VMware

I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab - basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta. Now 6 has been GA a while and I have a little bit of time, I have begun the lab upgrade process. You can see a bit more about my lab hardware over on my lab page.

vRealize Log Insight 2.5 improves on the clustering in previous versions with an Integrated Load Balancer (ILB) which allows you to distribute load across your cluster of Log Insight instances without actually needing an external load balancer. The advantage of this over an external load balancer is that the source IP is maintained which allows for easier analysis. The minimum number of nodes in a cluster is three, the first node becomes the Master node and the other two become Worker nodes.

Recently, I’ve had a bit of a SOAP baptism of fire - the project I am working on makes hundreds of SOAP calls to multiple SOAP APIs on multiple hosts. During this time I’ve encountered some common and rare problems and troubleshooting them seems to be a bit of a black art, if the number of results in Google is any measure. To demonstrate some of these troubleshooting methods I will use a global weather SOAP service, http://www.

Having been a VMUG member for several years and now a VMUG leader I have seen the value of being a VMUG member and attending the meetings/events/conferences continue to increase. So why do I think you should you go? If you are using VMware technologies/products in your workplace or you are regularly consulting on said VMware products, the VMUG events are in my opinion invaluable. It simply doesn’t matter what experience/knowledge you have of the products, whether you are very new to virtualization or an old hand I guarantee you will come away from any VMUG meeting having learned something useful or dare I say been a great source/help to others whom you have met and networked with.

When you are using a VMware orchestration platform with an official VMware plugin to manage a VMware product, you don’t really expect to have to fix the out-of-the-box workflows. However, during some testing of some workflows with a client the other day we ran into a couple of issues with the vCloud Director plugin workflows. Software versions used vCloud Director 5.5.1 (appliance for development) and 5.5.2 (production deployment) vRealize Orchestrator Appliance 5.

[Update Dec 2016: An updated article for vRO 7.x is available here] I’m developing some very large, very complicated workflows for vRealize Orchestrator (vRO/vCO), and as it’s a Java based application it will probably come as no surprise to many that the performance of the client drops off sharply as the client’s RAM usage creeps up. When working on some of the larger workflows, or after long sessions and heavy clipboard use, the client would become (even more) sluggish and in some cases would freeze entirely.

To quote the release notes for the latest version of vCO/vRO Multi-node Plugin: The VMware vCenter Orchestrator Multi-Node Plug-In allows organizations to manage environments with multiple vCenter Orchestrator server instances. As organizations increase their level of automation, they often find the need to deploy multiple Orchestrator instances. With the VMware vCenter Orchestrator Multi-Node Plug-In, administrators have a more efficient way to manage multiple Orchestrator instances from a central point. The plug-in allows administrators to log in to a master Orchestrator server to view the inventories and workflows of remote Orchestrator servers, and to trigger workflows remotely.

Yesterday (in case you missed it) was the fourth annual UK national VMUG at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham. It was my second year attending and I continue to be blown away with the quality and value available at this event. There’s a huge amount of content packed into this one-day event, so I’ll try and summarise my day… vCurry and vQuiz The vCurry event was hosted on Monday night and is a great way to chill out after a long drive up to the midlands.

Having finally got some SSDs to be able to use my PernixPro/PernixPrime NFR license, I thought it was about time to get PernixData’s FVP 2.0 running in my lab again. I haven’t used FVP in my lab since it was running in beta, so I was keen to see the awesome new features in action. It really is an easy install process and took me less than an hour to get my cluster up and running with VMs I/O being accelerated.

As this was my first VMworld I am not ashamed to say I was really stoked about attending, many of my peers have attended in the past and were going to attend. I flew in on the Sunday evening so that I could register early on Monday for partner day, however I did miss the chance to attend what turned out to be a very popular and very full Rockstar event on the Sunday evening.