Here is the recorded podcast from Ravello tech chat episode #3. You can also sign up for our next product tech chat and join us for an interactive discussion with the product team.
Part 1:
[audio src="http://www.ravellosystems.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ravello-esxi-beta-tech-chat-with-product-team-5-12-15-part-1.mp3"]
Part 2:
[audio src="http://www.ravellosystems.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ravello-esxi-beta-tech-chat-with-product-team-5-12-15-part-2.mp3"]
Part 3:
[audio src="http://www.ravellosystems.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ravello-esxi-beta-tech-chat-with-product-team-5-12-15-part-3.mp3"]
Episode #3 started with a beta recap and update. Ravello launched its ESXi beta on May 14th so we are nearly a month into our beta. Lots of people trying different things with ESXi on Ravello and we greatly appreciate the support and feedback. Here’s the state of the union:
50% are VMware resellers - channel partners looking for demo and POC environments. Using Ravello blueprinting capability to standardize a VMware demo environment that they spin up on demand before the meeting with the customer and then hand over the full environment to the customer to continue the proof of concept
25% are software vendors in the VMware ecosystem - VMware TAP partners. They are looking to use AWS and Google for training, demos and proof of concepts. For example backup products, networking products that interact with ESXi
Remaining 25% are enterprises that are looking for upgrade testing environments for trying vSphere 6 and testing the upgrade. We expect this segment to continue growing over the next few months.
Lots of home lab use-cases as the community continues to learn and grow by setting up their own isolated lab environment. For example, a 3 node ESXi deployment with one vCenter and one NFS back-end VM is a popular home lab setup that we are seeing.
Questions from the audience
If you have vCenter on premises (home lab or enterprise data center), can it manage ESXi nodes running on Ravello?
Yes it can. Here's how to set it up:
- Create a new application in Ravello. Drag and drop ESXi nodes on to the Ravello canvas - see instructions here
- Setup a VPN between your home lab or your data center and Ravello. As an example you can use pfsense and have IPsec connectivity between your vCenter and the Ravello capsule that has the ESXi nodes running
- Manage your ESXi nodes in Ravello using your vCenter running in your data center
You can also open up certain ports on the ESXi side to connect. Ravello is working on the details and will be publishing a blog soon. One of the users shared a tip with us on setting up the VMware .vib file.
Any best practices around the Ravello upload tool? I’m uploading my ESXi ISO to Ravello...
Some users have run into issues with uploading their ISO or VMs in to Ravello and the reasons have been categorized into three clear buckets
- Quality of your internet connectivity - for example your network bandwidth and packet loss. For example a user was trying to up
- Watch out for any proxy settings or traffic filtering that may be happening on your client side
- Local clock on your client should be synchronized with NTP or the right time. Because otherwise Ravello will have some issues with clock sync
How do you set up internet connectivity for guest VMs running on ESXi inside Ravello?
Yes it is possible
- Need to configure the distributed switch inside Ravello to make sure that it aware otherwise the guests running on top of ESXi on Ravello will not have internet connectivity -
- Follow the detailed instructions that we have described it here.
Has anybody tried running VMware OpenStack distro (VIO) on Ravello?
One of the vExperts was working on a project to run the VMware OpenStack distro on Ravello but we are not sure how far they went with it. In the meantime we have seen lots of Red Hat OpenStack labs running on Ravello and we have some ready made OpenStack “blueprints” that you can download to help you get started (see: OpenStack Juno on Ravello)
You mentioned your users are contributing blogs? What are some of the other user contributed blogs? Can I also write a blog and have it published on your site?
Yes, we have lots of user contributed blogs such as: NSX on Ravello, Arista vEOS on Ravello and testing VMware integrations on Ravello.
Just send an email to pm@ravellosystems.com and we will work with you to publish your blog.
The post VMware ESXi on Ravello – beta tech chat with product team. Episode #3 appeared first on The Ravello Blog.