At long last...

Across two companies, what feels like an eternity (actually only 2 1/2 years), and many many iterations, my "pet project" is finally announced. I can tell you that our partners are excited, our teams are energized, and we can't get out to talk to all of the customers that want this fast enough.

Hybrid Cloud is nothing new, certainly not in the land of marketing and buzzword bingo, but Hybrid Cloud in an appliance form factor that focuses solely on "high value workloads" is certainly something that is elusive.

The preview announcement, made at SAP TechEd by Sven Denecken (SVP, SAP S/4 HANA) described an industry partnership to bring a fully managed hybrid experience to customers that run SAP workloads.

With the 2025 deadline approaching, customers migration journeys are under way to S/4 HANA, and with these journeys comes infrastructure questions and choices. The position that Dell Technologies and our partners are taking is that customers' consumption of these technologies shouldn't be a "cloud OR..." question; rather it's a "cloud AND..." question. This consumption model provides great flexibility as to where workloads are run, and enables workload mobility and management based on an SLA - not based on a location.

The Kinetic Hybrid Cloud for SAP is brought to you by Deloitte, Dell Technologies and Intel. This simple diagram shows the Unified Operations and workflow integration that Deloitte and Dell Technologies bring to SAP workloads across multiple datacenter instances.

Dell Boomi provides integration of data sources and applications outside of the SAP Application ecosystem; SAP has intelligent integration points within the SAP Application ecosystem; Deloitte brings Hybrid Cloud Management to the horizontal suite of deployment solutions; and Dell EMC brings complete infrastructure management for the on-premises infrastructure components.

All of this is managed under one SLA, one price, and a single engagement model through Dell Technologies and Deloitte.

I'm really excited about this combination of companies, technologies and people. This is only the beginning - and I'll share much more when able to.

/finis

Your own personal datacenter

About a year ago, I decided to build my own personal datacenter. I won't go into gory specifics, except to say that I tried to buy a VxRail cluster, and discovered that I am not a billionaire or a business with a capital budget.

SO off to my favorite auction site I went, and found a great assortment of gently used Dell EMC Poweredge servers. I chose 4 of them, bought a couple of Ubiquiti switches to add to my home network, and off I went.

Here's how things are currently cabled:

And here is what my home cloud is running:

It's all VMware based, but I'll be adding Red Hat OpenShift and Kabanero.io once the RAM I ordered arrives. Fun times ahead.

/finis

Back in the saddle

Well, I took a brief hiatus, and 4 years later I'm back. I'm going to attempt to keep this up to date with tips, tricks and general palaver...

Introduction:
I've never had a reason to run VMware vSphere from a professional perspective. Several years ago, I became very interested in it, and began running a small embedded vSphere lab in our company's lab. Aside from simply messing around, I learned slowly the how / what / why things work the way they do. Fast forward to today, and I'm running a full-on hyperconverged data center in my basement. It makes my wife very happy...

I have come to rely on a few extremely smart friends for advice, help, and so on - and they have been amazing with the amount of knowledge they're willing to share. One of them is zsoldier, a friend and colleague I'm blessed to know. Find him here: https://tech.zsoldier.com/ - and I'm very thankful for his wisdom and friendship.

Problem: vCenter Server failed with a disk capacity issue for its' database.

I had been away on business, and when I came back, I checked in on my vSphere cluster, and vCenter was up but not really. When I started digging in (https://vcenter.local:5480), I discovered that the database (seat) was out of space, and the vSphere Server couldn't start.

I started researching this, and found that this issue is pretty well documented (here: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2145603 and here: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2126276).

It literally took longer to restart services and back up vCenter than it did to fix the issue. I had considerable trouble identifying the exact volume to expand, because the default vCenter with embedded PSC installation process creates a bunch of 10GB volumes. Nothing is labeled, so seat could be on any of these volumes.

Here are the steps I took to fix the issue:

1. SSH to the vCenter VM and enabled the shell
2. Ran df -h to determine which mount point seat is on - completely useless except to see that it was, indeed, full - but helpful later
3. Opened the vSphere UI on the host I know vCenter and the embedded PSC are running on. I then edited every one of the 10GB vDisks as follows: 11GB, 12GB, 13GB, etc etc until they were all completely unique.
4. There is a shell script to autogrow the changed LUNs: "/usr/lib/applmgmt/support/scripts/autogrow.sh"
5. Ran df-h again to see which of the now unique 10GB LUNs are /dev/mapper/seat_vg-seat (it was 13GB)
6. Back at the vSphere node that is running the vCenter VM and increased the 13GB volume to 55GB (thin so who cares right?)
7. Ran the autogrow shell script again
8. Ran df -h again to confirm that seat did, in fact, grow to 55GB
9. reboot

Voila! Healthy again!

/finis