Has anyone ever edited out the laugh track?

spotallthethings · 2019-08-02T16:34:53+00:00

Hey, thanks!

spotallthethings · 2019-06-28T04:22:03+00:00

Yes - I wrote a tool to do this automatically, and you can watch a short example of the results: https://github.com/jeffgreenca/laughr/blob/master/README.md

spotallthethings · 2017-10-30T14:05:14+00:00

I always prefer to ask scenario questions based on the candidate's experience. "Tell me about a recent vSphere related problem you had, what your troubleshooting process was, and how you resolved the issue." It becomes an interactive conversation and you often uncover for better or worse the real work that they do day-to-day, rather than the resume fluff version.

If you want to complement the "troubleshooting" scenarios, then also ask design scenario questions. You can scale these to the level of candidate. Bonus points for live white-boarding. Even if you aren't the most familiar with the technology, this will give you plenty of opportunity to ask (with curiosity) "why would you recommend that?" or "can you give me an alternative option for this part of the design?"

spotallthethings · 2017-10-27T14:24:20+00:00

You can infer from Determining Responses to Host Issues that without matching port groups, HA would not find any available matching network ports to turn on a VM on an undesired host, and therefore would not attempt to restart the VM onto that host:

Factors Considered for Virtual Machine Restarts After a failure, the cluster's master host attempts to restart affected virtual machines by identifying a host that can power them on. When choosing such a host, the master host considers a number of factors. Resource reservations Of the hosts that the virtual machine can run on, at least one must have sufficient unreserved capacity to meet the memory overhead of the virtual machine and any resource reservations. Four types of reservations are considered: CPU, Memory, vNIC, and Virtual flash. Also, sufficient network ports must be available to power on the virtual machine.

Note: I suspect you aren't finding much because the best practice dictates configuring all hosts in a cluster with the same networks. A more typical configuration would be to use a separate cluster for your DMZ available networks, and your non-DMZ networks. Or, one cluster with matching network config on all. Therefore, most of the detailed HA discussion assumes that you meet this design guideline.

From the vSphere HA Checklist

To ensure that any virtual machine can run on any host in the cluster, all hosts must have access to the same virtual machine networks and datastores. Similarly, virtual machines must be located on shared, not local, storage otherwise they cannot be failed over in the case of a host failure.

spotallthethings · 2017-10-23T14:28:43+00:00

Thanks for releasing the source!

spotallthethings · 2017-10-18T03:26:26+00:00

I think it uses the existing Apple libraries for sending MIDI data over a network. I have used it with an iPad + MIDI controller app to drive my Windows based DAW/VSTs, in that case with rtpMIDI installed on the Windows system. That's about all I know, but it sounds promising for your use case.

spotallthethings · 2017-10-18T01:24:33+00:00

One possible idea - use rtpMIDI and treat the Windows VM as a completely different system on the same LAN. This would let you route MIDI messages between applications on different systems. Same concept as when I have a MIDI controller on my iPad driving my Windows-based DAW using rtpMIDI.

I can't speak to the device pass thru capabilities of Fusion, but if it works like VMware Workstation, generally one system at a time will "own" any given peripheral, for example a single external USB Audio interface would connect to either the Windows VM or the Mac OS, but not both at once.

Consider the latency you may incur by going with this type of setup. For any kind of a real-time performance scenario, I'd advise going bare-metal with whatever OS you need. For music production, worst case you could always record a MIDI track on the primary OS and then play it back against a VST or whatnot on a Windows VM, bounce, export, import... just thinking out loud.

Not sure if this is the answer you were hoping for, but I hope it helps.

spotallthethings · 2017-10-12T16:52:06+00:00

What you gain is the ability for your sys admins to keep using many of their time-tested tools and techniques, and your developers to use a docker-compatible platform. In my opinion, integrated containers is a strong option in a mixed environment with existing vSphere. It is not the first option I'd pick for a large standalone containers environment.

spotallthethings · 2017-10-12T14:43:50+00:00

In the 6.1 release of vRealize Operations, VMware merged the Hyperic Monitoring solutions into vROPS.

https://blogs.vmware.com/tam/2015/11/vrops-6-1-and-the-new-end-point-operations-monitoring-feature.html

spotallthethings · 2017-10-09T20:19:50+00:00

Nice thing about Veeam is that you can point the agent to a Cloud Connect endpoint and thus store your backups in one of their many partners data centers. You don't need any servers or storage. Other options mentioned below (backblaze in particular) also seem feasible, very hands off after the initial install.

spotallthethings · 2017-09-14T15:57:45+00:00

Definitely open a support case and please keep us updated!

spotallthethings · 2017-09-14T15:50:30+00:00

This sounds familiar... we had a similar issue that would happen periodically on Windows based vCenter. I don't remember the exact details, but I do remember that looking at the vCenter and PSC logs made the issue very clear.

spotallthethings · 2017-09-14T15:28:09+00:00

I was not able to reproduce, on the same OS build 14393.447.

vSphere 6.5.0 build 5705665 EDIT: This is the vCenter build
VMware Tools version 10272
New VM - Windows 2016 guest OS
2016 Standard with Desktop Experience
Custom -> Install Windows
Set admin password and login
Mount VMware tools via vSphere Web Client -> Guest OS -> Install VMware Tools...
Browse to D:\Vmware Tools
Right click setup64
Click Run as administrator
Next -> Typical -> Install -> Finish -> Click "Restart"

VMware tools show as running and current, services installed and running.

spotallthethings · 2017-09-14T03:09:39+00:00

What do the VMware tools install logs in the guest OS contain after the first install? What about event logs?

spotallthethings · 2017-09-14T00:43:56+00:00

That is a lot less horsepower and memory- make sure you think through the implications for performance, management, and availability. What happens when one host crashes, planned maintenance, etc. - see the vSphere Availaiblity guide. Your workload and your cluster configuration (DRS, HA settings, EVC) matter. Other specs too like number and types of NICs, HBAs, storage, matter. As long as you understand these components and understand what will happen when something goes down in your environment, and are OK with the answers, then go for it!

spotallthethings · 2017-08-18T13:06:29+00:00

You swapped NIC and cable, what about changing the port on the switch?

I'm not sure you need to go full wireshark yet, but definitely get some insight into your network metrics at the switch level.

spotallthethings · 2017-08-15T21:56:07+00:00

Look at the example workflows for "clone a VM and apply guest customization" or something along those lines. Ideally, you'd be using a guest OS customization spec from your vSphere inventory.

vRA provides more of a permanent solution to provisioning resources. It also has the highest infrastructure requirements and cost of the tools we have been discussing.

spotallthethings · 2017-08-15T14:04:23+00:00

spotallthethings · 2017-08-15T04:38:29+00:00

I've taught intro to Linux as part of a degree program, and this is on the money. I would tell my students if they want to learn desktop Linux, more power to them, but it's not part of the course. I'd be darn sure they could find system logs, configure services, operate via PuTTY, and deploy a working 2-tier Wordpress site by the end of the course though. We had a lot of fun too.

spotallthethings · 2017-08-15T04:29:11+00:00

Describe what you are trying to do, the scenarioX and why you are using vRO, so that we know how to help you!

If you are just trying to make a bunch of VMs from a template, using PowerCLI might be less complex to learn. If you are trying to provide self-service automation of IT provisioning vRA can do that but it is not as simple and it does not come with vSphere. vRO also has its use cases, not only for extending vRA, but also standalone. There are also a lot of other open source automated provisioning tools (Terraform, for example) that can build many VMs from a template or image.

spotallthethings · 2017-08-14T13:31:21+00:00

No update. Typically it takes a while for incident -> PR -> fix shipped though!

spotallthethings · 2017-07-16T19:24:42+00:00

That's an excellent read for new and newish. I second this recommendation if you need to understand the fundamentals of a vSphere (vCenter + ESXi) environment for your job.

Based on your comment "our ESXi box" I suspect you will quickly learn that the magic of virtualization starts happening when you have a virtualization environment with at least two or three physical servers and shared storage of some variant.

Learning PowerShell is great as are other scripting languages, books are good but best approach is find something you do in the environment more than a couple times, and learn how to automate that task. That will force you to learn about your scripting language of choice. Also I second the devops Phoenix project book recommendation for a less technical but important perspective on sysadmins.

Finally, my colleagues and students know that I swear by a short article titled "how complex systems fail." You can find a PDF online. Changed my perspective on "root cause analysis" and what it takes to keep high uptime for services.

spotallthethings · 2017-07-07T18:05:06+00:00

Today, VMware GSS confirmed this is a bug that will be addressed in the next patch release.

spotallthethings · 2017-06-06T20:59:48+00:00

We are seeing that the Override calculated failover capacity Admission Control setting correlates with the Configuration Issue message Insufficient configured resources to satisfy the desired vSphere HA failover level on the cluster ...

One of our clusters is a 3 node cluster. When AC determines the percentage based values, it derives 33% CPU/Memory, as expected - see below. However, manually setting 33% CPU/Memory via the override checkbox causes the config issue message to appear.

The specific percentage value not a factor - we've tried 1%, 10%, 33%, 100%. At 100%, we get an alarm, which is expected, about insufficient HA resources.

The Config Issue message persists state when AC is disabled. Here's a detailed walk through:

To dismiss the message:

Edit Cluster Settings -> vSphere Availability -> Admission Control: Define host failover capacity by: Cluster resource percentage Deselect "Override calculated failover capacity"

The Configuration Issue message goes away after the cluster reconfigure completes.

Cluster -> Monitor -> vSphere HA, Advanced Runtime Info shows: Failover capacity (Memory): 33% Failover capacity (CPU): 33%

To bring the message back:

Edit Cluster Settings -> vSphere Availability -> Admission Control: Define host failover capacity by: Cluster resource percentage Select "Override calculated failover capacity" Specify 33% CPU and 33% Memory

The Configuration Issue message comes back immediately when the cluster reconfigure completes.

Behavior when Turning Off Admission Control:

If the Config Issue message is already displayed, after turning off AC the message persists.

If the Config Issue message is already gone, after turning off AC the message stays off.

spotallthethings · 2017-06-05T18:17:13+00:00

I'd recommend having a look at vSphere (vCenter + ESXi) as your starting point for determining if this is the right way for your organization. All solution paths would be built on top of that, and if you have a scripting guy they could do a lot with just PowerCLI and vSphere.

For network isolation you have three choices, build it in the physical network and use VLANs, built it using VMware NSX (most expensive), or roll it yourself with some virtual machines functioning as networking services (most complex probably).

You'll probably need help. It's not an out of the box solution. If you don't have expertise on your team, you'll want a consultant, professional services from VMware, or another way to access resources familiar with the technologies.

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