by Thursday 14th June saw the latest London VMUG take place at Tech UK, London, with the User Group marking it’s third outing for 2018 in just six months! Rarely does any event see such heavy hitters as Duncan Epping, Frank Denneman, and Niels Hagoort in one place, but today, we got to see all three in attendance. Add to that line-up further awesomeness in the form of vCommunity member, Chris Porter, and this was one truly great London VMUG indeed! I’ve been to a number of VMUGs around the UK, however, this was to be my first time joining the London gang.
Evolution of Storage, VMware vSAN – Duncan Epping, Chief Technologist, Storage & Availability, VMware
Needing absolutely no introduction, Duncan Epping has been a pivotal player in the VMware vSAN arena for some years and has also been one of it’s biggest evangelists. vSAN has grown faster than any other hyper-converged solution in the industry, so it was fantastic to hear it’s history, its plans to evolve in the coming years and, apparently, ‘LUNs suck’!
From Duncan’s session, there was an obvious and major point. Information has simply exploded, with a 50x data growth expected between 2010-2020, leading to an increased management complexity. As such (and as you may have guessed from the previous ‘LUNs suck’ comment), users simply don’t care about LUNs or datastores. They care about VMs or, more importantly, the workloads and/or applications that live therein.
Duncan then went on to cover some pretty cool upcoming enhancements, including the ability to leverage persistent memory via vSphere 6.7, HTML5 ‘Clarity’ User Interface improvements, Log Insight integration via a new vSAN Management Pack, to name but a few.
One feature I was particularly impressed with was support improvement. Specifically, by opting in to the Customer Improvement Programme, VMware support teams can more effectively support, troubleshoot and diagnose issues, as well as leverage enhanced visibility of health, configuration, fault domains, vSAN capacity, etc. Certainly something to be aware of when configuring vSAN on any/all of your clusters.
A few additional enhancements which future releases will include:
- Improved disk management capabilities
- New hosts added to clusters will be added in Maintenance-Mode by deault
- vSAN Native Data Protection. This feature is more scalable, efficient, and boasts native vSAN snapshots with no performance loss via a new snapshotting mechanism built directly into the vSAN storage level. Yes, bad things do happen, and even with space efficient VM snapshots stored locally on primary vSAN storage with low RTOs (“instant”), this functionality is not to be viewed as a backup solution.
For more information on vSAN, Duncan has a vSAN 6.2 book freely available via http://vSAN-Essentials.com, or follow Duncan via his blog (http://www.yellow-bricks.com/) or on Twitter (@DuncanYB).
The VMware Admin’s Ticket On-board the DevOps Journey – Chris Porter
There is a lot of focus on containerisation at the moment and, more so, the orchestration of. There are a number of options out there, including Azure Container Service, Cloud Foundry, Docker Swarm, and of course, Kuburnetes.
In this session, Chris Porter gave a fantastic overview of the Kuburnetes orchestration solution, how it enables users to orchestrate deployments, how it scales, and how it manages containerised applications. Essentially, this is bringing the best of cloud functionality back on premise for those critical applications and/or workloads.
Chris included a number of great links for those interested in getting started with Kubernetes, all of which are available in his recent blog post here.
To follow Chris via his blog (https://blog.uprightvinyl.co.uk/, or on Twitter (@uprightvinyl).
Host Resources Deep Dive, Part 3 – Frank Denneman, and Niels Hagoort
The authors of the mighty VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive, launched at last year’s LonVMUG, were back with a preview session they’re hoping to deliver at VMworld 2018. This session was simply amazing and, I have to admit, I stopped taking notes as I was simply trying to absorb as much of it as possible. I’ve been a fan of the book since it came out last year, and if you’re interested in learning more about CPU, memory, or NIC architecture at a VERY low-level, you can download a copy (for free) thanks to Rubrik via https://www.rubrik.com/blog/vmware-vsphere-ebook/.
For more information around Frank and Niels’ activities, please checkout their websites and/or updates on Twitter:
Frank Denneman
- Website: http://frankdenneman.nl/
- Twitter: @FrankDenneman
Niels Hagoort
- Website: https://nielshagoort.com/
- Twitter: @NHagoort
Luxury vBeers!!!
I knew there was one final reason that I’d enjoy joining the London VMUG gang. Beer. Not just any old beer though. Luxury vBeers! Thanks to the guys at Anspach & Hobday for a fantastic evening of beer tasting and great food. We had a blast!
Lastly, and by no means least, these events would simply not be possible without the tireless efforts of our VMUG Leaders. My biggest thanks to Simon Gallagher, Linsey Smith and Dave Simpson for the ongoing support and organisation. If you’ve not been to a local VMUG event before, do yourself a favour and pop along your next local event, or to the fantastic UK VMUG UserCon on 13th December at the National Space Centre, Leicester.
See you at the next one!
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