideshow, either. I don’t know for certain, but I’m assuming they’re using vCloud Automation Center and vCloud Director to spin up on-demand nested instances of the lab environment per-registration. That’s pretty cool tech even before you start messing around in your sandbox with the product or use-case you came to test! Go check it out.

OK, that being said, I’m assuming we’ll see the availability of the “2014 catalog” of new labs (I assume they’re still in the catalog model?). I’m hoping there are new versions of VSAN (I don’t have a lab yet) labs with additional use cases. I’d love to see an expansion of vCHS labs as I haven’t seen any Not For Resale licenses yet (I’d love to hear that I’m wrong about that. Anyone?). A new generation of End User Computing labs would be nice to see. Would love a “Mirage as XP Migration Tool” lab to familiarize people with the use case and the process. Fingers crossed. vSOM/vCOPS (whatever you want to call it) is another product which would be great to have expended scenarios in. How about a lab which had a series of failures present (randomized, possibly) which one used Operations Manager to identify the issues with and remediate? I haven’t taken the time to see what’s in the existing labs covering vCloud Director, but I’d love to spend some time with that as well.

For the moment, cheapest viagra in australia should not be adopted on a habitual basis because it results in addiction and you’ll face severe health risks because of it later on.If you’re taking any prescribed medicines then tell your physician about it prior to the IEP meeting. In recent years, criminals have started benefiting from the internet to fraudulently market medicines which include raindogscine.com brand viagra no prescription and Vicodin. The note should not be 5mg cialis price a long write up. Either male generic viagra cheap or female, infertility can strike both. And how about the partner product labs? I need to carve out some time to walk though the Puppet Labs automation, Cisco Nexus 1000V, and Netapp Virtual Storage Console labs. So much great stuff, so few hours in the day. I wonder if PEX 2014 is when additional partners roll out labs at.

Any labs you’d like to see in the future or existing labs you’ve been itching to try?

Are you going to PEX 2014? Any other first timers? Any veteran advice?

Blog Administration

VMware 2014 – A New Position, A New Beginning

fireworks
By Andrea Pavanello (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0-it (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/it/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons
As 2013 came to a close, I took advantage of a terrific job opportunity at a different company. I’m beginning the year as a field-deployed technical consultant at a technology distributor’s data center practice, focusing on VMware for the western region of the United States. VMware 2014 – yes, it’ll be a year eyeballs deep in VMware’s products for me.

What does that mean for this blog? Well, I’ll have to make sure that everyone knows that the views and opinions here are mine alone and don’t reflect that of my employer. In fact, I’ll have to figure out how to make sure that disclaimer is prominently displayed somewhere. I’d hate to attach it to each post I write. Maybe I’ll ask the prominent VMware bloggers how they handle that.

The most important impact is that I’ll be writing more. Though in the past, an aspect of my job as been to keep up to date with VMware, 2014 marks a point in my career where it become my primary (and secondary, and probably tertiary) focus. It’s always been part of my process to anchor lessons learned by writing. Hopefully this focus on VMware with partner solution providers will expose even more nuggets of information. Hopefully my reactions and views will be uniquely mine and valuable reading
Kamagra oral jelly can easily intake by the sildenafil pfizer user without water. They tonysplate.com generic viagra online were technicians and managers, not leaders. Getting aggressive management of erectile dysfunction such as cheap cialis canada , Tadalafil, Sildenafil, Kamagra pills and oral jelly can be used by people of an older age or those who are looking to conceal their intake of caffeine in the last 24 hours. viagra online ordering Some of these side effects include: drowsiness, breathlessness, skin rashes, male breasts and swelling of face, lips and tongue, loss of sexual drive, erectile dysfunction, etc.
In the past week alone, I had interesting  experiences with vCloud Hybrid Service, the VSAN beta, and vShield Edge products. Though young, vCHS looks like a rapidly maturing product with wide-ranging implications for business continuity and disaster recovery practices for internal IT, resellers, and service providers alike. VSAN is looking more and more like an amazing first step at embedding storage controller value in the hypervisor instead of running it on storage array silicon. My exposure to vShield Edge really came from ramping up on vCHS. it’s bringing security software to the virtual environment instead of locking it in a dedicated appliance, once again sparking the “When is that a good idea” discussions. I’d really like to start converting these experiences into public posts and discussions. Here’s my public commitment to make that happen!

So what are you looking forward to this year in virtualization?

Features

Reclaim Thin Provisioned Space – Punchzero

5 Comments

Thin provisioning of virtual disks has been a quiet benefit to IT administrators working in virtual environments.  In the recent past of thick provisioned storage as the only option (still common in non-virtualized, local storage environments), administrators made educated guesses about the amount of disk space their systems would need.  Only in the 2008 Server family did Microsoft even include operating system tools to expand disk partitions, an incentive to over-provision storage.

With Thin Provisioned disks, administrators were able to make extremely generous space allocations at the operating system level, while holding off on physical disk space allocation until it was actually used.  This over-provisioning practice often comes with the silent promise that operating system level storage usage would be monitored to see what the steady-state usage becomes.  The administrator might even make a silent promise to no one in particular to examine that usage level and shrink the disk to the steady-state level plus a reasonable safety margin.

I’ll set aside the quite-obvious danger of over-provisioning the physically available capacity aside, and focus on the issue of the creeping high-water mark.  Administrators sometimes make the erroneous assumption that thin provisioned disks will automatically shrink in size allocated by the vSphere hypervisor when files are deleted.  While the operating system might consider a file deleted (removing all pointers in the file allocation table in Windows, for example), the hypervisor doesn’t know about this status change, and thus doesn’t reclaim the space.  Unfortunately, this can lead to situations where a thin disk has a temporary spike in the high-water mark, followed by a drop to the steady-state level, leaving the thin disk allocated at the spiked level.  Or perhaps the operating system isn’t strict about only using previously deleted blocks for new allocation (and why would it be?) so that new space usage doesn’t always over-write previously deleted space. So how can we reclaim thin provisioned space?

There are options that involve storage vMotion (only available at the Enterprise Plus license level in 5.x) or vSphere Converter (make a copy of the workload and disk in a new location) which can result in awkwardly sorting out the naming.  Fortunately there’s actually a native way to reclaim that deleted space. It just requires comfort with and access to the ESXi shell.

vmkfstools [-K | --punchzero ]

Under the hood, this will remove all zeroed blocks from the vmdk. Unfortunately, because of the previously discussed operating system behavior, deleted files don’t necessarily result in zeroed blocks. To maximize the effectiveness of this technique, you should use operating system tools to overwrite all free space in the guest with zeroes. Keep in mind that this will expand the thin disk to it’s maximum. Make sure you have enough space to do it.

For Windows, the Sdelete tool is what you want. You can get Sdelete from TechNet individually or as part of the Sysinternals package.

Since you read my post on using Chocolatey, just install it with a single command.

c:\> cinst sysinternals

From Technet:

sdelete [-z] [drive letter] …

But, purchase cheap cialis https://drscoinc.com/cialis-1023.html those men who’re suffering from erectile dysfunction have come into use. These dealers sell different herbal medicines made up of ginseng that can cure all type of buy cheap viagra drscoinc.com health problems. Coffee may work similar to the male impotence treating medication Kamagra Soft, wherein the penile corpus cavernosum muscles relax and blood vessels dilate so that the blood gushes toward the penile organ for an erection during sexual intercourse. drscoinc.com cialis prescription Like sildenafil pfizer male sexual disorders, you can’t follow any preventive steps for sexual disorders in women.

-z Zero free space (good for virtual disk optimization).

And if you’re in a Linux guest, use dd to do the same thing.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/[path]/zeroes bs=4096 && rm -f /[path]/zeroes
# [path] is located on target disk

Keep in mind that this will inflate the disk to it’s maximum size. After the disk has been filled with zeroed blocks, shut down the guest and connect to the ESXi shell. (Remember how to enable the ESXi Shell?)

From the shell, navigate to the directory with the virtual disk you’re re-thinning, then  vmkfstools –punchzero. Here’s the vmdkfstools documentation.

vmkfstools --punchzero [disk-name].vmdk

It’s not ideal to have to schedule downtime to clean up after thin provisioned disk space, but it has to be done [EDIT: Barring Storage vMotion with alternate storage locations]. Monitor your usage and make sure you have enough space to inflate the thin provisioned disk to a fully-allocated state.

Features

Enabling and Accessing ESXi Shell

2 Comments

The ESXi Shell (formerly known as “Tech Support Mode”) is a Busybox embedded Linux environment which vSphere administrators can use as a direct command line administrative interface for the vSphere host. Everything one might want to do with the CLI (“run common system administration commands against ESX/ESXi systems”) can be done in the ESXi Shell for the local system. In addition, there are some commands and options that can only be run in the ESXi Shell. There’s also the added advantage of not needing to install the CLI package on a machine with network access to the vSphere host. It’s also where you’d run utility scripts like ghettoVCB for backup.

VMware Knowledge Base Article 2004746 provides the various ways to enable vCLI (vSphere Client and the Direct Console User Interface). In short, in the vSphere Client, you’ll use:
Inventory->Host->Configuration->Security Profile->Services->Properties->ESXi Shell
Options->Start and Stop Manually
Start

While you’re there, you probably want to enable SSH if that’s how you’re going to access the environment. VMware’s guidance is to disable these services in production for security reasons. In fact, while you have either ESXi Shell or SSH access enabled, you’ll get a security warning. VMware Knowledge Base Article 2003637 tells you how to disable those warnings.

A daily dose of these nutrients, and that’s just what viagra samples uk it takes, to keep a healthy and normal sexual life. Oh sure, we’ve heard plenty about how they don’t like what President Obama has proposed, but nothing about online order for viagra what they would like to propose. Here are a few insights: First of all, there are some widely circulated myths Check This Out best generic viagra about penis enlargement that need to be busted. The shockwave therapy has been believed for inducing body for repairing a smooth muscle in the penile and cheap online levitra enhance the flow of blood in it. Terrific.  So how do you access the environment? If you have physical access to the host console or a out-of-band management (Cisco iLO, Dell DRAC, HP iLO, etc).

If you’re using SSH (and enabled it), you’ll use your SSH client of choice. On a Unix/Linux/BSD client, you probably already have one. If not, check out OpenSSH. On the Windows platform, a popular client is PuTTY. Do you use Chocolatey to install software on your Windows box?  If so, then you can use it to install PuTTY:

cinst putty

You’ll need account credentials with administrative access, of course.

And you’re all set!

Operating System

Simplify software installation with Chocolatey

1 Comment

Working in the virtualization field demands a skill set which crosses domains.  Windows guest administration is one of the tasks that can’t be ignored. Be it template management, deployment, or performance troubleshooting, Windows administration is a basic skill that a well-rounded administrator should be able to do.  However, Windows administration can be a full time job, so if one’s focus is one level up, on the hypervisor, it’s important to have a consistent set of easily accessible tools to do basic administrative tasks.  A colleague pointed me to Chocolatey as a meta-tool which can help install and manage best-of-breed tools which often aren’t developed by Microsoft or included with the standard operating system install.

https://github.com/chocolatey/chocolatey/wiki

Chocolatey is a global PowerShell execution engine using the NuGet packaging infrastructure. Think of it as the ultimate automation tool for Windows.

Chocolatey is like apt-get, but built with Windows in mind (there are differences and limitations). For those unfamiliar with apt/debian, think about chocolatey as a global silent installer for applications and tools. It can also do configuration tasks and anything that you can do with PowerShell. The power you hold with a tool like chocolatey is only limited by your imagination!

You can develop your tools and applications with NuGet, and release them with chocolatey!
But chocolatey is not just for .NET tools. It’s for nearly any windows application/tool!

So what does this mean in theory?  Chocolatey is a Powershell automation tool which can help automate the installation of software packages, including dependency management.  What does this mean in practice?  With a command, you can download and install important software to your Windows workload.  The most complex command is the installation of Chocolatey itself.  From the shell (cmd.exe) run with administrative privileges:

@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('http://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%systemdrive%\chocolatey\bin

You can browse the list of software that’s been packaged in the Chocolatey Gallery.  Most of the standard free utilities that you might already be using are available.  Once you decide you want a package, you just issue the installation command, again from the Command Shell.  Want to install Google’s Chrome browser?
Understanding the Cause While developing an in-depth knowledge of penis anatomy won’t help men to cure their discomfort, it might be helpful to know that blue balls develop due to hormonal deficiency, disorders of the neural system, lack of adequate penile blood supply or psychological problems. order viagra professional There may be variety canada viagra sales http://twomeyautoworks.com/?attachment_id=244 of causes why a man meets this problem but most common causes are:* Stress* Depression * Penile surgery * Blood-related issues* Relationship issues* Chronic medication* High blood pressure* Cardiovascular problems Apart from above mentioned conditions, aging is another common reason of decrease in testosterone levels. Complications free generic viagra have utterly covered our lives and use our bodies. Testosterone deficiency http://twomeyautoworks.com/?attachment_id=233 purchase generic cialis Prescribed testosterone skin patches are for those whose problems are related to age.
cinst GoogleChrome

Perhaps you prefer Firefox?

cinst Firefox

See how easy this could be?  Perhaps you generally install 7zip, WinDirStat, and PuTTy on a machine.  Instead of carrying them around, going stale on a USB drive, you could:

cinst putty
cinst windirstat
cinst 7zip

Clean and simple, right?  So what uses can you think of?

Features

Link Aggregation Misconceptions

Leave a comment

Think you’ll be able to use Link Aggregation Groups (LAG) to turn your four Gigabit links into a single 4 Gigabit link? Well, Link Aggregation might not do the job you think it will do. Listen, I get it. There are a ton of topics that you have to know about to be an effective Virtualization solution designer, and network intricacies might seem pretty far down the list. So here’s the deal.

Link Aggregation, when discussed in a virtualization context, is a process of configuring multiple NIC ports to be able to send and receive traffic for a given network configuration of a vSwitch. To the virtualization host, this means the vSwitch can be sent packets on any of the pNIC ports in the aggregation (when the destination is one of the vNICs connected to the vSwitch). The process of outbound packets is a bit different. Currently, the ESXi hypervisor (5.x) creates a hash of the origin and destination addresses and chooses one of the outbound pNICs based on that hash. Yes, one of the pNICs.  It doesn’t alternate or load balance between the pNICs for any single origin-destination pair.

At the same time, the network device on the other side of the Link Aggregation (usually a physical switch) needs to make the same configuration as far as accepting packets from the aggregated link.  When it sends packets down the aggregated link, it has it’s own rule about which connection it uses.  Typically, this is a hash of MAC or IP addresses (Layer 2 or 3).  Again, this process typically chooses a single link for traffic involving a given origin-destination pair.  Again, no load balancing or bandwidth aggregation for a single origin-destination pair.

Premature Ejaculation:- This is a condition in which men are unable to maintain an erection for cialis super viagra a long time. Men can use this herbal oil to cure impotence in news buying cialis on line men. It is delivered to your door steps and you are going to pay just for the medicine you want and sometimes the bad generic super viagra quality medicine. Such a complication comes in the face of a disorder cheapest viagra tablets named erectile dysfunction which a person needs to get a prescription before ordering the product. What are the implications?  Well, vSphere doesn’t support a round-robin use of pNICs in Link Aggregation on the broadcast side, so two or more aggregated links won’t behave as a linear addition of the ports.  In fact, for any given origin-destination pair, the host will max out at a single NIC’s worth of (outbound) bandwidth.  If you only ever have a single origin-destination pair, then you’d get no bandwidth benefit from link aggregation.

What if there were many endpoints connecting to the vSphere host across a link aggregation?  Well, the more pairs, the better chance that the connections are evenly distributed across the ports.  In that case, there’s a potential bandwidth benefit.

That’s quite different from a simple addition of the two or more ports together.

Documenting my thoughts and experiences in virtualization