My Personal Blog

Since a few months I got the page : IAmJoost.com

There is where I am blogging right now.

Please update your links and go to that page.

Have Phun !

On my laptop I am using Virtualbox often. It’s easy and quick. Sometimes you will have to convert a VMWare .ova file into a Hyper-V file.

Now you can find a ton of application on the internet and some are working. Because I got already Virtualbox installed on my laptop, I am using this application.

When I am using the GUI of Virtualbox I can clone, but only to an .ovf format. So how did I convert the vmware image into a hyper-v image ?

VBoxManage.exe

The .ova file got a .vmdk file in it ! Just rename it to .zip and now you can extract the .vmdk from the .ova.

With the command vboxmanage.exe you can clone the harddisk to another format. In my case I used the command :

VBoxManage.exe clonehd --format vhd "c:\zooi\image\test.vmdk" "c:\zooi\image\test.vhd"

Now you can import the .vhd in your Hyper-V environment. You should use “Use an existing virtual harddisk” and it works !

Sometimes I buy some nice gadgets. And a few days ago I received my device. It’s an internet radio with radio, mediaplayer and DAB Radio.

Unfortunally I didn’t have a good reception. Because of this, I couldn’t play any radiostation via DAB. FM was okay, and because DAB is digital, the sound is way better.

Of course I could buy a good antenna, but why spend money on something you can create your own !

Do It Yourself : DAB Antenna

  What you need is an antenna cable 75 ohm of about 1.5 meters or longer.

Strip at the end of the cable 30 cm including the shielding.

  Strip from here 23 cm of only the plastic. Leave the shielding in tact.

  Create 2 loops with a diameter of 5 cm and make sure it stays this way.

And here is the result of the DIY DAB Antenna:

Connect you antenna and hold it up vertically and as high as possible.

Now you got some very good reception !

It’s nice that the bandwidth of the servers and the whole UCS system is getting faster and faster. Sometimes you must connect the FI 6332 with all 40 Gb ports to a 10 Gb network. How do you configure the Fabric Interconnect to have a 10 Gb connection ?

Port Configuration

First of all you should know that you can connect the 40 Gb QSFP via a QSA (1x10Gb) or breakout cable (4x10Gb). This is not configurable for every port !

Port 13 and 14 are 40 Gb ports only, which is the same for port 27-32. If you’re using QSA’s or breakout cables, don’t put it in those ports. It won’t work.

If you try it, you won’t see the option of Breakout Cable at the GUI and the CLI will give you the following error message :

  In this case the Breakout Cable is put in slot 25.

When you configure a Breakout Port, the FI should be rebooted to have the change in place !

When the FI is up and running, just wait a few minutes and then you can configure the 10 Gb port.

You will see now 4 small ports in the GUI.

And you can configure each port as a 10 Gb port for uplink or whatever.

  When you have a look at the links, you will see that Port 25 is now a Scalability port.

  So now you can configure it like it’s a 10 Gb Port.

Yes ! After doing a design clinic in 2010 and presenting Social Miner in 2012, I was lucky to do a technical Seminar in 2018 at CLEUR (Cisco Live Europe).

TECCOM-1463

The personal highlight of CLEUR 2018 was of course for me, my presentation. Because my session was on monday at 08:45, I started only with 22 people. But more come during the session and finally I had 37 people in the room. It seems not many, but for a Techtorial the participants had to pay extra, so this is a nice amount of people.

The session was of course about Hyperflex and some personal experience with installing the clusters with customers. If you don’t read the manual…. mistakes will be made..

CLEUR is not only party and presentations. It’s way more !

Here is a small impression of the rest of the event and for more information you can visit : www.ciscolive.com

World of Solution

On the WoS (World of Solution) Cisco and partners can show their product or services. I was staffing the Hyperflex booth for 2 days which gave me very nice and interessting conversations with all kind of persons. Technical and non-technical.

  And there was enough coffee at the Hyperflex Cafe !

With a lot of space to whiteboard and showing video’s on the screen.

  Meet The Engineer

One way to interact with Cisco is to schedule a “Meet The Engineer”. Then you can have a 1:1 conversation regarding questions and problems. There is always a whiteboard available, so that designing or explaining things is possible.

  On monday there was a very nice Hyperflex Customer Appriciation Event at Camp Nou, Barcelona.

And here are some generic Cisco Live photo’s.

A lot of Breakout Room !

Room 121 for TECCOM-1463

Entrance of Cisco Live

A small walk from the subway to the venue.

In large companies most of the IT people are siloed into boxes regarding their skills. So you got Networking, Compute, Storage etc admins. Some work together others don’t.

What I noticed during a lot of Hyperflex installation at customer sites, that for Hyperflex you need a HyperConverged Admin! Somebody who knows a bit of everything. Of course he/she can still have their expertise, but if the VM Admin doesn’t know what a vlan is, he can’t tell the network guy why he’s needing the vlan for the Hyperflex solution.

Let’s do a test to see if you are a HyperConverged Admin!

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Welcome to the "What kind of Admin are You" test.

What is your email ?

What type of admin are you ?

Network Admin

Compute Admin

Storage Admin

Hypervisor Admin

IT Manager

Other Admin

Where do you create datastores ?

On the ESXi Host

In vCenter

In a service template at the Fabric Interconnects

With zones and zoning on the FC Switches.

Where to configure maintenance policy's of the servers ?

In vCenter

In UCS Manager

On the Switches

In the zonesets.

How do you configure a routable vlan ?

Just ask the Network Guy. He eats vlan's in the morning.

Configure a routing protocol on the Fabric Interconnects

Let's start to open an ssh to the router and configure the vlans on it.

I don't know.

Volumes are created at ......

vCenter

SAN Storage

Network Switches

Service Templates

Don't worry regarding the results ! You won't be fired by your boss... I hope... 😉

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Cisco still develops new SAN FC switches with very nice features.

The Cisco 9132T is a 32 port 32 Gb FC SAN switch. Because of the size it’s suitable for SMB, Mid Market and even for ToR SAN switch for enterprise. Everyone can put this fixed switch in their network. You can replace your SAN switches with this devices and step up to the 32 Gb FC standard ! The switch support 4,8,16 and 32 Gb FC.

Cisco proofs that FC isn’t dead !

You can start with 16 ports and add 16 ports if you grow.

The expansion module.

The MDS 9132T got a lot of features and for the full datasheet you can click here.

To have a quick overview of the MDS 9132T, here are some great features. Unfortunally I don’t have any 32 Gb FC SAN switch in my lab, so don’t hesitate if you can provide me hardware. 😛

Feature 1 : Analytics and Telemetry Capability

The asic n the MDS 9132T is the same asic as the on that is in the 32 Gb module for the MDS 9700. Therefore the MDS 9132T can inspect every FC SCSI header at wire speed. And it doesn’t matter what the form-factor is, because it can do this on every flow. Without any external taps or appliance like the competitor ! The switch got 2 ethernet ports and one of them can be used for telemetry and analytics if you want to export the data.

Feature 2 : Diagnostics

The MDS 9132T got all kind of diagnostics on board like network analysis tools, protocol decoding, ISL diagnostics and read diagnostics. By using the Call Home capability you can resolve faster any problem and the service costs will be reduced.

Feature 3 : Virtual Machine Aware SAN

Although this is not a new feature, it’s a feature that a lot of people don’t know of. Because of this feature, virtual machine awareness can add value due to visibility of the flow and performance of the virtual machines.

More information can be found at : Virtual Machine Aware SAN

Feature 4 : Secure

Security is now a days a big issue. The MDS 9132T protects the system by onboard hardware to protect from malicious attacks on bootloader, system image loader and the JTAG interface.

Feature 5 :Intelligent Network Services

What are examples of intelligent network services ? This about slow-drain detection and isolation. ACL for hardware based intelligent frame processing, smartzoning etc. It’s even possible to encrypt the traffic to meet security requirements.

Always a GREAT Feature : API

Cisco is seeing the need for developers. That’s why in every product there are very goot REST API capabilities. In the Cisco MDS 9132T this feature is also available and you can automate everything with your powershell, python, javascript of any other language you like.

See other API posts :

Dev-ops rules the world with Cisco NX-OS!

Hyperflex 2.5 API Rest Explorer

Yeah !!! I am a presenter at Cisco Live Barcelona 2018

TECCOM-1463 : Technical Seminar

On mondays there are Technical Seminars which you can follow for an additional fee. This year I am presenting the Hyperflex Ins and Outs Technical Seminar. Because participants are paying extra, the preperation should be very very good and that’s why I don’t post often on this blog.

Although the agenda and presentation are finished, during the seminar I will show some live demo’s. As a backup plan I will have to record every thing I want to show. This takes a lot of time ! And it’s loaded with live demo’s !

After Cisco Live I will post some very nice new things about Hyperflex 3.0 and the configurations.

If you go to http://ciscolive.com click on Barcelona. Schedule Session and then you will see the content catalog.

Just search for Hyperflex and you will find :

The agenda for the session is :

There it is : https://intersight.com/

Cool if you know what it is and what it can do.

Why  Cisco Intersight?

Managing Data center devices can be challenging. We use the applications which are running in the Data center 24/7 and we don’t want to have any outage. And if there is one, everybody can’t wait until the problem is resolved. Right now there are a lot of managing tools for all kind of hardware.

We use apps very frequently. Not just for facebook or instagram, but also for business. Wouldn’t it be nice to manage your data center from one point ? Just have one entrance to view everything ? Here it is : Cisco Intersight !

What is Cisco Intersight ?

What if Cisco moved the management of devices to a central point, somewhere in the cloud ? You can manage your data center from any device, anywhere. Intersight become Management as a serverice (MaaS)

What can we do with Cisco Intersight ?

Cisco Intersight got right now only some features from the Base Edition. It works with Hyperflex, so that is awesome !

Base Edition

Free version, supports Cisco UCS and HyperFlex

Global monitoring of health and inventory status

User customizable dashboard

Tagging and basic search

Context launch of element managers

The Essentials edition is coming soon.

Essentials Edition

All the functionality of the Base Edition

Policy-based configuration with service profiles

Remote management and vKVM

Firmware management with scheduled updates

HCL compliance check and upgrade recommendations

How to configure Hyperflex Edge with Cisco Intersight.

First we’re opening the Hyperflex GUI.

We’re going to settings, Cloudmanagement and click preview. (Depends on the version you got.)

  First you will have to enable Starship management. Starship was the code name for Intersight.

When it’s enabled, you will see the Not Claimed status, Device ID and the Claim code.

  Let’s go to the Cisco Intersite page and sign in with your Cisco ID (Or CCO as it’s called also)

Goto devices and claim a new device.

  Now you can fill in the Device ID and Claim code you see at the Hyperflex cluster. At the Hyperflex cluster page, you will see that the status is now Claimed, so we know it got a Cisco Intersight connection.

  You will see the Hyperflex cluster at the Cisco Intersight Dashboard.

You can label/tag your environments and see the health. Cisco Intersight will be getting new features quickly.

More information on the Cisco site :

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-computing/intersight/index.html#~stickynav=2

Yes ! On November 12th 2017 I finished my first Marathon in Las Vegas, NV.

My time wasn’t fast and this wasn’t my goal. My goal was just to finish before they close the circuit.

Preparation

Every person is different and you can read a lot about preparation regarding marathons on internet. I got 5 tips to practise for the big day. See my post here. 5 tips to prepare for a Marathon.

Diabetes

It’s not only regarding running the marathon and got good legs, but in my case also howto handle my diabetes.

Here are 5 tips to run a marathon with diabetes.

Running Day

The start of the marathon was at 04:30 pm. The start was late because of the temperature and it’s always nice to run over the strip in the dark with all the lights !

There were different kind of corrals and depending of your end time you think you could run, you were given a corral number. I hoped to finish in 4 hour and 30 minutes. There were also pacers and I choose the one of 04:30.

Unfortunally the pacer wanted to run at a pace of 10km/h and then have different walks as rest. This tempo was too much for me and I had a different strategy. Every 10K I wanted to have a break so that my heart could rest a little bit.

The first 13.1 mile I did it in 2:20 including 6 minutes of break. Which is not bad for a first time !

At the 25k I got cramps in my arm and later in my legs. Now I was calculating how I could finish within the time. It was still a long time to go. There is one thing what worked for me and that is walking at a pace of 6.5-7km/h. This saved my, so that I could finish 15 minutes before the deadline !

In the last part there was a lot of music and still a lot of people to cheer you to the finish line.

As you can see in my post My First Marathon, I finished the Las Vegas Marathon 2017. It wasn’t a pleasure walk. It needed preparation and a lot of research regarding my diabetes.

Here are my personal 5 tips to run with Diabetes and finish a marathon.

Tip 1 : Fill yourself with Carbs !

24 hour before starting the marathon, make sure you have enough carbs in your body. I ate about 600 gram carbs the day before (Spread over the day. Most was a macaroni salade) and I made sure that my sugar levels were still normal ! When you have enough carbs in your body, you won’t eat your muscles during the race.

Tip 2 : Eat Gels with water

Just before the start of the marathon I ate a gel with 24 gram carbs in it. This gel does advise to drink water with it. Just a few sips is enough. During the marathon I ate every 40 minutes a gel and I had 8 gels with me. Some paged advise to have 60-70 gram carbs every hour. For me this was too much, so I did it with about 45 gr carbs/hour. I didn’t use the gels the organisation was providing during the race, because I didn’t know how my stomach would react to it.

There are gels with and without caffeine. I prefer without caffeine, but this is personal.

Tip 3 : Test everything before the Marathon.

Everything I did before, during and after the marathon I tested it in advance. Not only test it, but also had a very close look at your sugar levels, so that you know what your body needs and how it can recover.

Tip 4 : Recover with chocolate.

One thing that really helped me, was drinking chocolate mild and eating chocolate after the race ! There are scientific articles about it and I just like it. Make sure that the chocolate got a lot of cacao in it.

Tip 5 : Watch your sugar level after the race

2 weeks before the race I was using my FreeStyle Libre and watched closely my sugar levels. Even after the race you should watch you values. In my case everything looks fine, but a hypo followed in the night, although I had enough food after the marathon.

The start of the marathon was at 16:30. Although all the gels and carbs, the level is stable. (Finish of the marathon was at about 21:40. Value went up due to food after the marathon.)

My nightly levels. A bit low although everything looks fine when I was going to bed….

  Have fun and enjoy running !

Here are some tips for running a marathon.

In may 2016 I started, since the first time in my life, with running. Just to make sure I could make the finish line in september 2016 during a mudmaster race. Then there was the 5K run, the 12K mudmaster run and now, 18 months later I am a Las Vegas Marathon finisher !

I don’t have the body of a real runner and the only thing that me motivated to run was my diabetes. My goal was never to set a quick time, but just to finish the Marathon. It was a long proces and here are my 5 personally tips.

Tip 1 : Run on heartbeat

You can run faster and faster, but within a couple of km’s your legs won’t be able to carry you. When you’re starting with running on your hearbeat, you will start slow, but after a few trainings you will notice that you can go faster and faster without raising your heartbeat. There are some heartrate zones and you will have to find your sweet spot. Some say it is 140 bpm and for me 155 works very well. (Las Vegas is located at 600 meter above sealevel)

You can also see this post regarding running on heartbeat.

Tip 2 : Have your own strategy

First I thought I could run 4:30. I knew it’s gonna be hard and I noticed during trainings in Las Vegas that my heartbeat was higher then in the Netherlands. So I calculated that I could do 6:45 min/km and still have room to have a walking break at 10k, 20k and 30k of 3 minutes. (Also to have my gels reordered, fill my cans with bottled water etc.)

During the start I was standing near the 4:30 pacer guy. Unfortunally he started to quick and when I was at the 10k I stick to my plan to have a break. It’s hard to get your pace back when you walked a few minutes, but I did manage it.

Al important things I figured out before the race, I wrote on my arms. What would my times be at the 10k, 20k and 30k including pause, pace etc etc.

Everybody is different and there isn’t one strategy. What is your goal and don’t try to loose that goal !

Tip 3 : Drink and Eat !

During the marathon you will need a lot of water and fuel for your body. A 10k you can run without water or gels, but a marathon is different. In Las Vegas the water is with chloride. Normally that’s not a problem for me, but for this run I choose not to drink it because of my stumach. So in the beginning I ran with a bottle of water (And a belt with also 500 ml of bottled water). After 6k my girlfriend stood on the site with a new bottle of water. I drank at every gatorate stop and in total I had about 2 liter of bottled water and gatorate. That is okay, as long as you fill your reserve after the race with an isotone drink.

A day before I already stuffed myself with carbs and during the race a had a gel every 40 minutes. I never had any stumach pain.

Tip 4 : Walk

When you’re not a fully trained person like me, it’s hard to have the same pace the whole marathon. After 25k I got my first cramps. In my lower arms. Later at the 30k I got cramps in my legs and I started to walk. Not at a “shopping pace” but more like 6.5-7 km/h ! You’re using different muscles then en you can give some other muscles rest ! Walking isn’t bad when your goal is to finish within the limits.

  Tip 5 : Have Fun !

Most of all have fun in the marathon and also have fun during the preparation. Enjoy every step although it’s hard when you muscles aches. Make new friends when you are waiting for the start. When you have the right food, preparation and mindset, you can finish the marathon just like me !

I never had a longer run then 20k! Most of my trainings were just 5-8k. I liked the interval trainings and heartbeat trainings.

Every Cisco minded technical guy wants to go to Cisco Live ! In my “early” days being at Cisco Live was for me “THE” event for the whole year ! There is so much content and new stuff to learn ! Nothing is for free and this event has also a price tag. (Early birds will get discount of course). So… Why should you go ?

Reason 1 : Attend a Techtorial on Monday !

When you want to know every in and out of a product, technology, you should go to the Techtorials ! Right now you got an 8 and 4 hour techtorial. It’s possible to have 2×4 hour techtorial on one day ! Right now you can find 48 technical session for monday. I like Hyperflex and now there is also a technical seminar of Hyperflex. Even if you want to become a CCIE Collaboration there’s a session for you !

  Reason 2 : As an CCIE you will get discount on the price !

On this link you can register as an CCIE and you will get discount ! And on the event you will get a nice special gift and some recognition with a CCIE Badge. Make sure that your CCIE is still valid. Being a CCIE is hard ! All the nice attention you will get. You worked hard for it, so enjoy !

Reason 3 : You can get DevNet stickers !

How cool is it to have a laptop full with all kind of DevNet stickers ? It’s way cooler if you UNDERSTAND DevNet and that you can do something with it ! The DevNet zone will give you information, learning and a lot of fun. API’s are more important then every, so use them ! Even with Hyperflex you can use API.

Cisco Live is NOT only for networking people. Cisco do a lot with DevNet, applications, SDS etc etc.

On developer.cisco.com you will get more info about the thing you can do with Cisco Products.

More information about the DevNet zone click this link.

Reason 4 : It’s a training

There is so much content, that you can’t follow everything in person ! Make sure you’re choosing the right track and sessions. Don’t tell your boss it’s an event. It’s free training and you only have to pay for the event. 🙂 There is so much good content. All the sessions are chosen and the standard of Cisco is always very high !

Reason 5 : Meet Me !

Yes, I will also be on Cisco Live ! I will be given the Hyperflex techtorial on Monday. There will be way more cool stuff shown about Hyperflex then that you will see on this blog ! The Hyperflex team and the Business Unit will also be there as Subject Matter Experts. You can have whisper sessions with them or ask a question to the Expert.

Let’s have some beers and give me feedback about Hyperflex. (If it’s negative feedback, you’re paying the beers… 🙂 )

Why wait ? Register right now for Cisco Live 2018 Barcelona.

Just go to this page for registration and don’t forget to register for the Hyperflex techtorial !

On the Cisco website you can see other reasons to go to Cisco Live.

There are many cool HX 2.5 features and one of them is native replication. But how do you configure this ? Well. Let’s start.

What is Hyperflex replication ?

It is possible to replicate VM’s from one Hyperflex Cluster to another Hyperflex cluster. In case of a disaster, you can (manually) start the replicated VM’s at the secondary cluster. Right now there are some limitations. Please read always the release notes of the software version.

Step 1 : Create replication network on the Hyperflex clusters.

First you will have to configure the Replication Network. It’s easier to have a routed network.

  I am lazy so I like the UCS Manager configure the VLAN for me on the Fabric interconnects. I got a special VLAN for the replication. The IP Range should be #Nodes + 1 ! So if you have 4 nodes, the range should be at least 5 ip addresses. Make sure your range is big enough for the future.

It’s possible to have some bandwidth restrictions regarding replication traffic.

Finally the replication network is created and you will see something different.

Now you can configure the Replication Pair

Step 2 : Replication Pair

Fill in the name of the Replication Pair. Right now Hyperflex 2.5(1c) can only have a 1:1 relation with eachother.

  The username here is NOT local/admin ! It’s a user with admin right of the SSO of vCenter !

  Now we can map the datastores. It’s just a place where the replication will land. It’s easy to have a dedicated datastore for replication, but it’s not a must.

      Step 3 : Create Protection Groups

A protection group is a group of VM’s with the same replication scheme.

Ofcourse it’s also possible to protect a VM without group scheme.

Step 4 : Protect the VM

Just select VM’s you want to protect.

The Protectiongroup was already created, but you can create your own also right now. Now you can see that the VM’s are protected and to which group they belong.

Step 5 : Monitoring the VM Protection

As long as you see green arrows, it’s alright. If the status is active, then the replication is not finished yet.

    In the overview you can see how many VM’s are protected and how many replications are in progress. Click on the graph and you will see some details regarding bandwidth.

Bandwidht usage of the Replication.

Step 6 : Test

A disaster is never a happy event and you can test in advance if everything is working.

First you will need the ID of the VM :

stcli dp vm list –brief With :

stcli dp vm recover test –vmid <vmid> –poweron –newname <NewName>

This test will create the VM at the recovery stite. With –poweron the image will also be powered on and I use –newname just to give it another name.

Ofcourse you can do this also with the API !

And here you see the image running.If you’re doing some testing in the lab, make sure that the booted VM’s don’t interrupt eachother with the same IP addresses etc. It’s better to choose a different network.

Step 7 : Disaster Recovery of the VM’s.

For a real disaster Recovery you will halt the replication with :

stcli dp vm halt –vmid <VMID> or sticli dp group halt –id <group id>  Now you can type :

stcli dp vm recover failover –vmid <vmid> and that’s it !

Once you halted the replication, you can’t start it anymore. Works as designed !

Step x : Automation

Wouldn’t it be an easy world if everything was automated and you don’t have to do any manual labor ? In the next blog I will explain how you can create your own script with API calls to automate everything.

    Some nice Cisco Validated Design documentation about Hyperflex can be found at : here

When I installed vCenter appliance in the lab, I didn’t use a NTP server. (I know… STOOPID !!!) So how can you configure it afterwards ?

Login to the vCenter Appliance.

timesync.get will give you what mode the appliance is in.

ntp.server.add –servers <NTP Server> will add a NTP server

timesync.set –mode NTP will set the mode the NTP instead of host mode

ntp.get will give you the status of the NTP mode.

When you’re done with the installation of Hyperflex, there are still some steps left.

You can configure it manually, but you can also use an automated script.

Just go to https://<installer ip>/mssh 

when you have the CLI window just type : post_install

Now you got some questions and after you answered them, the cluster is completely up and running.

Just enter the vcenter and UCS-M credentials. If some links weren’t setup correctly, the install script will make sure that it’s according the doc !

Post_install look at the last cluster you configured.

If you do multiple installations and you forgot to do the post_install, you can do it always afterwards with :

post_install –cluster-ip <cluster ip address>

Right now you can download the Hyperflex Data Platform software at CCO. www.cisco.com/go/software

There are some cool features in Cisco Hyperflex 2.5 which makes the product better then the best !