Author: Angelo Luciani

As I was working through my VCAP5-DCA studies, I was at the point where I had to mask a LUN. I typically don’t perform this function on my hosts in my enterprise environment, but rather, let my storage admins look after those details.

But I am working on my home lab and this is a requirement for the DCA exam, so I was all in. I was at the point where I had to reclaim the device and the following error appeared.

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I was puzzled at first thinking that nothing is actually using this device in my home lab – but it turns out I was wrong. I gave it some thought and since I had HA running, is it possible that this device is being used as a heartbeat datastore.

The answer was YES

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I removed the datastore-LUNMASK as one of the heartbeat datastores, ran through my procedure and it work! I hope this helps other folks that may run into this situation.

Let me know on Twitter if you had run into this situation and if you solved it a different way.

When I first heard that Chris Wahl was writing a book about Networking for VMware Administrators along with Steve Pantol – I was super excited and quickly pre-ordered it. This book fills a gap that has been outstanding for quite some time. It’s important to move beyond technical silos and learn the language your colleagues speak, so you both can be effective in delivering solutions for your business.

This book helps the VMware admin learn, speak and understand what your friends on the network team deal with and vice versa.

As we move to a more converged and software-defined data center, the VMware Admin’s role is changing and more and more, this individual needs to be a hybrid admin that understands the entire virtualization stack from compute, storage, and network, this book will aid you in understanding the network.

What can you expect

This book is divided into four parts:

• Physical Networking 101
• Virtual Switching
• You Got Your Storage in My Networking: IP Storage
• Other Design Scenarios

Physical Networking 101

This section provides you with an nice foundation, to build on. Its a great refresher, the OSI model and TCP/IP model are discussed. You might think you should skip this, but its good to know how decisions in the past have influenced our designs today.

Then you move to Ethernet networks and as they mention in the book – the nuts and bolt. Layer 2 and Layer 3 are discussed next, I really like how they clarify terms and concepts throughout the book. For example Ether-channel vs Port Channel, its good to have this terms correct when talking with your networking folks.

Finally they talk about Converged Infrastructure, which I believe gives you a peek into this new hybrid VMware admin that should be aware of the entire stack from compute, storage, and network.

Virtual Switching

In this section, they explain how virtual switching differs from physical switching, its good to get your head around VLANs. Then they discuss vSphere standard switch and vSphere Distributed Switch concepts and designs, like traffic shaping, NIC Teaming and Failover, and Network I/O Control. They also talk about third party switches like the Cisco Nexus 1000v.

The diagrams and screenshots throughout the chapters are very helpful in explaining the concepts and ideas.

You Got Your Storage in My Networking

For those of you that have not done any work with IP storage, this section gives you a great introduction to the topic and helps explain different design scenarios. NFS and iSCSI are discussed and again the diagrams and screenshots help explain the topics.

Other Design Scenarios

Finally, Multi-NIC vMotion and additional vSwtich design scenarios are discussed, covering many design scenarios. The talk about Multi-vMotion architecture highlights many design considerations to be aware of.

Great way to get started

This book flows really well, they walk you through the early days of networking to present day. Its easy to read and they have many “Real World” call outs in the book, that make the discussion relevant. Reading this book, you feel like your having a discussion with Chris and Steve about networking for virtualization and not being lectured too. The diagrams and screenshots also help reinforce the concepts.

I recommend getting a copy for yourself and if you can’t get one for someone on your networking team, then pass along your finished copy to them. This book really levels set the discussion between the teams.

Kudos to Chris and Steve for making mention of the VMware User Group (VMUG) in the Appendix, I know they are huge supporters of the VMUG and its a great way to extend the conversation with your networking team and the broader community – consider joining today – its FREE.

Let me know on Twitter if you have read the book and how it has helped you!

On April 2, 2014 RightScale which provides a suite of solutions that enables enterprises to manage applications across public, private, and virtualized environments, published a report called RightScale 2014 State of the Cloud Report, which provides some interesting insights into the Cloud market place. They interviewed 1068 professionals from a broad section of organizations.

You can download and read the report for yourself, but I wanted to highlight a few items from their findings that I thought were interesting.

• 94 percent of organizations surveyed are running applications or experimenting with infrastructure-as-a-service.
• 87 percent of organizations are using public cloud.
• 74 percent of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy and more than half of those are already using both public and private cloud.
• Next-generation IT shapes up as Cloud + DevOps + Self-Service IT. Cloud-focused companies embrace DevOps (71 percent) and Self-Service IT (68 percent).

VMware Hybrid Cloud Strategy

I think the results of the survey, re-affirm VMware’s Hybrid Cloud Strategy as 74 percent of respondents have a hybrid cloud strategy. It was exciting to see VMware’s Hybrid Cloud rank second on the Top Public Cloud Used. At VMworld 2013, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger in a Executive Roundtable, panel discussion re-enforced the concept of a Hybrid Cloud for the future of IT.

Next Gen IT: Cloud + DevOps + Self-Service

Configuration management, automation and orchestration are creating a new breed of IT admin for the cloud model. This new breed of IT Admin will break down silos within traditional IT organizations and deliver on business outcome much more quickly. Provisioning in a software defined data centre (isn’t that what the cloud really is?), will become the new normal. A new skill set is need to move beyond the traditional IT mindset.

The survey also pointed out that automation tools are on the rise, Puppet and Chef are the leaders in this category, but I am sure there are other products that you folks use. Recall last year, VMware made a substantial invest in puppet, (VMware Invests $30 Million In Puppet Labs).

The cloud will change the way IT operates, the slow moving traditional model is broken, and delivering on business outcomes with a more agile model is key to the future of staying responsive and using IT to improve business effectiveness and efficiency, not just manage costs.

Its a great document, I’m sure you can make your own conclusions, I recommend downloading it and sharing your thoughts on Twitter and as always, thanks for reading!