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How to get the most out of your VMworld visit

It is only a few days to VMworld 2018 US and just over 3 months to VMworld 2018 EU. Time to think about a few points.

VMworld is a major event lasting several days at which hundreds of activities and sessions are offered every day. So there are many reasons to go there. In fact, I think some people just go for the party. But the question for most of us is: How can I get the most out of my visit?

There are some great blogposts from other people with general tips, like comfortable shoes, big bags or that you should definitely network with other people. Besides these general and useful tips I try to point out some other aspects.

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vCloud Architecture Toolkit for Service Providers – What is it?

VMware recently released the latest version 2.5 of the vCloud Architecture Toolkit for Service Providers (vCAT-SP). But I know that many service and cloud providers around the globe don’t know what that is and that something like that even exists.

I will therefore try to give a brief overview and introduction to this topic and hopefully show how powerful this toolkit can be for your business.

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Upgrading NIOC to v3 – Disruptive or not?

Upgrading NIOC from version 2 to 3 is no big deal. But I’m writing this blog post because the official VMware documentation says that the upgrade to NIOC v3 is disruptive and that worried me.

We have only one dvSwitch in our virtual infrastructure and use vSAN and NSX. If this upgrade is really disruptive, we need to shut down all virtual machines before the upgrade process starts. And that would be a big deal for us and our customers.

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ESXi 6.x, Intel X710 and malicious driver event

Two of our vSAN clusters consist of VxRail S570 nodes with Intel X710 NICs. A few weeks ago the ESXi 6.5 hosts failed again and again. Not all at once but a different host every time. Failed means the host was displayed as “not responding” in the vSphere client and VMs stopped running and were restarted by vSphere Availability on other hosts.

Of course we thought of a network error at first, but on the physical upstream switches there were no related events in the logs and also all other hosts were not affected.

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vCloud Director 9 load balancing with NSX edge gateway

For high availability and performance reasons, it makes sense to run multiple vCloud Director cells. To do this, you can place a load balancer in front of it. And since we already use NSX for vCloud Director 9, it makes even more sense to use an edge gateway for load balancing.

However, there are a few pitfalls, for example with terminating HTTP connections, session persistence and especially with the VM Remote Console via the browser.

In my blog post I show you how to configure NSX and vCloud Director 9 and what to consider for this setup.

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Getting started with vCloud Director API

The vCloud Director API is a powerful and easy to use solution for getting information about organizations, VDCs, networking, vApps and eveything else. But that’s not all. You can use it for automate all aspects of vCloud Director, too.

You may think it’s difficult to use the vCloud Director API. But I’m trying to show how easy the usage is and what you can do with this API.

So, let’s get started.

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Understanding congestion in vSAN

If things go wrong in a VMware vSAN 6.x environment you may see congestion warnings and errors – usually in hybrid setups. I try to explain what congestion means in the world of vSAN, why it’s a problem and how to deal with it.

What is congestion?

In short, congestion occurs when you have a bottleneck in the lower layers of your vSAN infrastructure. Or, more concretely: The destaging process of the incoming data, from the flash cache to the capacity disks, is so heavy that one layer of vSAN cannot handle this amount of data.

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