Category Archives: VMware

My DockerCon Europe agenda

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I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently familiarising myself with the ‘cloud native’ landscape (blog posts are in draft format and will hopefully get finished one day soon) and to that end I’m attending DockerCon Europe next week to immerse myself even further.  I’m going to be a fish out of water!  I’m used to attending VMworld where I know the technology and a large number of people whereas I only know a couple of people attending and only have a passing familiar with many of the technologies and vendors. Given the energy around the container space I’m envisaging an overwhelming experience like my first VMworld six years ago. You can view my full agenda online but there are a couple of sessions I’m particularly keen to attend.

The first is ‘cgroups, namespaces, and beyond: what are containers made from?‘ which promises a deep dive into container structure along with a comparison of different container runtimes. I’ve read about alternatives LXC, rkt, & systemd-nspawn a bit  and it’s particularly relevant to me as VMware’s container initiative, vSphere Integrated Containers, goes about creating the container http://premier-pharmacy.com/product/neurontin/ using hypervisor mechanisms rather than Linux kernel primitives. Being able to articulate the rationale and benefits of this to VMware customers will be key. Incidentally for those who attended VMworld this year there was a great session all about it – INF5229 – Docker and Fargo: Exploding the Linux Container Host.

Another session which should have some lively debate is live migrating a container: pros, cons, and gotchas (a concept I tweeted about back in April). The obvious question is always ‘why would you want to do that? containers are stateless and immutable – deploy and destroy!’ but the naysayers would claim that containers will also be used to deploy stateful applications in which case this is a must have feature (just as vMotion is nowadays). The presenter is the maintainer of the CRIU project and also works for Odin whose product manages both VMs and containers (so they have both expertise and a desire for it to work!).

Hopefully I’ll follow up with a blogpost detailing my thoughts after the event. If you’re attending get in touch – it’d be nice to see a friendly face!

VMware certification exams – 25% discounts (2015 offer)

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Igreenf you’re in the market to take a VMware certification exam, there’s some good news – provided you’re quick. For the next couple of days (while VMworld US is running, August 30th-4th September 2015) you can book VCP and VCAP/VCIX exams at a cool 25% offeven if you’re not at the conference! Like last year it’s only 25% (in earlier years it was 50% and if you’re attending the conference in person it still is) but every little helps.

Sadly the period of time to actually sit the exam has been shortened (see below) compared to previous years but if you want to blitz http://premier-pharmacy.com/product-category/womans-health/ multiple certification tracks you can – you’re not limited to just one.

The codes you need to register with are;

  • VCPWDF25 – for the VCP exams (VCP-DCV, VCP-DT, VCP-Cloud/CMA, VCP-NV)
  • VCPADWDF25 – for the VCAP exams (VCAP-DCA, VCAP-DCD, VCIX-NV)

Conditions:

  • You MUST book the exam while VMworld US is running, 30th August to 4th September 2015. You don’t have to be attending the conference, it’s just the period of time the offer is valid.
  • You MUST take the exam by October 15th, 2015

What are you waiting for? Head over to VMware Certification and get registered certification junkies!

Chromecast causing wifi interference – resolved

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Summary: I’ve found Google’s Chromecast to be a great streaming device but in rare cases it can misbehave and cause wireless access issues.

I bought my first Chromecast the day they were released in the UK (March 18th 2014), totally by chance, and I’m a big fan. Once setup they’re simple enough to use that my 2yr old son can now use a tablet to power on our TV and watch a program of his choosing via BBC iPlayer or Plex without any help from me – and that’s something my in-laws can’t manage. I’m not sure it’s socially a good thing but at least the technology works!

Chromecast wifi analyzerHowever I have noted a few issues, notably with their use of wifi. When you first plug in the Chromecast it’s in ‘master’ mode which means it acts as an access point, thus allowing you to join its wireless network with a tablet and configure it (and also opening up at least one vulnerability). Once the initial setup is complete however it’s supposed to go into ‘managed’ mode which means it should stop being an access point and act only as a wireless client but mine was still intermittently acting as an AP and therefore causing interference, as seen by Wifi Analyser (highly recommended by the way). In my case (and for others too) I saw additional wifi signals, always on the same channel as my home wifi, and the signal strength was greater than my home wifi http://premier-pharmacy.com/product/adipex/ when I was near the Chromecast. The Chromecasts online pharmacy belgium didn’t broadcast an SSID (it showed as ‘?’ in Wifi Analyser) with a MAC address starting in fa:86:ca, which belongs to Google (although none of the OUI lookup databases seemed to know it).

This useful article about how Chromecast uses the Wifi network, including packet captures, goes into some possible causes although it’s been 18 months since the Chromecast was released and firmware updates may have resolved some issues mentioned.

How do I fix it?

The fix, at least for me, was a factory reset of the Chromecast – hardly worth of a blogpost! However I’d ‘reset’ mine several times by simply going into the Chromecast utility on an iPad (or Android tablet) and after a reboot I’d go through the setup again (inputting wireless password, naming the device etc) and that DIDN’T fix the issue. A factory reset can be done by holding down the power button on the Chromecast for 25 seconds until the light on the device flashes or via the Chromecast app (detailed walkthrough here).

It’s also worth checking that it’s running the latest firmware (31432 as of May 22nd 2015, according to Wikipedia) – it should update automatically (and in fact you can’t stop it doing so which isn’t ideal) but sometimes a factory reset gives it the kick up the proverbial it needs to update. If you need help the official Google Chromecast forum is a good place to start as is the online troubleshooting wizard.

A new challenge…joining VMware

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Summary: An unexpected career change!

I’m excited to announce that from late July I’m going to be joining VMware as a Senior Technical Marketing Engineer.  The role will be a change compared to all of my previous roles which have entailed operating infrastructure as an end user and more recently as a service provider whereas I’ll now be focused on marketing for a vendor, albeit from a technical perspective. I’m excited because my skillset has gravitated around VMware/virtualisation/cloud for quite a few years and this role will require knowledge of areas I’ve not previously been responsible for, in particular the 3rd platform (think cloud native applications, containers etc) and VMware’s competition.   I think it’s an interesting time to join VMware as the world of ‘cloud native applications’ finally seems to be meeting the enterprise infrastructure world via technologies like Docker and the relationship with Pivotal is becoming more, well, pivotal! Time will tell if VMware (or I) live up to expectations….my imposter syndrome is at an all time high right now. 🙂

This job is only possible for me, living as I do on a remote island in the English channel, because I’ll be working remotely – which is a first for me and something I’m both looking forward to and concerned about. I’ve always enjoyed the social interaction in an office environment and building relationships remotely is a different experience – though one I think social media has prepared me well http://imagineear.com/pharmacy/buy-xanax/ for. Time to soak up those home working/office blogposts!

As with everything in life there’s a compromise and obviously I’m compromising my independent viewpoint. It’s always been a luxury to have (almost) complete freedom of speech without company politics being a concern – as an end user I was largely free to say exactly what I felt, good or bad. However hard I try I don’t believe I can be ‘independent’ when all my focus (and livelihood) depends on improving VMware products – we all have biases – so blog disclaimer or not you’ll have to interpret anything I say through the lens of a vendor employee. To my friends who work for other vendors – let’s make sure our choice of employer doesn’t affect our relationship!

I still intend to engage fully with the community. It keeps me honest, keeps me learning, and is one of the most enjoyable parts of my career, even if I can no longer attend TechFieldDay events. If I can walk the line between corporate expectations and my personal thoughts, which very few seem to manage, I’ll be a happy man.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Sure International for a great year – if you happen to be in the Channel Islands you should check our their cloud solutions! Thanks for reading and hopefully this next step in my career will lead to more great content in the future.

 

 

The vSphere v6 Webclient – hints and tips

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Summary: The vSphere Webclient has been around since vSphere 5.0 but it’s fighting an uphill battle to gain user acceptance. I’ve recently tried using it as my primary administration tool with mixed success.

Recently I’ve been rebuilding my home lab to test out new features in vSphere6 among others. As VMware have been very vocal about moving to the webclient I thought it was about time I took the plunge and started using it in anger – after all it’s been out for several years and like many others until now I’ve stuck with the C# client. Unfortunately I can’t say it’s been an overly positive experience, largely because of browser compatibility issues rather the the design of the webclient itself. To be fair it does seem faster than in earlier releases. VMware KB2005083 lists the prerequisites for the WebClient (both server and client components) but it doesn’t detail the browser specific configuration you need to get it working successfully. This post will cover a bunch of settings you need to make but it’s largely for my own reference as I couldn’t find a single source of information elsewhere.

Browser and server tweaks to make it work

Surely one of the perks of a web based client is no client side setup right? Sadly no. I’m using a Windows 2012 server as my management station for my home lab, which isn’t representative of a real production environment as I’m less concerned with compliance, security etc. While mine is a niche use case some of the same settings apply to desktop Windows editions, especially Windows 8. There are a few configuration changes you need to make on Windows to allow you to work with vSphere via the web client;

  • Enable desktop experience (instructions in VMware KB2054049) to allow Flash which is required by the web client (this is only required on Windows Server editions).
  • Install the client integration plugin as Administrator, run IE as Administrator. Discussed in this http://premier-pharmacy.com/product-category/other/ forum post (and this one) though I’ve had mixed success getting it to work at all. Based on the fact that those two forums posts between them have over 50,000 views I’d say this is a very common issue and one that seems to vary with each browser.
  • Disable Protected mode (internet and intranet zone) as per VMware’s advice. Obviously this reduces the security but if you’re choosing to use client applications on a server you’ve already made that choice!
  • Install the root CA certificate (instructions here) to remove those annoying ‘this site is untrusted’ errors. Alternatively deploy certificates to replace the self-signed one’s that ship with vSphere, although that’s considerably more work!
  • Disable pop-up blockers for the following sites;

I’m not sure if VMware publish a compatibility matrix across all their products but I’d suggest you have two different browsers installed so you can switch between them as required. For example IE is supposedly the fastest when using the webclient (reference), but doesn’t work at all when trying to login to the Orchestrator configuration web service.

Tuning performance

Here are a few tips;

Let VMware know what you think

VMware are apparently listening to user feedback, according to this forum post, although in reality it’s largely an outlet for frustrated users!

Further Reading

Tuning the vSphere webclient for better performance (based on v5.5, but largely unchanged)

What VMware need to do to convert the web client haters  (Trevor Pott @ The Register)

vSphere6 Web Client – still Flash, but vastly improved user experience (Chris Wahl)