ESXi Thunderbolt Driver to Fibre Channel Storage from ATTO

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One of the things I always enjoy doing at VMworld, when I am not running around and I have a few minutes to myself, is to check out the VMware Solutions Exchange. This is where you can learn and interact with hundreds of our VMware Certified Partners showcasing their new solutions and innovations that they have built on top of VMware's products.

While walking through the show floor, I had stopped by the ATTO Technology booth who has been a long time partner of VMware in the storage and networking connectivity space. What caught my eye was that they had just released a Beta of an ESXi Thunderbolt Driver in the form of an ESXi VIB that would allow customers to connect their Apple Mac Pro 6,1 using the Thunderbolt 2 interface to an external Fibre Channel storage array. I believe ATTO might be the first vendor ever to produce a Thunderbolt Driver for ESXi. This is really exciting news if you ask me, especially as more and more of our customers are looking to virtualize Mac OS X guests in their Datacenters using vSphere

Historically, the only option to connect a Mac Pro 6,1 to an external Fibre Channel array was to use something like a Sonnet Chassis. Now, you can potentially connect up to 6 of the built-in Thunderbolt 2 interfaces on the Mac Pro's to your external storage array using this new solution from ATTO. Before I go into some of the details, ATTO did want me to mention that this solution is currently not officially supported by VMware nor is it on VMware's HCL. ATTO will be providing full support on their software as well as VMware's software stack during the duration of the beta program. In terms of official certification on VMware's HCL, I suspect that it will most likely depend on customer demand which would influence whether ATTO applies for an official certification, which again, would be the first of its kind for Thunderbolt.

The way in which this solution works is that you install the ATTO Thunderbolt Driver on your ESXi host and this will allow it to communicate with an ATTO ThunderLink device which provides the Thunderbolt 2 to Fibre Channel connectivity. You have the option of using either the FC2082 which provides 20Gb/s Thunderbolt 2 (2-port) to 8Gb/s FC (2-Port) Device or the FC2182 which provides 20Gb/s Thunderbolt 2 (2-port) to 16Gb/s FC (2-Port) Device. Below is a diagram from the ATTO digital solution brief which outlines the configuration.

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If you are interested in taking part in ATTO's ESXi Thunderbolt Driver Beta program or would like to learn more about the solution, you can reach out directly to Carllene Mowry (cmowry@attotech.com) who is running the program. I also had received a digital brief on this solution and I believe it should be posted on their website shortly. Once that is available, I will provide a link to it which includes some additional information about the solution.

Lastly, I was also fortunate to have a quick chat with Carllene and team to get a few additional exclusive tidbits on some of the things the ATTO team is working on next. The first of which is support for the Thunderbolt 3 (aka USB-C) interface to Fibre Channel which will be quite nice for newer platforms that include that interface, including home lab setups such as the Intel NUC. Speaking of Intel NUC, this is just one of the many other platforms that include either Thunderbolt 2 or 3 interfaces. Although the solution today is specifically supporting the Mac Pro, I know ATTO folks are interested to hear from customers on other systems with Thunderbolt interface and providing similiar capabilities.

The other really exciting development that is currently being investigated is support for Thunderbolt 2 or 3 to 10GbE connectivity on ESXi. As you can imagine, this is really going to open up some really cool new use cases, especially around things like VSAN which can easily benefit from this. It is still in early development but from my understanding, ATTO is already seeing a lot of interest in this area as well as how this might work with VSAN. I am hoping I will be able to share more details as this further develops. If any of these updates sounds interesting, do leave a comment to let the ATTO folks know and I will make sure they monitor the thread.

Few #migrate2vcsa VMworld sessions & HOL worth checking out

One thing that I had noticed at VMworld last week was that there was a lot of excitement and buzz coming from our customers/partners around migrating from a Windows based vCenter Server to the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). I am pretty sure it had nothing to do with the awesome #migrate2vcsa stickers that my buddy Emad had created.

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or the killer #migrate2vcsa apparel ...

In all seriousness, I do think our customers are genuinely excited about this upcoming migration capability and the value of the VCSA over the Windows vCenter Server. This is especially true for simplified lifecycle management from deployment (Day 0), configuration (Day 1), patching and upgrade (Day 2) of the VCSA. Customers not only benefit from the operational aspect of the VCSA, but it also allows them to reduce their overall Windows licensing footprint for both the vCenter Server as well as the backend database which is usually a Microsoft SQL Server or an Oracle Database. I do understand that this is not the goal of all customers, but I also know of many customers who do appreciate this additional CapEx savings.

At VMworld this year, there was a ton of coverage across a variety of topics for the VCSA including Migration, Deployment, Management, Operations and most dearest to my heart, Automation which spans all of these areas. I thought it would be useful to share some of the content in the form of publicly available VMworld sessions that you can view regardless if you attended VMworld or not. I know many of you have been asking about the VCSA Migration Tool and all I can say is check out the resources below and stay tune for an update real soon 😀

#migrate2vcsa Sessions:

#migrate2vcsa HOL (simulation):

I just found out about this, but it looks like our Hands-On-Labs folks also built a nice VCSA Migration simulation HOL (http://docs.hol.vmware.com/hol-isim/HOL-2017/hol-1710-vcsamigration.htm) that you can try out which gives you a sneak peak at a Tech Preview of the VCSA Migration Tool. You simply follow the instructions to the right and it walks you through the simulation and highlighting what you need to perform via the orange colored icon. I thought this was a very neat solution for folks to get an idea of how something works without having to sit through hours of content. migrate2vcsa-hol

Lastly, here are some of the general vCenter Server / VCSA sessions that are also worth checking out.

General VCSA Sessions:

Direct playback & download URLs for all VMworld US 2016 sessions

Thanks to Duncan Epping who shared the awesome news the other day in which ALL VMworld US 2016 sessions are now freely available to the general public regardless if you attended VMworld or not! This is definitely fantastic news and kudos not only to the VMworld team for doing this but also having it done right after a US holiday. To access the playback videos, you simply just need to register at http://www.vmworld.com/en/sessions/2016.html. Once you have done that, you will be taken to the page shown below with all the VMworld sessions since 2010.

UPDATE: With a bit more hacking around, I have now also created a second list of all the VMworld sessions with their respective download URLs. Please have a look at the Github repo for more info https://github.com/lamw/vmworld2016-session-urls

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Although the site allows you to search and filter the content, I personally prefer just a simple list of the titles and direct playback URLs. In the past, I have scraped the VMworld site to build such a list and figure I do the same this year. Luckily, this year it was not as difficult as it was in the past as it looks like some of the data is JSON encoded which makes it trivial to parse into the format I want.

With that, I have published all 539 sessions with direct links to the playback URLs on the following Github project: https://github.com/lamw/vmworld2016-session-urls which you can easily bookmark and hopefully allow Google to also index for searchability in the future. Enjoy!

VMware PowerCLI for Mac OS X, Linux & More? Yes, please!

powercli_for_mac_osx_linux_1There were a several announcements at last weeks VMworld US Conference, but one of the most exciting piece of news in my opinion was from Alan Renouf, Product Manager for all things API/SDK/CLI at VMware. During Alan's What's New PowerCLI session, he announced that PowerCLI is finally coming to both Mac OS X as well as Linux! As you can imagine, the news was very well received from customers and partners. In fact, after I had tweeted the update here & here, I literally had folks pinging/IM'ing/DM'ing me non-stop about when they could get access 🙂

This exciting update was only possible with the help of our friends over at Microsoft who had recently open sourced both .NET Core & PowerShell. Once that news broke, Alan and the PowerCLI Engineering team have been working hard on porting over the existing PowerCLI code which uses the Windows .NET library over to the new .NET Core which is now open sourced. I have been very impressed at how fast the PowerCLI team have already made available many of the default cmdlets as well as the Get View cmdlet which exposes the entire functionality of the vSphere API.

Now, before you get too excited, this new version of PowerCLI is currently not available yet. As Alan mentioned in his session, we plan to release an early Tech Preview of PowerCLI for both Mac OS X and Linux as a VMware Fling shortly after VMworld. It is also very important to note that Microsoft PowerShell for Mac OS X & Linux which PowerCLI uses is just at an Alpha release milestone. There is still much work to do on both sides but I am really looking forward to enabling our customers with the choice of platform when it comes to consuming PowerCLI.

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A few of us have been quite fortunate to have been involved in the early development of this new version of PowerCLI. In fact, we even built a simple Docker Container for PowerCLI which will allow you to easily access PowerCLI from any system that can run Docker. Here is a quick screenshot of spinning up a PowerCLI Docker Container which will also be part of the Fling release.

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Lastly, we want customers to be able to quickly and securely set up a persistent PowerCLI environment in which they can use to manage and configure their VMware-based products that support PowerCLI. With that, we have also built a PowerShell package for Photon OS which is VMware's minimal Linux container host distribution. Not only is it free to download and use, but it literally takes a few seconds to install (tdnf -y install powershell) and even less time to boot up and import the PowerCLI module. This was literally done the week before VMworld by the Photon team and huge kudos for their support! As you can see, not only do we want to provide choice for our customers but also simplifying how you might consume PowerCLI whether its natively on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Docker Container or running on top of VMware Photon OS. I hope you are excited as I am and stay tuned for more details on the Fling release!

If you have any feedback or what you are most excited regarding this news, please leave a comment and I will make sure it makes it way back to our Product Manager.

Quick Tip - How to retrieve the ESXi Update Level using the vSphere API?

Using the vSphere API, it is very easy to extract the version and build of all your ESXi hosts. This information is exposed in the Product property of an ESXi host. For example, Product.Version will return something like 6.0.0 and Product.Build will return something like 3029758. However, one thing that is not available in this property is the Update Level information for an ESXi host such as Update 1 or Update 2.

Historically, customers would have to rely on ESXCLI to pull the Update level information using the following command: esxcli system version get and though this can be run remotely or integrated into PowerCLI as shown in the example below, it would be ideal if this information was just available using the vSphere API.

This exact same question was brought up internally again today and Etienne Le Sueur actually shared an awesome tidbit on how to retrieve this information using the vSphere API. You can find the ESXi Update Level information in an ESXi Advanced Setting called Misc.HostAgentUpdateLevel

Below is a quick PowerCLI example which exercises this vSphere API to retrieve the Version, Build and Update Level information:

Here is a screenshot of the output for my ESXi host which is running latest vSphere 6.0 Update 2 (including the recent patch release).

retrieve-esxi-update-level-using-vsphere-api

Its great to hear that the ESXi Update Level information is available through the vSphere API, although I would have liked to have seen it exposed within the Product property. Perhaps its time to file an internal Feature Request? 🙂