All posts by Aaron Margeson

vSphere 5.0 & 5.1 End of General Support Coming

vsphere 5.0 5.1 end of general support

Just a little Public Service Announcement and reminder.  vSphere 5.0 and 5.1 end of general support is coming soon.  End of General Support for ESXi 5.0/5.1 along with vCenter 5.0/5.1 and ancillary products (SRM 5.0/5.1, Data Recovery 2.0, Update Manager 5.0/5.1) is set for 2016-08-28.

What does End of General Support mean?

General Support provides full support of the product, which includes:

  • Phone Support
  • Maintenance Updates
  • Upgrades
  • Bug and Security Fixes

So what happens to vSphere 5.0/5.1 now?

vSphere 5.0 and 5.1 now enter the technical guidance phase.  While phone support is not provided, help can be obtained through a self-help portal.  You can also still receive support and potential solutions for low severity problems.  You can get further details here.

So what should customers running 5.0/5.1 do?

I recommend customers should look to upgrade to vSphere 5.5 or 6.0.  If you have a valid support contract, it shouldn’t cost you anything to upgrade as far as licensing goes.  It’s important to verify your hardware is supported though, including:

  • Servers
  • Storage, whether it be a traditional storage array, or internal controller, or hyper-converged solution
  • I/O cards
    • HBAs
    • NICs
  • Third party products, such as
    • Backup products
    • Orchestration
    • Monitoring
    • VDI

While it’s not absolutely critical to upgrade exactly by 8/28/2016, plans should be made to upgrade.  You don’t want to handle that upgrade in a hurry!

Final tips

If you’re upgrading, be aware that you can mix ESXi versions with vCenter versions.  For this reason, if there’s a specific reason you can’t/don’t want to upgrade to ESXi 6.0, you can upgrade your hosts to 5.5, and run vCenter 6.0, assuming your other products are compatible with vCenter 6.  That might make it easier to upgrade to subsequent versions of vCenter or ESXI down the road.  You might want to consider the vCenter Appliance.

Happy upgrading!

How to backup ESXi servers

Do you backup your ESXi servers?  You don’t technically have to.  If you’ve documented your environment well, and/or you use things like host profiles, Distributed Virtual Switches, and Autodeploy, the need is lessened or even pointless.  However, if you have any manual configurations that need to persist beyond a reboot, you should do it because it’s stupid easy.  Here’s how to backup ESXi servers.

Backup ESXi servers the easy way

This is really easy if you do it with PowerCLI.  Ready?

Get-VMHost | Get-VMHostfirmware –BackupConfiguration –DestinationPath “C:\BackupLocation”

That’s it!  If you used Connect-VIServer to connect to vCenter, this one liner creates within the backup location a file for each server.  Done!

You might want to run this when:

  • You’re about to make any configuration changes.
  • Periodically in case others make configuration changes you’re not aware of.
  • Before you patch your servers.
  • After you patch your servers, and you’ve determined they’re functioning properly.
  • If the ESXi install is on storage that is reporting errors.
  • To migrate ESXi installations to different storage.

This is a great way to get your ESXi servers up and going in the event of a misconfiguration or failure in the ESXi server installation storage.

Restore from backup files

Great!  You have a backup of your ESXi servers.  How do you restore it?

Set-VMHostFirmware -VMHost <IP_or_FQDN> -Restore -Force -SourcePath C:\BackupLocation

If the ESXi server is not on the network anymore, it must be returned to a network connected state first.  You may need to reinstall ESXi first, and configure its management network first.  Then, you can use Connect-VIServer to connect directly to the ESXi server in order to run the above.

Also, be aware that configuration backups can be and almost always are ESXi server version specific.  So ensure you reinstall ESXi using the same version that the server was when the backup was taken.  Ensure you create new backups after you patch your server for this reason.

 

Lenovo IX-4 firmware update problem

Just experienced one of the more bizarre issues I’ve encountered in my IT career.  I was attempting to install a simple Lenovo IX-4 firmware update.  I use one of these myself in my home lab.  Some of my very small customers use them for cheap replication or backup targets as well.  One customer needed a firmware update that went awry.  The solution was incomprehensible, but it fixed the problem.  I felt compelled to share!

IX-4 Firmware Update Issue

These IX-4 NAS devices are pretty straight forward to manage.  They do have a management app you can install.  However, they’re easy enough to just manage them through their built in web portal.  Updating the NAS firmware is normally standard fare, much like updating a home router firmware.

  1. Point your web browser to the NAS, login, and go to the Software Update icon.
  2. When you click to check for an updated firmware, it’ll tell you if there is one, and provide the link.  Download the firmware package.
  3. Click the browse button, and select the firmware file you downloaded.  Do a file hash checksum first of course.  The firmware will then be uploaded.
  4. Finally, click to apply the firmware.

The problem is this time, despite the file hash being correct, and trying multiple downloads of the latest firmware file, and even the next previous version, the firmware would not install.  I kept getting the error “The software could not be updated because the update file is corrupted.”

ix-4 firmware update error

I tried rebooting the IX-4 and then reapplying it.  I tried deleting it and reuploading it.  Nothing worked.

IX-4 Firmware Update Solution

I did some googling.  I found a weird forum post about resolving this issue, that other users had success with as well.  Yes, this is pretty out there.

  1. Delete the uploaded firmware file.
  2. Power down the NAS.  You can do this within the web management console.
  3. Pop the cover by removing the two screws on the back, and pulling the cover off.
  4. Remove Disk 4.lenovoix4disk4
  5. Power the NAS back up.  When you log in to the web management portal, it will show alerts that disk 4 is missing.  This is obviously expected.
  6. Upload the firmware file again and apply it.  The firmware should apply.  It did for me, which I could not believe!  Let it reboot, etc.
  7. Power NAS back down.
  8. Put Disk 4 back in.
  9. Power the NAS back up.  Ensure that the status for the NAS shows the RAID set is rebuilding, or good.
  10. Check back in and ensure that the RAID rebuild completes.

And that’s how I got the IX-4 firmware update installed!  I’d complain, but it was pretty simple to fix, and we are talking about a sub $1000 NAS here.

emcie

Exam E20-393 Unity EMCIE Review

As I alluded to in my previous post, I recently obtained the EMCIE – Unity Solutions certification from EMC by passing E20-393.  I wanted to give my thoughts on the certification process for anyone else interested.

What do you need to get the certification?

It’s pretty simple.  To get EMCIE for Unity, you simply need the EMCISA base level exam (common to all EMCIE certifications), and then pass the E20-393 exam.  Since I had the EMCISA certification for years on my way to getting EMCIE for VNX and RecoverPoint, I simply had to pass E20-393.

What study resources are available?

EMC has free elearning for partners on their certification site.  If you are not a partner, you can pay for instructor led training as well.  There are no exam prep type books on Unity that I’m aware of. I did the free partner elearning, and I found it sufficient for the instructional needs for the exam.  You should have hands on experience with Unity, too.  The partner elearning alone doesn’t provide that.

Besides the training, what else should be done for exam prep?

Other than the obvious studying of the training material, you should get some hands-on experience with Unity before attempting E20-393.  Be very familiar with the interface, where you go to do everything you need to do, how you do initialization, configuration, etc.  While you could try to memorize everything in the training material, it’s hard to beat getting familiar with Unity by working with it.  Thankfully, UnityVSA is freely available to run on an ESXi server.  Also, EMC offers a freely available simulator to run on Windows.  This is great for anyone who doesn’t have access to an ESXi server.  Simply download and install the simulator, and you’ll have access to Unity’s interface for studying!

How difficult is the E20-393 exam?

The E20-393 exam is multiple choice.  Not terribly difficult, although you shouldn’t underestimate it.

I completed the elearning during downtime between customer appointments and in my spare time.  I did take good notes within OneNote to study afterwards.  I played around for a few hours with the simulator to make sure I knew where everything was.  You must score 60% or higher to pass, and I scored a 78%.

The best way I could explain the exam is about half of the exam asks questions that you conceptually understand the array and how to do things.  Most of the remainder of the exam asks very specific questions that would be difficult to answer all of them unless you’ve been working with the array for a long time and know details about the array just from sheer repetition through every option of the array.  You should be able to answer though enough of those to pass with some practical experience with it coupled with answering most of the conceptual type questions.

Hope this helps!

unity

Unity – EMC’s new unified storage array

As you may know, EMC released their new unified storage array for block and file called Unity.  I wanted to go over it a bit to help people understand where this array fits within the storage landscape to see if it might be a good fit for them.

What exactly is Unity?

Unity is a block and file unified array.  It’s very similar to both the VNXe and VNX models of the past.  Like most of those, Unity supports both Fiber Channel and iSCSI protocols for block storage.  It also supports CIFS and NFS for File protocols as well.

It is a dual storage processor ALUA array for redundancy, with dual processors, redundant components across the board.

For IO ports, it includes 2x 1GbE ports and 2 Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) per storage processor.  The CNA’s at the factory can be configured to act as 10GbE adapters for iSCSI or NFS, or as up to 16Gb fibre channel interfaces.  Note those modes cannot be switched after the device is shipped.  You can also add up to two IO modules per storage processor in identical pairs to provide additional IO ports, including 1GbE, 10GbE, or FC.  All unity arrays also have 2 SAS ports to connect to additional racks of disks called DAEs (just like the VNX).  The 500 and 600 arrays can have additional SAS ports installed as an IO module to approach their maximum supported disk configurations as well.

The Unity arrays effectively replace all the VNXe storage arrays going forward.  In addition, they replace most VNX storage arrays.  The only exception are the VNX 7600 and 8000 arrays, which will continue due to their higher scalability relative to the Unity models.

Unity has all the other features you come to expect from EMC, including secure remote support and monitoring in ESRS, FAST Cache using SSDs as a third layer of cache for storage acceleration, FAST VP auto storage tiering, and more.

Also, the Unity arrays have all flash models for each of the models as well for the performance conscious.

Improvements Over the VNX/VNXe

There are quite a few improvements I wanted to point out over the VNX and/or VNXe.

  • HTML5 based Unisphere – YES!  TAKE THAT JAVA!
  • Simplified and easier to use interface
  • Significantly smaller rack footprint when offering  both block and file
    • Within the VNX line, you had to have Storage Processors, X-blade data movers, and Control Stations typically to offer both protocols.  taking up way more rack space and power.  Now, just the DPE provides the same functionality!
  • Support for both block and file VMware vVols
  • Easy setup of ESRS within the array, similar to the VNXe did, but not the VNX
  • All arrays come with IO ports that could potentially bring both iSCSI and FC support without requiring any additional IO cards
  • Far faster setup
  • Better remote monitoring and data analytics of the storage array
  • Ability to run Unity as a virtual storage appliance for dev/test, potentially even for free!

That’s quite a jump from the VNX/VNXe, even though the concepts of the two arrays are the same.

Where can I learn more?

There actually is an abundance of learning resources about the Unity arrays already available.  I would suggest checking out the following:

vCenter 6 – Windows vs Linux Appliance?

One of the first questions for a vSphere 6 design is which version should be used – the linux based VCSA appliance, or the traditional Windows installable version?

The debate on whether to go with the Linux based vSphere Appliance vs. the Windows installable version began when the first version of the appliance was introduced.  Through vSphere 5.5, I generally recommended the Windows version for numerous reasons:

  • It’s more mature
  • VCSA didn’t support linked mode
  • It uses a SQL database
  • You need Windows anyway for VMware Update Manager
  • It scaled better with backend databases that were more common (MS SQL)

Many blog articles have compared the two, and I don’t want to rehash a lot of that information here.  A case could be made for either.

vSphere 6 has been out for awhile, and I’ve deployed it for numerous customers, both the appliance and Windows versions.  I feel like now I can make offer something more on the debate, based on practical experience.

Which works best generally speaking?

I’m going to be honest, I’m coming at this from a Windows centered background.  I’ve worked with linux a bit, don’t get me wrong.  But at the end of the day, I am far more comfortable with Windows.  So, I’ve generally been partial to Windows based vCenter servers for my customers partly because I can support Windows based OS’s easier than linux based, and most of the customers I’ve dealt with are also more familiar with Windows.

With all that said, after deploying vSphere 6 for awhile now, it’s time for the vCenter Appliance.  I preface this with that doesn’t mean for everyone.  It does mean I start with the assumption of the appliance first.  If the customer has reasons why a Windows version makes more sense for them, I’ll recommend the Windows version.  But my de facto recommendation otherwise is go with the VCSA.  This is the first time in my entire workings with vSphere I’ve recommended the VCSA over the Windows version generally speaking.

Why the VCSA is better?

Some reasons for the VCSA have been consistent since its introduction:

  • No need for licensing of Windows or SQL
  • It’s more secure (honestly this is debatable)
  • If you’re a linux shop, you don’t need to introduce Windows for vCenter
  • It’s faster to deploy

But this version is different for numerous reasons.

VCSA is faster

After you work on both, you start noticing the VCSA is noticeably faster.  As a consultant, I jump around between environments that have different hardware that varies drastically.  I started to wonder if I truly remembered correctly which environments were faster.  Maybe the faster environments had faster storage arrays or servers?

One customer I did work for, they had hardware issues that caused me to rebuild their vCenter environment.  We elected the second time to deploy it as a VCSA instead since it had to be rebuilt from scratch to save time.  This provided a rare opportunity to compare them on the same hardware.  I don’t have numbers or benchmarks to provide.  I can only say that the customer commented it was noticeably faster within the Web Client.  I noticed it as well.

It’s faster to deploy

I know, I said this version was different for numerous reasons.  Why bring that up again?  Because vCenter 6 works best by deploying the Platform Services Controller into a separate OS from the vCenter server.  That’s two VMs to build.  It’s far faster to deploy two VCSA’s than two Windows servers.  There’s no contest there.

It scales better without a licensed database

You can scale vCenter to its highest limits of VMs and hosts with the included database within the VCSA.  If you deploy the Windows version and use the vPostgress database, it only scales to 10 hosts and 200 VMs.

Who doesn’t have full VM backup capabilities now?

Back when the VCSA first came out, I dealt with numerous customers who used traditional in guest agent backup products such as Backup Exec without the ability to do whole VM based backups.  To backup the vCenter database, they needed to use a SQL database, which locked them into using the Windows vCenter version.  Now, most environments have whole VM based backup products, whether it be Veeam, add-ons for backup products they’ve been using for a long time such as Backup Exec, or using the generally included VMware Data Protection in most licensed versions of vSphere.  How to backup the VCSA just isn’t a challenge to overcome anymore.

No feature limitations

There used to be functional limits with the VCSA compared to the Windows version of VCSA.  Almost always, this centered around Linked Mode.  Why deploy any version of vCenter that might stop you from using included features, even if you aren’t using those today?  VMware since rewrote Linked Mode, and it works with both versions.  There isn’t any other native VMware feature you can’t use in conjunction with the VCSA.

It’s the future of vCenter

This is speculation on my part, but I think it’s clear VMware wants vCenter to become the VCSA.  Best to go that direction now than later.

Why might the Windows version still be better for some environments?

There can still be some compelling reasons to go with the Windows version.

Windows in place upgrades and SQL based databases

vCenter 6 is supported on Windows 2008 R2 and above.  If your old vCenter runs on a supported Windows OS instance, this potentially allows you to do in place upgrades.  The same can be said for the SQL backend database.  With that said, if VCSA becomes the only version down the road, it might be better to bite the bullet now instead of later to migrate to it.

No whole VM backup products

If a customer doesn’t have any whole VM backup products and doesn’t wish to deploy anything, including VDP, then they may need a SQL backend database that can be backed up with their backup product.

Better operational skills with Windows

Sometimes environments have IT personnel better skilled with Windows than linux.  With that said, linux based appliances, whether it be vCenter or for some other service or application, are far more common than in the past.  It’s increasingly likely the customer has or will have one or more in their environment, whether it be a Cisco wifi controller, or perhaps a security appliance.  Perhaps the VCSA is a good starting point before learning some linux is suddenly forced on the staff unexpectedly.

vCenter High Availability

With vCenter Heartbeat gone, Microsoft clustering is the only way to provide application layer high availability for vCenter.  That can only come through the Windows version.  However, for most customers, they often elect for HA as sufficient protection of vCenter.  Windows Failover Clustering often caused more service loss than it avoids, especially if there is insufficient knowledge and/or experience, on managing it within environments.

VUM still needs Windows

Unfortunately, VUM must be installed within a Windows OS.  You can use VUM in conjunction with the VCSA.  It must run in its own Windows OS.  I don’t think that’s a good justification to not go with VCSA.  I prefer to run VUM within its own OS instance anyway.  However, some customers would rather not mix them, or prefer to deploy VUM in the same VM as vCenter.

vCenter 6 – The appliance rocks!

I highly encourage using the appliance in most cases.  The one piece of advice I can give is don’t dismiss the appliance because you’ve never used it.  Also, unfamiliarity with linux may not be a good reason either.  That one is tricky.  On the one hand, you don’t want to introduce risk due to the lack of linux skills.  On the other hand, you’ll rarely need to be in the linux parts of the appliance anyway.

Either way, the VCSA for vCenter 6 is a solid option, and should be heavily considered.

VMware Update Manager HP Vibsdepot Change

I posted last year about how to get HP specific updates related to VMware through VMware Update Manager.  A co-worker of mine recently pointed that URL is incorrect now.  HP recently rebranded their enterprise products as HP Enterprise (HPE).  Consequently, the VIBS download locations changed.

New HP VUM URLs

Drivers: http://vibsdepot.hpe.com/index-drv.xml

All other components: http://vibsdepot.hpe.com/index.xml

To get all HP updates, you need to add both as download locations.

Make sure you update your environment accordingly!

Ecobee Thermostat After One Year – Part 1

I also wanted to use this blog to discuss some gadgets and things that aren’t work related.  Finding in depth reviews of these kinds of things are hard to come by, especially ones where there isn’t any real incentives to be for or against the product.  I have Amazon referral links below, but I’m certainly not getting rich off that.  🙂

I purchased an Ecobee3 thermostat by Ecobee about a year ago.  I find it’s better to live with it before making any judgments about it.  I think now is a good time to write a review after living with it for a year.

Basic Background Info

I just wanted to share some basic information that may help others compare their results or their current situation that may help them to determine what to expect from their purchase of an Ecobee3 should they decide to purchase one.

Ecobee3 can be purchased in two packages:

You can also add packs of two remote sensors.

Protip: If you have sections of your house with consistently offset temperatures from each other, such as an upstairs and downstairs, place sensors equally between the two.  This avoids skewing of one house section's temperature over another.

I purchased my Ecobee3 for my primary residence, which is a 1650 sq ft house, no garage.  It’s a two story house built in 2001 in the Richmond, Virginia area. Other than the Ecobee3 purchase, I haven’t done any significant energy efficient upgrades to the house.  It’s still running the original HVAC system, which is an American Standard electric heat pump system with one stage aux heat (emergency heat).  I don’t have any additional specific information about it beyond that.  It had a standard manual thermostat, which we set and forgot about.  We conscientiously change our air filters in the house every two months, and service the unit each year to ensure efficiency.

The house, typical of most multi-story houses, has a temperature disparity between the floors of about 5F on average.  On top of that, my wife and I share an office, which is another 3-4F warmer than the rest of the upstairs due to all the computer equipment running up here (router, NAS device for lab, Windows based file server, my workstation, her workstation, 7 LCD monitors between us).   I also have my desk treadmill I got last year around the same time. It uses significant electricity and generates more heat in the room when I’m using it.  We do have dampers which we change depending on the season to force AC more upstairs in the summer, and force more heated air downstairs in the winter, but the temperature disparity can’t be overcome by this alone unfortunately, no matter what we do.

I frequently work from home, and my wife is home most of the time as well, aside from a few days a week during the day.  I wouldn’t expect a ton of energy savings from detecting when we’re home or not.

Installation

I purchased the Ecobee3 version before HomeKit integration was offered.  Ecobee3 comes with a motion/temp sensor within the thermostat itself, and one additional remote sensor.  I purchased one more motion/temp sensor two pack.

My thermostat is located downstairs in our family/entertainment room.  I placed the remaining sensors in the downstairs kitchen, our upstairs bedroom, and our sauna office.  We elected not to place sensors in any bathrooms, an extra bedroom upstairs that’s a glorified storage room, or any hallways.

Protip: I would balance sensors evenly between floors that have natural temperature disparities like we do. Otherwise, the weighted whole house temperature might get skewed more often towards one floor or another when all are evenly occupied.

Installation was relatively simple, even for me.  While I’m an IT engineer, I’m not much of a DIY’er for house work.  I’ve never replaced nor installed a thermostat ever before the Ecobee3.  I checked their website, and provided the wires that were in my current thermostat.  It provided me the wiring directions for the Ecobee3.

Protip: Use their website to determine wiring.  Also, know what kind of system you have prior to install.  I would also elect to install the thermostat when the system will engage, and you will be around to know if there are any misconfigurations.

It worked straight off the bat except for one issue.   It asks you if energizing your heat pump cools or warms your house.  I accepted the default, which is the most common.  Mine was of course the lesser common.  This became very obvious as soon as cooling was needed.   Ecobee notified me my house was going in the wrong direction from what the thermostat expected.  I simply went in and changed this option, and everything worked at a basic level there on out.

Ecobee updated the firmware a few times since.  One notable update came a few months after the initial release, which claims to have improved the algorithms responsible for deciding when to use the heat pump versus aux heat and full on AC.  This should improve efficiency significantly.

Issues Encountered?  Just a few…

After the initial install snafu I discussed above, the only issue I’ve encountered is the sensor in the kitchen downstairs, despite it being the closest to the thermostat unit itself, would alert of getting disconnected and reconnected frequently.  New versions of firmware that would automatically install on the themostat would make this better, then back to bad, then better again.  I tried replacing the CR2032 watch battery in it, but that didn’t do any good.  Eventually, Ecobee apparently nailed it somewhere in the firmware update chain, and it has rarely happened again.  Even though this happened, it never significantly impacted operation that I’m aware of.

Once, I updated my Asus RT-AC68W to the latest firmware revision, and my Ecobee3 absolutely could not connect to wifi.  I downgraded, and it reconnected.  I did it again a few months later with an even newer firmware revision, and it did it again.  The only way I could resolve it is downgrade back again.  However, I recently upgraded my router to a fork in the Asus router’s code that Asus uses as a base for their firmware.   I had no issues at all  after that. I’m guessing there was indeed something wrong with the Asus firmware.  Why it caused issues specifically with the Ecobee3, I have no idea.

Protip: If your router or WAP has the ability to provide segregated connectivity only to the internet and to nothing else on your LAN, you might as well use that for the Ecobee.  Any Ecobee actions you perform against the thermostat goes out to the internet to Ecobee's servers and back down to your thermostat.  Local connectivity doesn't do you any good.  This reduces risk to your network.

What I’ve liked about the Ecobee3

Here’s what I’ve liked about the Ecobee3 so far:

  • Easy initial installation for the most part.  No special wifi network configurations necessary, no port port forwarding, nothing like that.  “It just works” is pretty much the case, at least as much as you could possibly hope for IMO.
  • Easy to maintain.  Firmware updates automatically, no issues I’ve encountered other than the kitchen sensor issue, which eventually went away.
  • IOS apps have worked fairly reliably.  Sometimes I need to force close the app and restart it, but that’s really minor.
  • Remote ability to manipulate settings, such as desired temperature, turning the HVAC system off when it’s not needed, flipping the mode from heat to cooling as the seasons change, and scheduling vacations to save energy.  My wife LOVES the ability to do this without having to go to the thermostat.
  • Automatic detection for when we are home and not, or which rooms are occupied (see negatives below, it’s definitely not all roses)
  • AWESOME analytics when you want it.  This helps you determine how efficient the system is running, diagnosing and detecting problems, etc.  This helped me detect a problem recently where a small leak in the heat pump system caused the outside fan unit to freeze up.  The unit was becoming noisy.  I fired up the iPad IOS app, looked at trends, and noticed a sharp increase in how much the heat pump was running just to maintain heat.  I promptly called for service.  It also helped me to determine that using the single room small portable AC unit I have for the office does help avoid running the whole house unit. At my fingertips, I can find out what temperature it is in any room with a sensor, when my AC, heat pump, and auxilury heat has run on an easy to read graph along side the outside and inside actual temperatures, along with my desired temperature.  The data you gain access to alone in my opinion may make the thermostat worth it.  I didn’t know exactly what the temperature differences between rooms actually was before.  I didn’t know how much my system was running.  I didn’t know any trends concerning how much the auxiliary heat was used vs the heat pump, or how much the AC was actually running to cool the house down.  I could actually see the impact of my desk treadmill had on the office temperature.  All this data is  eye-opening.  You can use it to make informed decisions that can save you money.
  • Alerts when things aren’t running right.  Ecobee notifies me if it sees the temperature moving in the wrong direction compared to what it expects, which helped me diagnose the initial misconfiguration.  I get alerts when it’s time for routine maintenance.  Ecobee sends alerts if the aux heat runs for longer than an amount of time I configure.  That helped me discover a window in the house was left opened accidentally, and when a damper somehow got closed shut.  This happened once before I got the Ecobee, and it ran like this for a few weeks before we noticed.  I get alerts if the weighted temperature goes above or below configured thresholds, so I know if there’s a major problem.
  • Plenty of tweaking options!  If the automated logic of the Ecobee doesn’t quite work for you (or even not at all), you’re given enough options to change to make it work for you.
  • You gain access to settings and abilities you just don’t have with a dump thermostat.  For example, I can choose to run the HVAC system’s fan a minimum of a defined number of minutes to circulate air throughout the house, which has helped the temperature imbalance in the house between rooms/floors.
  • It’s a really nice looking thermostat quite honestly.  Very well made, nice looking display, the touchscreen works really well on it.

What I haven’t liked about the Ecobee

There are a few things that I haven’t liked:

  • If you lose internet connectivity, you lose the ability to remotely manage the Ecobee3.  I know if they changed this, it would likely complicate installation and day to day management of it.  I’m fine with this honestly.
  • The wifi connection issue when I’ve updated my router.  I do think that was very likely a problem with my router’s firmware though.
  • Ecobee isn’t being intentionally misleading.  You may think this thermostat can simply be installed, initially configured and setup your schedule, keep that updated as your daily life patterns change, and then let it automate your house beyond that, and you’re good to go.  No significant tweaking required!  That wasn’t my experience.  I fully recognize this may be because of the weird temperature disparity within my house coupled with the varying tolerance of temperature ranges between my wife and I.  I found I had to resort to some pretty unorthodox tweaking that most people would never need to do. Here’s an example of one of the issues I had to tweak my way out of to stop constant complaints from my wife.  We would often times both be in my office for long periods of time.  Since the office is so hot, this works to our favor in the winter.  All other rooms get de-weighted, so the heat pump doesn’t run nearly as much.  The problem is when my wife goes downstairs, and is confronted with a 10F colder temperature.  I tried various tweaks until finally deactivating the office as even being counted when determining the house temperature because nothing else would make it be acceptably warm enough when she left the office, negating significant savings.  I’ve also had to tweak other settings as well to get optimum performance for winter and summer that would be more specific to each HVAC system.  Didn’t have to in order to get a basically functioning system, but still.  Expect to need to tweak.
Protip: Check in on your analytics when you begin using AC or heat for the first time you have the thermostat, or perhaps even if you just changed your HVAC system.  You may need to tweak some settings.
  • Firmware updates are out of the blue and are managed by Ecobee.  Furthermore, Ecobee doesn’t do a very good job of notifying you when new firmware drops, when it’s installed on your system, and changelogs to the firmware, so you might know what to expect.
  • The iPad version of the app has significantly more in it than the iPhone app.  This is most noticeably in the amount of trending data available.  Surely some limited trending data could be made available on the iPhone.
  • Not every tweaking function is available on even the iPad app.
  • Remote sensors are around $65-70 for a two pack, which is price gouging, quite honestly.  That’s why we don’t have sensors in the rooms we’re not in much, even though that would be nice.
  • You and anyone else who manipulates any setting really needs to basically understand how the Ecobee works before they start fiddling with it.  For example, my wife would be upstairs in the winter, and would come downstairs and be a bit too cold, so she’d change the desired temperature to a set and hold for something warmer.  She didn’t understand the displayed temperature was a weighted average on the thermostat for all rooms with a greater weight to rooms that detected motion.  She’d set it a few degrees warmer than whatever that said,  and that was that.  That would leave the set/hold on indefinitely, throwing the schedule I had configured out the window.  Next thing I know, a non-optimal set and hold was running for a week.  It took some explaining that moving from room to room alone may have automatically made it comfortable.

Would I have bought it knowing what I know now?

Unequivocally, yes.  I need to crunch the numbers to see if the thermostat itself has saved me money on its own by making my HVAC system more efficient, which I intend to do soon as a follow up to the best of my ability.  It’s hard to calculate this.  I’ve gotten concrete practical examples of where the Ecobee has helped me solve issues that would have cost me more money in electricity or a service call.

It’s also far more convenient to remotely change settings without having to go to the thermostat or even be home.  I’ve even made some tweaks to make my wife more comfortable from my iPad while I was out of town.  How cool is that? (No pun intended!)

My wife loves being able to change basic stuff right from her phone if she wants. She’s not a tech gadget person, and even she has seen the value of it.  That says a lot.

I’ve also got an Amazon Echo Dot.  Voice commands are limited to mainly setting a temperate, but that works.  With that said, I have never had a use for that in practice.

vCloud Air OnDemand and DR Overview

Recently, I worked on a project to deploy for a customer vCloud Air Disaster Recovery.  Along the way, as mentioned in a previous post, I went ahead and picked up the applicable VMware certification for it.  I wanted to discuss how vCloud Air works.  To begin with, I wanted to discuss the two offerings, and how they interact.

vCloud Air OnDemand

vCloud Air OnDemand is a public cloud Infrastructure As a Service (IAaS) solution.  You can run pretty much whatever workloads you like.  These are VMs or appliances you deploy either manually by yourself, using their catalog, or perhaps even upload templates from your VMware on premise  environment.

vCloud Air Disaster Recovery

vCloud Air Disaster Recovery is a public cloud Infrastructure As a Service solution.  It’s identical to vCloud Air OnDemand except it’s geared specifically for failing over replicated virtual machines.  VMs you run in this cloud can only be replicated virtual machines from your vSphere environment.  These VMs are replicated with vSphere Replication.  In addition, you can designate isolated networks within vCloud Air DR for isolated testing.

Two Separate Clouds

One design concept to understand is vCloud Air OnDemand and vCloud Air Disaster Recovery are two completely separate clouds.  While they have very similar features and management interfaces, they are completely independent and separate.  This is so much so that in order for VMs in either to be able to communicate with each other, you must setup site to site VPN connections between them.  Keep this in mind.

When Should I Use vCloud Air OnDemand vs Disaster Recovery?

This seems obvious, right?  If you want to replicate VMs using a whole VM replication technology and fail VMs over, use DR.  Use OnDemand when application or service data will replicate natively instead of whole VM replication.

But it’s not so simple as that.  What if a VM has the ability to replicate within its service or application?  Do some services and replication prohibit you from using whole VM replication?

The giant elephant in the room for DR solutions when asking these questions is Active Directory.  If you want your DR solution to be wholly independent, you likely need domain controllers in the cloud and on premise.  And it’s not supported to use whole VM replication with Active Directory Domain Controllers.  So, DCs are out for use with vCloud Air DR for production use cases.

Generally speaking, it maybe a bad idea for infrastructure bread and butter type VMs generally speaking.  For example, DHCP servers could be replicated, but the problem is vSphere Replication can only configure VMs with as low a RPO as 15 minutes, and going over a WAN link might make that 15 minute RPO at best impossible with all your other VMs you’re replicating.  Perhaps it would be better to build a VM within OnDemand and run a script to export the DHCP database regularly to the DR site.

Bottom line though is this:  You only need OnDemand if you won’t replicate VMs using vSphere Replication to vCloud Air.  If you want to run replicated VMs within vCloud Air as a DR solution, AND you want to ensure that the vCloud DR site is not dependent at all on your on premise infrastructure, you probably need both if only to facilitate running Domain Controllers.  Perhaps other services and applications you’ll replicate data to through other means, too.

It would look something like this:

vcloudairdrcommondesign

 

VMware ESXi 6.0 Express Patch 6 causing CBT issues

The always useful Veeam support digest is reporting that at the very least Veeam is seeing issues with Change Block Tracking (CBT) caused by vSphere 6.0 Express Patch 6.  This build was released on May 12th of this year.  It is the current build according to VMware’s build number KB article.

Veeam is reporting they’re seeing the issue if you’re not using application aware processing and using VMware Tools quiescence on your Veeam jobs.

Other blog articles are mentioning other backup products also impacted, including VMware Data Protection and IBM TSM.  It’s safe to assume this will broadly impact all VMware centered backup products.

If you’re using Express Patch 6, you currently have two options:

  1. Roll back to ESXi 6.0 Update 2.
  2. Don’t use quiesced snapshots.

Heads up!