OK, I know that the title to this post is a bit of a oxymoran. ECMP Active/Passive? Isn’t ECMP about active/active/active/active/…. ? Yes it is, but imagine a scenario where you are building your NSX-v deployment across two campuses, with datacenter firewalls upstream – making it important that you ensure data flow stays predictable and asymmetric routing doesn’t become an issue: ingress through datacenter A, egress through datacenter Roie Ben Haim has a fantastic write-up for why this is important, so I’ll leave you with this link as a primer.
Welcome back. Now that we are on the same page on why we need to control datacenter ingress/egress, let’s further imagine that we have some incredibly demanding North South requirements that force us to lay down the maximum ECMP configuration of 8 ESGs. Does that mean you can’t have passive, lower weighted ESGs on the secondary site of the DLR? Does it mean you have to fail the ESGs over to the secondary site?
These questions hit me today, so I sought out to answer them.
Earlier this month I took the VCAP 6 DCV – Deploy exam to round out my VCIX 6.5 certification. Previously, I mentioned how important I felt time management was during the VCAP 6.5 DCV – Design exam, well that exam had nothing on the Deploy exam. I used the entire duration and probably could have used another 30 to 40 minutes to increase my level of confidence walking out the door.
I walked away leaving two questions unanswered because while I knew what was needed to answer them correctly, I don’t work in those aspects of vSphere enough to know how to accomplish them without digging around in the documentation.
Beyond that I had one question I knew was wrong, and another two I felt iffy about.
Regarding the experience of the exam itself:
It was incredibly stressful – imagine the stress of a huge meltdown in your environment at work. Stressful right? When the day is over you want to go home and sit on the couch with a beer. Now take that stress level and subject yourself to it 27 times in a little over 3 hours, in an environment that you have never touched before, on someone elses computer, and you don’t have google (or coworkers/VMware support). I took the exam first thing in the morning, and when I was done I was completely toast.
That said, the exam interface itself used the HoL format used in the online training courses and well the Hand on Labs. I had no issues there other than that I just missed driving my good old Zenbook or Surface.
My biggest complaint about the whole experience was that it took over a week to get my results, which was more stressful than the exam itself. Fortunately, when the email came the news was good news!
Content wise I felt it was a really good all around test of ability for a vSphere administrator/engineer/architect type person. If I had to redo I’d focus on those areas of the vSphere suite that I don’t do every day. i.e. The stuff I do everyday or have focused on a lot in the past: powercli, HA, DRS, esxcli, iSCSI, networking I would flat-out ignore. Anything related to those I either don’t need documentation or I simply need a reminder of the exact spelling of an advanced parameter or something similar.
Review the blueprint and drill into those things that you aren’t comfortable with. You don’t have to build to a level of mastery, but get yourself to the point where you know what needs to be done so you can accomplish it 70% to 80% on your own and you can find the last 20% to 30% in the documentation within 30 to 60 seconds – i.e. you understand the breakout of the vSphere documentation and you know the keywords you are looking for to find the section quickly in a PDF.
Lastly – the only real preparation I did for this exam was the solutions4crowds exam simulator. The simulator was only 17 questions, but it provided a great mockup of what to expect and it was worth every bit of the $10 the owner asks for to utilize it.
The chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what you want most for what you want now.
I will leave out my thoughts on Ironman Texas 2018, the race, both the positive and negative. Instead I want to talk about my relationship with triathlon over the last couple years. Aside from my relationship with my wife and my career, triathlon is the longest running activity I have engaged in in my life – this August it will be 15 years that I have been doing triathlons. It isn’t surprising that it has had it’s ups and downs.
What I have struggled with these last two years +- is that it “started” with a great race and then fed into a series of poor performances, poor training and increasing frustration. There have been a number of contributing factors:
Layoffs at work in 2017 = stressful work environment
Assignment to a new team/project at work getting to do awesome stuff = Very engaging job
3 young children = Crazy Train
Paradoxical downward self-feeding cycle of triathlon related events = Very little excitement about training or racing.
The truth is in terms of life overall I can’t say that I have ever been more happy, but in terms of my pursuit of triathlon I have been incredibly unhappy, to the point where after Ironman Wisconsin last fall I contemplated if I really wanted to do another triathlon.
Early this year I signed up for Ironman Texas, ostensibly to get a Kona slot for this fall, which incidentally didn’t happen, but even after signing up I didn’t change my level of engagement or behaviors. My engagement was so low that at one point my wife actually questioned if going to race Texas was the right thing to do.
Could I really have a race that would contribute to changing the direction that triathlon was going in my life?
Was I going to enjoy myself?
Was it fair to my family to make this solo trip without a chance of accomplishing the original purpose of it?
If I’m honest about it, the answer to all those questions at the time of the conversation was likely no, but for whatever reason I could not just not do a race that I had signed up for. It was as if I needed to do the race to tell myself what I needed to do.
In the lead up to the race I was excited and nervous about it – was I going to enjoy myself, would it be a positive day?
In the end the race was not great in an absolute sense but I had fun and for the first time in over two years I enjoyed myself and was 100% engaged the entire race. It’s probably a bit premature to say that my love of triathlon is back and the furnace is roaring, but yesterday was a huge step in the right direction and I’m excited to see if I can rekindle it and find out if I can return to my level of fitness that I had just a handful of years ago.
A couple of weeks ago I sat the VMware VCAP 6.5 DCV – Design exam as part of the process of completing the prerequisites for submitting for VCDX. I don’t have a lot of insight to add beyond the excellent post by vHersey. I did want to jot a few notes to help relieve the dearth of information out there on this exam.
The things that really stood out to me:
Read the questions carefully
Practice, practice, practice identifying RCARs
Understand the difference between functional and non-functional requirements
On several questions it was easy to eliminate answers simply by being able to identify technical non-starters
Beyond that – manage your time well. Overall I found the exam to be much less technical than the VCP 6.5 DCV exam, but the VCAP 6.5 DCV – Design was significantly more intense as I felt the devil was in the details of many of the questions and answers.
Hopefully the 6.5 Deploy exam will be released shortly so I can say on track for my submission goal date.
Sorry for the delay in getting part two published, life had been busy the past week or so. Today we are going to build upon what we covered in part one, namely the pieces of the code and/or things you need to adapt about the packer template file for it to be functional for your environment.
This is the second post of a planned 4 part series:
As I was working on part two of this planned four part series about packer, I realized I forgot a crucial step in setting up Jenkins! Due to part of our pipeline including deployment to an artifact repository and a vSphere environment, we need to create some credentials within Jenkins. I have also created a friendly link to all parts of this walk through. I will retroactively edit the links as the posts are written.
Imagine a world where the next meltdown level vulnerability is announced and you have to patch your image 5 minutes ago. You calmly run a script to force approve patches in your patch manager and 45 minutes later the base template you deploy from in vSphere is updated and all new machines are based on the new image, all while you drink coffee and play the Block Game. Sounds pretty cool right? It’s definitely better than the old school way of:
Installing Windows or Linux to a new virtual machine
Performing your organizations steps to customize it
Install patches
Stage the system for customization
Shut it down
Mark it as a template
etc
etc
While the steps may very slightly depending on the exact platform you are leveraging: Linux, Windows, KVM, Azure. Or maybe you’ve scripted some of the steps. No matter where your process stands, at the end of the day this activity is a huge time suck, a huge potential for mistakes, and in no way contributes to a cloud way of working, which results in your platform looking like a pretty poor option to those desiring to do “cloud first.” Not only that, how can you prove to yourself or auditors that a given image is properly built according to defined standards and controls?
There are potentially many tools out there to help automate the image build process, and like many things in life; some are better than others. I’m about to walk you through the recipe I settled on and I think is best. Your mileage may vary.
This is the second post of a planned 4 part series:
I have always been one to pick stupid goals and then make it happen, fortunately for me as I’ve progressed in life from childhood to adulthood I actually learned that when you set an outlandish goal, you probably need to do things bordering on outlandish to accomplish them.
After gaining my MCSE 2003 certification, I pretty much swore off certifications. To much work, not enough reward, etc, etc. Then over the last 18 months or so at work I have had the fortunate opportunity to play a significant role in some incredibly awesome efforts: Always-on Horizon implementation, and SDDC/Automation PoC, and the design and implementation of a full on SDDC. While shooting the breeze with a co-worker numerous times throughout this period we have discussed that much of the work we have executed for these efforts would make a hell of a VCDX design submission – for the track of our choice.
A log time ago, in a place not very far a way, I had an irregularly updated blog dedicated to tech stuff that I encountered at work and in my lab, which I unfortunately abandoned (the blog). Recently work has gotten exciting and at the same time I’ve been “forced” to rebuild my home lab, resulting in me deciding to revive said blog.
This is the story of that adventure. There will be stories of intrigue, heartbreak, and magic involving dragons, progress bars, Nutanix, vSAN, NSX, Openstack, vRA, and lots of other buzzwords.
An important aspect about the SAFe framework, which I talked about a little last time, is accountability. Namely, holding yourself accountable for accomplishing the things you have committed to. This is done by defining clear acceptance criteria around that commitment. The acceptance criteria describes why you are doing something, what you are doing, and what the end result of that will be.
Three weeks ago, I stated that the first thing I needed to correct was my bike fit and return me to a state where I am comfortable, confident, and that I have faith in my fit; all with a target date of the end of October.
Now that it’s November 4th, the important question is, did I do it? Yes, thanks to Todd at TTbikefit, things are in a much better place. I think there is still a bit of work to do in terms of me adapting to the position and revisiting it after some rides on the road, but we made a few surprisingly simple changes and things are now back to a position I feel comfortable and happy with. It will be interesting to see how it progresses as I ramp things up over the next week or two after I end the break period this weekend with a 50k trail run.
So what’s the next step of action am I taking? Much like last time, it’s pretty straight forward, primarily a return to normal training after a pretty relaxed 4 weeks post Kona. So 3/4 swims per week, 6/7 runs per week, and 4 rides per week. I am planning to focus pretty strongly on the bike with the goal of getting adapted to the position and making some gains in specific areas on the bike. I’m going to focus on three key bike workouts most weeks, with running being nothing but easy running, and a typical swim program.
I am looking to judge myself not by absolute gains, but by my ability to execute those three key workouts each week, using the gains I’m looking for as not the success/failure point but as a light house guiding the way and using it and the calendar to tell me when it’s time to change focus. Process, not outcome.
At this point there is not a need to do more than simply run, as while my running wasn’t “on” this year, it’s in my body, and a stronger bike will lead to a stronger run, regardless of absolute run fitness. The primary target is 23 months away, so there is no pressing need to try to kill all the required birds with the first handful of stones.
