Author: Wouter

My VMworld EU 2019 presentations

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It’s already the week after and I am looking back at a very good VMworld last week in Barcelona. In the end I was at a podium for none less than four times and wanted to share the decks or videos with you when available. For the vExpert daily there is no deck (duh) and for the EUC Beer and tapas community event there is no video. I also had to remove most of the slides because the fling hasn’t been published yet, you can expect a blogpost when it’s been published because it’s going to be awesome!

vExpert Daily: Video | Deck

vBrownbag: tools for Horizon Helpdesk: Video | Deck

EUC Beer and Tapas top 5 flings for Horizon: Video | Deck

VMware{Code}-Horizon API 101: Video | Deck

VMworld EU 2019 day 3 report

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I am writing dus from my own desk in my own house after an awesome VMworld 2019. Day three was the day where I presented at the VMware{Code} theater. There was a good audience that really want to start using the Horizon API’s to automate their environments. The rest of de day I spent for a bit in the Solutions Exchange but mainly in the community area. We talked a lot, played some fussball and at the end of the day we had some fun with Eric Nielsen’s workshop about working with Raspberry pi’s and sensors.

 

VMworld Europe 2019 day 2 report

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Day 2 of VMworld was interesting for me. I actually did my first (and only) breakout session in the afternoon about VSAN and was in the first row for the one and only Virtually Speaking Podcast. The day actually started with having control of the @VMware_NL twitter handle during the general session (lots of demos!!) and until noon. I also did another two Design Studio sessions and I can’t encourage enough people to do those because you’re helping out with creating our tools from the future. I was for 45 minutes at the VMworld Fest but there where huge lines at the food stands so I grabbed a but and went back to my hotel where I was asleep in no-time.

 

Day 1 of VMworld Europe 2019

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So yesterday was a very interesting day for me. It started at the reserved bloggers seats for the keynote where we didn’t see too much really big announcements. After that I had to rush to the community area for my appearance in the vExpert daily this year. If you’re interested to watch that you can find it over here. And at 12.45 I had another go at vBrownbag presenting on a couple of helpdesk tools for VMware Horizon. The rest of the day mainly was hanging around in the community area distributing Pink Cookies, Stroopwafels and gathering swag inn the solutions Exchange. In the evening I once again went onto a stage with Hans Kraaijeveld at the EUC Community beer and tapas event. This was my biggest crowd to present for until now but the beer part made it rather easy. We even showed a brand new fling called Horizon Reach from Andrew Morgan that hasn’t even been released yet. The evening came to a closing for me at the Benelux party where we had some beers and tapas again.

 

The VMworld day 0 report in text and some tweets

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Ever played football (or Soccer for the yanks) after a day at a conference? I did this yesterday for the second year in a row but at least we waited with most of the beer until after doing the active bit. Before that my morning was filled with a couple of sessions at the Design Studio’s. The afternoon was more interesting with a a workshop on operationalizing NSX-T. Or well to be more exact that was the description but it ended up being 4 hours of death by powerpoint. But hey it gave me more time for networking with friends at the vCommunity area after bailing out.

https://twitter.com/GreatWhiteTec/status/1191446898017742848

The VMware Labs flings monthly for October 2019

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Only two days before I am flying to Barcelona, I am really looking forward to VMworld. The bad things is that it will probably be over before we know it as well. One of the new flings from last month has been renamed, one new was posted and six received updates. Kubernetes eXtensible Desktop Client (KXDC) was renamed to Kubewise and the Virtualized High Performance Computing Toolkit is the new fling posted. Updated flings are vRealize Operations REST Notifications Helper, vSphere Mobile Client, Workspace One UEM Workload Migration Tool, Virtual Machine Compute Optimizer,  vRealize Build Tools and the vSAN Performance Monitor.

New releases

[sta_anchor id=”hpctoolkit” /]

Virtualized High Performance Computing Toolkit

The toolkit helps you in performing High Performance Computing

High Performance Computing (HPC) is the use of parallel-processing techniques to solve complex computational problems. HPC systems have the ability to deliver sustained performance through the concurrent use of distributed computing resources,and they are typically used for solving advanced scientific and engineering problems, such as computational fluid dynamics, bioinformatics, molecular dynamics, weather modeling and deep learning with neural networks.

Due to their extreme demand on performance, HPC workloads often have much more intensive resource requirements than those workloads found in the typical enterprise. For example, HPC commonly leverages hardware accelerators, such as GPU and FPGA for compute as well as RDMA interconnects, which require special vSphere configurations.

This toolkit is intended to facilitate managing the lifecycle of these special configurations by leveraging vSphere APIs. It also includes features that help vSphere administrators perform some common vSphere tasks that are related to creating such high-performing environments, such as VM cloning, setting Latency Sensitivity, and sizing vCPUs, memory, etc.

Feature Highlights:

  • Configure PCIe devices in DirectPath I/O mode, such as GPGPU, FPGA and RDMA interconnects
  • Configure NVIDIA vGPU
  • Configure RDMA SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization)
  • Configure  PVRDMA (Paravirtualized RDMA)
  • Easy creation and  destruction of virtual HPC clusters using cluster configuration files
  • Perform common vSphere tasks, such as cloning VMs, configuring vCPUs, memory, reservations, shares, Latency Sensitivity, Distributed Virtual Switch/Standard Virtual Switch, network adapters and network configurations

Update flings

[sta_anchor id=”vropsrestnotifyer” /]

vRealize Operations REST Notifications Helper

vRealize Operations REST Notifications Helper helps vRealize Operations Manager users improve and customize the REST notifications of alerts. It collects the most useful information about an alert, creates a new payload by user configuration, and sends it to third parties.

Changelog

Version 1.3.0

  • Added a configuration for preferred HTTP request type
  • Added severity mapping configuration
  • Enabled blacklisting with resourceName property
  • Arranged the endpoint configuration structure for different behavior based on alert trigger states
  • Added symptoms as a single string (like recommendations)
  • Minor fixes

 

[sta_anchor id=”vspheremobileclient” /]

vSphere Mobile Client

vSphere Mobile Client enables administrators to monitor and manage vSphere infrastructure directly from any mobile device. Whether you want to check on the current or historical resource consumption; you want to get notifications on long running tasks; or you want to check the currently running tasks – the vSphere Mobile Client is there to help.

Changelog

Version 1.6.0

  • Hosts can now be rebooted from the UI
  • Recent tasks can now be viewed in tasks view (running/in-progress)
  • Redesigned cards: VM card, host card, cluster card, task card
  • Quick actions can now be easily accessed with a tap on the card
  • VM cards display a screenshot which can be enlarged by taping on it
  • A feedback portlet has been added to the dashboard, you can know provide feedback from within the app
  • Performance charts are now available for hosts
  • Navigation menu items are now larger to faciliate taping on those
  • Supports mobile devices using Android version 4.4 (KitKat) or newer
  • Supports mobile devices using iOS version 10 or newer
  • No other mobile operating systems are currently supported
  • For Notification Appliance – 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 14 GB storage
  • An existing VC (version 6.0 or newer) installation (VCSA or Windows).
  • Application is tested on the vCenter VCSA 6.5 GA release.
  • Hosts can now be rebooted from the UI
  • Recent tasks can now be viewed in tasks view (running/in-progress)
  • Redesigned cards: VM card, host card, cluster card, task card
  • Quick actions can now be easily accessed with a tap on the card
  • VM cards display a screenshot which can be enlarged by taping on it
  • A feedback portlet has been added to the dashboard, you can know provide feedback from within the app
  • Performance charts are now available for hosts
  • Navigation menu items are now larger to faciliate taping on those

[sta_anchor id=”wsonemigtool” /]

Workspace One UEM Workload Migration Tool

The Workspace One UEM Workload Migration Tool allows a seamless migration of Applications and Device configurations between different Workspace One UEM environments. With the push of a button, workloads move from UAT to Production, instead of having to manually enter the information or upload files manually. Therefore, decreasing the time to move data between Dev/UAT environments to Production.

Changelog

Version 2.0.1

  • Fixed Baseline Migration issue
  • Fixed Profile Errors not displaying in the UI

[sta_anchor id=”vmcompoptimizer” /]

Virtual Machine Compute Optimizer

The Virtual Machine Compute Optimizer (VMCO) is a Powershell script that uses the PowerCLI module to capture information about the hosts and VMS running in your vSphere environment, and reports back on whether the VMs are configured optimally based on the Host CPU and memory. It will flag a VM as “YES” if it is optimized and “NO” if it is not. For non-optimized VMs, a recommendation is made that will keep the same number of vCPUs currently configured, with the optimal number of virtual cores and sockets.

Changelog

Version 2.0.1

  • Corrected Get-OptimalvCPU.ps1 where sometimes cluster information would show as System.Object[].

Version 2.0.0

  • Priority of the findings are captured
  • Details on the findings are included
  • Cluster information is captured to determine if Host HW is not consistent across the cluster
  • Report if a VM spanning pNUMA nodes actually has the pNUMA exposed to the guest OS
  • Report if advanced settings have been changed on the VM or host level to expose pNUMA to the guest OS
  • Reports if the number of vCPUs for a VM exceeds the physical cores of the host (using hyperthreads as vCPUs)
  • Ability to use the stand alone “Get-OptimalvCPU” function for more flexibility

[sta_anchor id=”vsanperfmon” /]

vSAN Performance Monitor

The vSAN performance monitor is a monitoring and visualization tool based on vSAN Performance metrics. It will collect vSAN Performance and other metrics periodically from the clusters configured. The data collected is visualized in a more efficient and user-friendly way. The vSAN performance monitor comes with preconfigured dashboards which will help customers evaluate the performance of vSAN clusters, identify and diagnose problems, and understand current and future bottlenecks. The dashboards are heavily inspired by vSAN Observer.

Changelog

Version 1.2

  • Fixed issues with the fling while CA certificates
  • Minor tweaks to the data collection agent
  • Removed anonymous statistics collection by influxdb

[sta_anchor id=”vrbuildtools” /]

vRealize Build Tools

vRealize Build Tools provides tools to development and release teams implementing solutions based on vRealize Automation (vRA) and vRealize Orchestrator (vRO). The solution targets Virtual Infrastructure Administrators and Solution Developers working in parallel on multiple vRealize-based projects who want to use standard DevOps practices.

Changelog

Version 1.7.1

  • Further enhanced the TypeScript projects support (still experimental)
  • Bug fixes

[Dutch] Inschrijvingen voor de tweede Nederlandse Nutanix User Group meeting zijn geopend

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Op 28 november zal in Hoofddorp in de tweede Nederlandse Nutanix User Group meeting gehouden worden. In het mooie nieuwe kantoor van Nutanix hebben we een mooi programma samen kunnen stellen.

Schrijf je hier in: https://events.nutanix.com/event/?id=1571327994-5da88ffab8960-5db058b9652ac

  • 14:00 –14:30 Registration & Welcome
  • 14:30 –15:00 Keynote: Ruben Spruijt
  • 15:00 –15:45 Community Speaker: Vishwapreet Mahabir (PQR) – Xi Leap & Xi Frame with demo’s
  • 15:45 –16:00 Break & Refreshments
  • 16:00 –16:45 Community Speaker: Bart Donders (ICT Partners) – Data Management in the real world
  • 16:45 –17:30 Nutanix Support: Martin Miedema and Mustafa Gulkara
  • 17:30 –18:30 Networking & Dinner
  • 18:30 –19:15 Interactive Session: Favorite Tooling, Wouter Kursten
  • 19:15 – 19:30 PM Take-aways & Closing

Hopelijk zie ik je 28 november in Hoofddorp!

My schedule for VMworld 2019 Barcelona

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In less than two weeks VMworld Europe will begin, for me it will be a busy one this year. With four sessions that I will participate in, a bunch of Design Studio sessions, parties and let’s not forget vSoccer (or football for us Europeans). Let me give you an insight into how my schedule will probably look. Probably because things can still change even during the event itself. Sadly there is no Hackathon this year but it would have been a hard choice between that and playing some football anyway.

Monday

My earliest session during the week will actually be on Monday starting at 8am with a Design Studio session. Later in the morning there will be another Design Studio session followed by the entire afternoon filled with an NSX-T workshop. While I am still undecided about the Partner reception I will go to the vSoccer in the evening. After last year’s first but very successful version of it in Las Vegas I am again looking forward to playing some footie with friends. Having lost a bit of weight the last year will also help in how long I will actually stay on the pitch.

Tuesday

This is a packed day for me, after the keynote where we bloggers can sit in the press area I will spend the entire day in the Community area and maybe the Solutions Exchange. I will be there because I will be in the vExpert Daily, will be presenting my own vBrownbag session and someone has to be there as emotional support for my buddy Hans’s first ever vBrownbag as well. From 17.30 I will be at Brian Madden’s EUC Community Tech Talks & Beer evening where I am presenting with previously mentioned Hans. Party wise I can go to the vExpert party but that’s a bit further away than I would like so I’ll wait on where the Benelux party is or I might even just go to the Veaam party.

Wednesday

The Wednesday is a mixed day for me starting in the community area to watch the vExpert Daily followed by two Design Studio sessions and two regular sessions. Well regular? One of the two is the live Virtually Speaking podcast with a lot of great names.

Thursday

On Thursday I will be presenting my own Horizon API 101 Session at the VMware{Code} stage. This session is fully booked but there’s probably a spot for everyone. Session wise I will be doing three regular sessions and a workshop. I will be flying back on Friday so if anyone wants to go out for dinner or something just let me know!

Nutanix .Next 2019 Copenhagen Day 2

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And Nutanix .Next 2019 is already over. Today I enjoyed the first Keynote again from the Executive lounge and hit the community booth afterwards. I don’t think there was a lot of really new tech in the keynote but I liked seeing it anyway. The interview with Caroline Wozniacki was great she sound like a very humble and down to earth person to me.

In the community area we had way too much fun distributing the 100’s of Nutanix Design Guides that where shipped to Copenhagen. So much fun that I actually forget to go to the sessions where I wanted to go but hey I met some nice people and really felt like Operah with giving away those books.

The closing keynote had two parts, the first with Dr. Katie Boumann who worked on creating the image of the black hole the last few year. I barely understood 20% of what she was saying but I loved hearing about the process. The second part was with Kit Harrington from Game of Thrones, while I never really liked the show I loved hearing all of his stories.

And see you next year in Paris!

Nutanix .Next 2019 Copenhagen Day 1

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Having arrived in Copenhagen on Sunday I have had plenty of time to go for some sightseeing but yesterday things really started for me at the Nutanix .Next event in Copenhagen. I haven’t done any sessions to be honest but had a full schedule anyway. First we started of at the keynote with the NTC’s getting a shoutout from marketing Chief Ben Gibson and one of us on just before at the celebration of 10 years of Nutanix: Andrea Mauro. Several announcements where made during the keynote like Metro availability for AHV, one minute RPO for Xi Leap and ESXi availability for Xi Leap as well. For me the highlight was Julie O’Brien (VP of marketing ) doing a tech demo on stage.

What followed after the keynote was a lot of networking and offcourse the yearly NTC lunch. While it was only a small group it actually was great to catch up with everyone. Too bad Angelo didn’t have a microphone because he was singing with the music as usual.

In the afternoon I did a roundtable session about a new type of certification that Nutanix is exploring. This was with a small group of ntc’s and I have to say the discussions where great and what is actually the future of us engineers and what does an engineer actually do?

For the evening keynote Angelo got us in the executive lounge (that hadn’t been used a lot during the day according to some of the staff). Too bad the part with Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike wasn’t broadcasted but they made up for that at the awesome party in the evening. They did a great set with lots of oldskool music that got the croud really going.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B3aJOdWBeIK/

(yes my smartphone can’t handle 120+db’s of music)