Posts Tagged ‘tutorial’

A Boring Introduction:

It's been a crazy week! A lot of stuff is happening right now at my work, personal life, and my career. For example, I'm building our much-awaited "Private Cloud" at work, using both the ultimate vSphere Cloud OS and the rock-solid IBM hardware that was finally delivered this week. But wait, this is not 'the' exciting thing that was happing this week for me, it's most definitely the news that I've received last Thursday about winning the first round of the vSphere blogging contest. I will not thank John Troyer & Mike Adams for their great idea and their incredible efforts for organizing this contest, and I will not thank Deepak Narain, the man behind this blog existence who kept pushing me to lunch it a year back (more on this soon), I will, instead, thank everyone for their kind words and encouragement (including the names I've just mentioned), I was literally thrilled by the emails, blog posts and "tweets" that were thrown at me since the news was out. THANK YOU!

Now, enough of this boring talk about me, myself and I, and let's get started with this new round of the blogging contest. A heads up first: I was not supposed to participate this week since I've been so busy as you see, but I had a 24 hours after canceling some plans that I had at the last minute. That said, what you see here is not quite final, I believe I need to work more on the diagram especially the IO plane layout in the hidden vSS, and probably add a couple of more configurations to the video to show some cool stuff like the consistent network stats of a mobile VM jumping from an ESX to another. I'll be updating all these stuff hopefully during next week.

The Configuration Video:

The Architecture Diagram:

Another vSphere diagram! I told you, you are going to see these blueprints more than any time before. Quick notes:

• This is an A3 scale diagram in case you want to print it.
• The diagram reflects the exact configuration on the video. I've done this intentionally to make it easier and faster for any one new to the vDS to understand the concept and the various configuration aspects.
• As I mentioned above, due to the very short period of time that I had, I will most probably modify small parts in the diagram to achieve better results. You can come back and check the version number of the diagram to download the latest updates.

MASTER IT!

I love this part at the end of any book/chapter published by SYBEX. It gets down and dirty with all the theoretic parts covered, and guide you through a practical path to try what you've learned. This is what I want to do here as well. The vDS is quite confusing as a concept and configuration for the first time, and I personally didn't get it except when I started getting my hands on it and playing around with the configurations. The challenge here is that you probably won't have the required lab to do this, especially that you need large number of NICs to test all the configurations. If you are one of my regular blog readers, you've probably guessed what I'm getting to. It's the "vSphere in a box"!

Around three month back, I published a series of posts talking about building a vSphere configurations using ESX inside itself. Instead of rewriting the whole story again, here is the links for your consideration. One last thing to note here: the entire lab you've seen in the video was built using Lab Manager 4.0 as you will read in the following posts.

• vSphere in A Box: A "Virtual Private Cloud" Blueprint
• vSphere In A Box: Part (2): Putting the pieces all together
• vSphere In A Box: Part (3): The Lab Manager 4.0 Automation

Special Thanks:

I'd like to thank Duncan Epping for reviewing part of the contents here. I was having some doubts about few points and due to the time constrain, I didn't have the time to research more on them. I asked for Duncan's help and he was very kind to do so.

Additional Recourses:

These are the best resources that I've found so far for the vDS:

• WitePapers: VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch: Migration and Configuration
• VMworld 2009 Sessions: TA2525, TA2105
• Blog Posts: Eric Sloof, Barry Combs, Luc Dekens, ICT-Freak

And finally some real action of the new amazing vSphere's Fault Tolerance. In this video we'll do the following in order:

• Verify that the FT logging is enabled on our network card.
• Enable the FT on one VM.
• Observe that the VM has two instances, the primary running on one ESX server, and the secondary running on a deferent ESX server.
• Demonstrate the "Record & Play", or to be acurate the "vLockStep" mechanism used on the FT enabled VM.
• Start a large file copy to the VM as a continuous operation in place throughout our fail-over process
• Start the fail-over process by resetting the ESX blade via the Dell admin console.
• Observe that the VM has been shifted to the secondary ESX server, and that the file copy is not interrupted.
• Observe that the FT has automatically chosen another ESX server to protect the VM with no intervention from our side.
• We'll check also the up-time of the VM after the fail over.
• And finally we'll perform the migration of the FT enabled VM in case of planned maintenance.

I hope you will find this video useful, and see the great benefit of the new Fault Tolerance feature in vSphere 4.

This is the third video in our vSphere journey. We'll do the following tasks in order:

• Add our Licenses in vCenter Server.
• Register our first ESX server in vCenter.
• Configure the VMkernel on the ESX server along with enabling the vMotion & FT.
• Configure the iSCSI software initiator and discover the shared LUNs on the SAN.
• Create an HA/DRS enabled Cluster.
• Add our three ESX servers to it.
• Import a Virtual Appliance to the cluster for testing.
• Test vMotion to ensure that the VMkernel is functioning properly.

And by that we set the stage for Fault Tolerance in the next video. I have it already recorded and I will do my best to produce it by tomorrow since it's a weekend over here.

One last thing to note: please bare with the interesting music that plays along with the video, I can't find my flash loops collection, so until I do, you may either mute the music or dance with it. It's really boring watching silent videos, besides, it's almost impossible not to fall asleep from them.

It's fast, it's wild, and it's out of NDA.
I'm furious, I'm excited and I'm off the hook.

If you are a VMware guru, the first few episodes in this series are not meant for you. You would probably be interested when we reach the level of configuring things like the Cisco Nexsus1000v, create host-profiles, or do some FT magic. Between now and then, it's all for the newbies coming to our wonderful virtual world, and have no clue where to start and what platform they should adopt.

I've been willing to do a similar series in VI3 for quite some time, and start from the basics all the way to advanced configurations, but now that the vS4 is out, well, almost, I said why not, it's a learning journey for me before anyone else.

You have to be patient with me however, the video recording is fairly easy, but the editing and production is quite hard and time consuming to present in this format. If you have any feedback, corrections or anything that can help improve these videos, please don’t hesitate to drop a comment or an email.

What are we waiting for? Let’s do this: