William Lam

History of Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility and its productization in vSphere 7.0 Update 1c (p02)

12/17/2020 by William Lam 10 Comments

I am super excited to share that the popular Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility Fling has been officially productized and is now available with the release of vSphere 7.0 Update 1c (Patch 02)! The official name for this capability is now referred to as Advanced Cross vCenter vMotion, would that mean the short hand is Ax-vMotion? 🤔 In any case, this has literally been 5 years in the making from an idea that I had shared back in 2015 to now having it fully integrated as a native vSphere feature in 2020 is pretty wild!

While reflecting back and writing this blog post, I came across this tweet from our CEO, Pat Gelsinger, which I thought was quite fitting

I love this. Thanks for sharing. To me, execution is everything. It's much easier to have a good idea than it is to actually get it done. https://t.co/DAPdip6A8e

— Pat Gelsinger (@PGelsinger) November 24, 2020

I have learned over the years, that simply having a good idea is not enough. It takes hard work, time and perseverance.

It has been very humbling to work with so many of customers of all sizes and shapes and enabling them to take advantage of vMotion in a new way that would allow them to solve some of their unique business needs. vMotion is still as magical in 2020 as it was when VMware transformed the IT industry when it was first introduced.

🤯 WOW 🤯

~400TB migrated using the Cross vCenter Workload Migration @vmwflings 🔥

You win @vRobDowling 👏👏👏

I want to say the largest VM migration that I heard of with this tool was ~15K https://t.co/gfjGHQcJaE

— William Lam (@lamw) December 18, 2020

Of course this would not have been possible without the support of so many amazing VMware Engineers who contributed to the Fling including the original developer, Vishal Gupta who I had worked with as part of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) team. After Vishal left VMware, I recruited a few more folks to help with the project including Vladimir Velikov, Vikas Shitole, Rajmani Patel, Plamen Semerdzhiev and Denis Chorbadjiyski. Lastly, I also want to thank Vishwa Srikaanth and Abhijith Prabhudev from the vSphere Product Management team who have been supportive of the Fling since day 1 and has been advocating with me on behalf of our customers.

VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) v0.5.0

12/16/2020 by William Lam Leave a Comment

Just in time for the holidays, the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) team is excited to announce our latest v0.5.0 release, which is also our last planned release of the year. 2020 has been a very difficult year for everyone, but looking at the positives, we could not have been happier with the engagement and community contributions that we have received from our user base. I just want to say, THANK YOU to everyone who has used and have shared their feedback on VEBA. We have so much more planned for 2021, cannot wait to share with the community!

While reviewing some of the GitHub commits (changes) for the v0.5.0 release, I had noticed the number of commits in this release has even surpassed our very first v0.1.0 release back in November of last year.

Here is a quick recap of all 6 VEBA releases:

v0.1.0 (11/25/19) - 351 commits
v0.2.0 (01/23/20) - 311 commits
v0.3.0 (03/10/20) - 252 commits
v0.4.0 (05/11/20) - 191 commits
v0.4.1 (06/10/20) - 141 commits
v0.5.0 (11/25/20) - 356 commits

Let’s now take a look at what is new with the v0.5.0 release.

Supermicro VMware Homelab 2020 Options

12/14/2020 by William Lam 3 Comments

There are a number hardware options these days when it comes to building a new or upgrading your VMware Homelab. For instance, take a look at the 100+ VMware Community Homelab submissions which can range from $500 up to a whopping $50K. There are many factors that go into deciding what type of system to use and whether you use off the shelf hardware like an Intel NUC or a Supermicro kit or simply build your own.

From my experience, I have found that most folks prefer something that "just works" and for those needing more than 64GB memory, a Supermicro kit is generally preferred. For my personal homelab, I have an E200-8D and is by far it is one of the most popular Supermicro kits for running a VMware Homelab.

One question that I often receive is whether the E200-8D is still a recommended platform and whether there are other updated options? After answering several inquiries, I realize I probably should also do a quick blog post on this topic.

ESXi-Arm Licensing Options

12/12/2020 by William Lam Leave a Comment

The the adoption of the ESXi-Arm Fling has skyrocketed since its initial launch back in October and has already surpassed over 10K+ downloads in its first month of release!

Just got an update from the @vmwflings team that the #ESXionARM Fling has already surpassed 10K+ downloads since its release! 🤯

Thank you to everyone in the community who’s participated, especially those who’ve shared their feedback & those doing some really stuff with it!

— William Lam (@lamw) November 18, 2020

One interesting observation that I have noticed lately has been an increased in inquiries related to licensing ESXi-Arm. This week alone, I have seen this question come up at least a dozen plus times across various communication channels.

VMware Cloud on AWS 1.13 adds support for VMRC vCenter Proxy

12/09/2020 by William Lam Leave a Comment

VMware Cloud on AWS (VMConAWS) 1.13 was just released and although it is an optional release, it does introduce a pretty interesting capability that I think our customers will really appreciate and benefit from, especially when this capability also makes its way into an on-premises vSphere release.

VMware Remote Console (VMRC) vCenter Proxy

VMware Remote Console connections will now be proxied through the SDDC’s vCenter, and clients no longer require connectivity to ESXi hosts. This simplifies connectivity requirements, and allows for the use of VMRC over VPN when a DX or vTGW is also being used with the SDDC.

Historically, when you wanted to interact with a Virtual Machine using the vSphere UI in vCenter Server, you had two options. You can either use the HTML5 Remote Console within your browser or you could use the standalone VMware Remote Console (VMRC) application. For basic functionality, the HTML5 console is generally preferred but for cases where you might need to mount a local device from your computer such as a USB, bluetooth or CD-ROM device, you had to use the VMRC client.

Intel NUC with 512GB memory

12/03/2020 by William Lam 6 Comments

Yes, you read that correctly. 512 gigabytes of memory on an Intel NUC. Not only is this pretty 🤯 but this is actually possible today with an already released Intel NUC!

A few months back, I was made aware of some really cool technology from Intel called Intel Memory Drive Technology (IMDT) which leverages Intel Optane SSDs to extend memory of a system beyond its physical memory (DRAM) capacity. This technology is made possible with their IMDT software, which is a purpose built Hypervisor whose sole purpose is to just manage memory and this Hypervisor runs on top of the Intel Optane SSD. You can think of this like a Software-Defined Memory (SDM) solution. In fact, SDM was actually coined in this performance white paper evaluating IMDT with scientific-based applications back in 2018.

Note: This should not be confused with Intel Optane and its Datacenter Persistent Memory (PMEM) solution which vSphere already supports today.

The target use case for this type of technology is for memory intensive applications such as SAP HANA, Oracle, Redis, Memcache and Apache Spark to just name a few. These workloads can easily gobble up 10's of terabytes of memory that can bring a number of challenges when needing to scale up these solutions. High capacity memory DIMMS are not only expensive, but once you exhaust the number of physical DIMM slots, your only option for scale up is to add additional servers which is very costly.

Using IMDT, customers can expand their physical DRAM capacity from 8x to 15x, which can significantly improve cost, performance but also the operational overhead in managing additional systems. Putting aside the in-memory based workloads, I think there is also huge potential for general purpose workloads that can also get the exact same benefits, especially when you think about constraints like power, cooling and location such as Edge or ROBO locations. Since this solution works on an Intel NUC, a really interesting use case for this technology that immediately came to mind was for a vSphere/NSX/vSAN homelab environment.