Month: June 2014

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Apache and F5’s

Everyone who uses any type of reverse proxy runs into this issue.  The original user IP address is lost when the proxy is used.  F5 and most proxy vendors have implements an additional header that contains the original source ip for usage known as the X-Forwarded-For Header.   You have to train your apache logs to look at this or your logs show the wrong IP.   This does present a problem that if someone goes directly the webserver the logs don’t show their ip address.  I ran across this little trick to display the correct IP either way just place this in your apache configuration replacing other log configuration.

 

httpd.conf in LogFormat section

LogFormat “%{X-Forwarded-For}i %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %b \”%{Referer}i\” \”%{User-Agent}i\”” proxy

SetEnvIf X-Forwarded-For “^.*\..*\..*\..*” forwarded

Then in your virtual host or host entry use the following

CustomLog “logs/ssl_access_log” combined env=!forwarded

CustomLog “logs/ssl_access_log” proxy env=forwarded

 

Enjoy!

 

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VMware Ebooks for $10 each

I have to admit I love books.  I buy them like crazy.  Of late I have been buying ebooks… they are even better.  They don’t take up any space and are accessible everywhere I am.   I think my love affair with ebooks started with my Nexus 5 and Nook Tablet… I love how they stay synced… I get so much more reading done now.   Anyways to celebrate 10 years of business Packt Publishers is selling all ebooks for $10 each.   There are a number of decent VMware ebooks.   The sale ends on July 4th.  Their cook books are great for people new to virtualization.

 

Take a look at the sale on packtpub.com

 

Here are  a few items to get you started…

Learning Power Cli

Troubleshooting vSphere storage

Virtual Machine Management

Disaster Recovery using VMware vSphere Replication and vCenter Site Recovery Manager

 

Plus you get them in pdf .epub and .mobi formats unfortunatly you cannot print…  (Only Oreily does that.).

Enjoy and throw me a $10 ebook if I saved you some money 🙂

 

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Replacement for vCenter Heartbeat or not?

Many of my readers will already know that vCenter heartbeat is being removed from VMware’s product line up.   They will officially end support in 2017 but the kill notice has already gone away.   Today I attended a VMUG user conference and one of the speakers was Justin King (read more about him here) He joined VMware when they acquired the company that developed heartbeat.   So he was the perfect person to ask the golden question.  Now that vCenter Heart beat is gone what should I use to protect vCenter?

Background:

In the ESX 3.xx days it was common to find vCenter running on physical hardware.   This was due to multiple dependencies for HA to operate on vCenter.  It was also about customer confidence.  These issues have been slowly removed.  With the rewrite of FDM in 5.0 the recommendation has become to use a virtual vCenter and even more the Linux based appliance.   Heartbeat provided a hot standby for vCenter in the event of failure but it really took about 30 seconds to take over.   At this point HA takes 15 seconds + reboot and service start to restart vCenter.

 

Justin’s Take:

Justin provided a really great view that I wanted to share:  Most companies don’t have SLA’s on vCenter.  Most of the availability features work fine without vCenter.   So for most companies the 15 seconds + reboot is not a big deal.   He also suggested that HA Application should be used to restart applications as needed.   He also suggested that a management cluster is becoming more and more common.   Certainly with NSX and Auto deploy a management cluster becomes critical.    He also eluded to some new features that may solve the issue.

 

My Take:

This problem reminds me of the 2TB VMDK limit.  Everyone needed more space and it felt like VMware took about two years too long to solve.  For years customers have complained that everything about VMware is redundant except vCenter… I have to agree with them.   Talking to Justin did bring up one critical thought: customers complaints and needs are two different things.  Very few customers have SLA’s around vCenter… lots of SLA’s around virtual machine work loads.   So they have focused they energy on customer needs instead of wants.   Will they go to a redundant vCenter solution?  Yes they will just not right away.   There are two environments that require vCenter and have SLA’s  EUC and Cloud.   In both situations your customers will be unable to consume services without vCenter.   I think are both gain more traction the business case for redundant view will increase.   I think the move toward the appliance also opens up doors to solve this redundancy issue.