Updated: Cisco UCS Inventory Script

April 24, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

A few years ago, I created the first version of the Cisco UCS Inventory Script (UIS), a PowerShell script to read all the configuration and environment data from a UCS Manager. It can help you to get an easy overview of UCS installations after completing the initial build, or on an ongoing basis. To answer basic questions like “How many port licenses do we have left?” or “Did we create VLAN X?” – when you have no easy connectivity to the management console.

Next to reporting configuration and environment data, it also provides some basic recommendations about the configuration.

The … Read more

Cisco Enters Hyperconverged Market with HyperFlex

March 1, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Cisco has just announced a new line of HyperConverged appliances called HyperFlex. With this announcement, Cisco has officially entered the HyperConverged market with an appliance with integrated compute, storage and network.

The HyperFlex line initially consists of three flavours and features the hardware of the existing Unified Computing System (UCS), coupled with a hypervisor (initially VMware vSphere, eventually Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM), a software defined storage solution from SpringPath (licensed for HyperFlex) and the networking solutions of UCS.

The three flavours of HyperFlex consists of a minimum of four nodes of either UCS C220 M4, C240 M4 or B200 M4 … Read more

PowerShell Friday: Configuring vSphere MTU Size

February 19, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Several vSphere components can benefit from using a larger network frame size (MTU) than the regular size of 1500 bytes. vMotion, Storage: NFS, iSCSI and VSAN are examples that would gain some performance by increasing the frame size. In most cases, you would configure the MTU to a jumbo frame size, which is 9000.

Configuring the MTU size throughout your infrastructure can be tedious though, as you need to make sure you configure the entire chain of the network flow. If you’re not using Host Profiles for your ESXi host configuration, you have to make sure that you configure the … Read more

VMware NSX PowerShell Extension Open Sourced

February 1, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

VMware NSX has an open API and it’s pretty easy to consume. PowerShell is the same way; it’s easy to learn and easy to extend. This week, Anthony Burke and Nick Bradford released a PowerShell extension called PowerNSX. As the name suggests, it’s all about managing VMware NSX.

Nick and Anthony put PowerNSX on Bitbucket, which means there will be a continuos release cycle (whenever someone pushes something to the Git repository). You can download and install PowerNSX using Git or by downloading the branch as a zipfile.

Prerequisites

To run PowerNSX, you need a couple of things pre-installed … Read more

Ravello Systems: VMware NSX 6.2 Management Service Stuck in ‘Starting’

January 3, 2016 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Ravello Systems offers ‘Smart Labs’ where you can run a multitude of applications in Amazon or Google Cloud, including nested ESXi Hypervisors. This opens up the possibility of replacing a home lab system, where you have noisy power guzzling servers set up at your home and move your test lab to the cloud. I have been using Ravello for a while and just got around to upgrading my VMware NSX blueprint to NSX 6.2.1, which is where I ran into an issue:

The NSX Management Service did not start on boot; it was stuck in ‘Starting..’ for about 5 minutes … Read more

The Future of Virtual Networking from VMworld – Part 2

October 26, 2015 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Following up on my post The Future of Virtual Networking from VMworld – Part 1 (read that before starting this one), I’m going to continue rambling on about some of the awesome future networking ideas floating around during VMworld.

Disclaimer: this post is also based on public roadmap information divulged by VMware and can be subject to change. Also, some of this is my interpretation of the features.

Distributed Load Balancing

With traditional load balancing, network traffic goes through an appliance (physical or virtual) before it connects to the actual target (load balanced server). This is set up this way … Read more

The Future of Virtual Networking from VMworld – Part 1

October 18, 2015 / Martijn / 0 Comments

VMworld Europe took place in Barcelona last week and my experience was mostly centered around NSX. A few technical sessions and a lot of meetings later, I have been given an insight into the future of virtual networking and it’s awesome! In a mini series (otherwise it’d be much too long and windy) of posts, I am going to discuss my interpretation on how this will look.

Disclaimer: this post is based on public roadmap information divulged by VMware (mostly the great mind Bruce Davie) and can be subject to change. Also, some of this is my interpretation of

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