Monday, March 26, 2018

Amazon Web Services: A short description of some of the AWS services

As I am planning to sit in my next AWS Certification exam which is Architect Professional in next few months so, thought of starting from scratch and make a note of all common AWS services with their short description (Actually at times I find it hard to recall what service is there for a particular use case so...from next time, I can have a look here).

Amazon Web Services offers a broad set of global cloud-based products including compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, mobile, developer tools, management tools, IoT, security and enterprise applications. These services help organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale.


Compute Services :-

Amazon EC2 : Virtual Servers in the Cloud

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling : Scale Compute Capacity to Meet Demand

Amazon Container Service : Run and Manage Docker Containers

Amazon Lightsail : Launch and Manage Virtual Private Servers

AWS Batch : Run Batch Jobs at any Scale

AWS Elastic Beanstalk : Run and Manage Web Apps

AWS Lambda : Run your code in Response to events

VMware Cloud on AWS : Build a Hybrid Cloud without Custom Hardware

Storage Services :-

Amazon S3 : Scalable Storage in the Cloud

Amazon EBS : Block Storage for EC2

Amazon EFS : Managed File Storage for EC2

Amazon Glacier : Low cost Archive Storage in Cloud

AWS Storage Gateway : Hybrid Storage Integration

Database Services :-

Amazon RDS :  Managed Relational Database Service For MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server and MariaDB

Amazon Aurora : High Performance Relational Database

Amazon DynamoDB : Managed NoSQL Database

Amazon Redshift : Fast, Simple, Cost-effective Data Warehousing

Amazon ElastiCache : In-memory Data Store and Cache

Amazon Neptune :  Fully Managed Graph Database Service

Migration Services :-

AWS Database Migration Service : Migrate Database with Minimal Downtime

AWS Application Discovery Service : Discover On-Premises Application to Streamline Migration

AWS Server Migration Service : Migrate On-Premises Servers to AWS

AWS Snowball : Petabyte-scale Data Transport

AWS Snowball Edge : Petabyte-scale Data Transport with On-board Compute

AWS Snowmobile : Exabyte-scale Data Transport

AWS Migration Hub : Track Migrations from a single place

Networking and Content Delivery Services :-

Amazon VPC : Isolated Cloud Resources

Amazon Route 53 : Scalable Domain Name System

AWS Direct Connect : Dedicated Network Connection to AWS

AWS CloudFront : Global Content Delivery Network

Elastic Load Balancing : High Scale Load Balancing

Amazon API Gateway : Build, Deploy and Manage APIs

Management Tools :-

AWS CloudWatch : Monitor Resources and Application

AWS Auto Scaling : Scale Multiple Resources to Meet Demand

AWS CloudFormation : Create and Manage Resources from Templates

AWS CloudTrail : Track User Activity and API Usage

AWS Config : Track Resources and Inventory

AWS OpsWorks : Automate Operations With Chef and Puppet

AWS Service Catalog : Create and Manage Standardized Products

AWS System Manager : Gain Operational Insight and Track Action

AWS Trusted Advisor : Optimize Performance and Security

AWS Personal Health Dashboard : Personalized View of AWS Service Health

Analytics :-

Amazon EMR : Hosted Hadoop Framework

Amazon Kinesis : Work With Realtime Streaming Data

Amazon Redshift : Simple, Fast, Cost-effective Data Warehousing

Amazon CloudSearch :  Managed Search Service

Amazon Elasticsearch Service :  Run and Scale Elasticsearch Cluster

Amazon Quicksight : Fast Business Analytics Services

AWS Data Pipeline : Orchestration Service for Periodic, Data-driven Workflow

AWS Glue : Prepare and Load Data

Amazon Athena : Query Data in S3 using SQL

Security, Identity & Compliance :-

AWS Identity & Access Management : Manage User Access and Access Keys

AWS Single Sign-On : Aloud SSO Service

AWS Organizations : Policy-based Management for multiple AWS accounts

AWS Key Management Service : Managed Creation and Control Of Encryption Keys

Amazon Inspector : Analyzed Application Security

AWS Shield : DDoS Protection

AWS Guard Duty : Managed Threat Detection Service

AWS WAF : Filter Malicious Web Traffic
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My previous AWS exam related posts can be fond here,



Hope this would be useful for others as well...That's it for now :)


Saturday, March 10, 2018

VMware vExpert 2018 award Announced

After lots of delay VMware finally announced the list of vExpert 2018…. I am very honored to be named a VMware vExpert again, this is my fourth vExpert award…..

Congrats to all those who named as a 



Here is the full list of vExpert 2018... https://vexpert.vmware.com/directory 

vExpert 2018 Announcement on VMTN Blog,
https://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2018/03/vexpert-2018-award-announcement.html

That's it... :)


Sunday, March 4, 2018

Unable to power-on a VM in nested ESXi, hanging at some random point with a question in the events

I would say this is the most weird issue I ever faced, it took me so long to find a solution so thought of making a note of it.

My setup is all nested, VMware workstation on my Lab Windows PC and then ESXi, vCenter and everything else as VMs running on workstation.

After building a vSphere 6.5 lab environment, when I deployed my first VM and tried to power it on it got stuck at a some point, after waiting for few minutes when checked the task and events, found following info event there,
"Running VMware ESX in a virtual machine will result in degraded performance. Do you want to continue"


Then I created few other VMs but they all got stuck at some random point during power-on operation and the same event was there in events.

However there is no way to answer the question, nothing in VM summary and no pop-up nothing.

A quick search about the issue lead me to VMwareb# 2108739 however adding msg.autoAnswer = "FALSE" in host .vmx file or /etc/vmware/config didn't make any difference.

Initially I thought this is something related to ESXi 6.5 so, just to check deployed another VM with ESXi 6.0 but even on nested ESXi 6.0, VM power-on operation stuck at random point.


Earlier, I had a working vSphere 5.5 nested lab on this system so, thought of checking with ESXi 5.5 but to my surprise VM power-on operation got stuck with same "Running VMware ESX in a virtual machine will result in degraded performance. Do you want to continue" question (without any way to answer it) for ESXi 5.5 too.

Then I thought this is something related to VMware workstation so, downgraded it from version 14 Pro to 12 Pro but there was no difference.

This is when I started looking at other things and eventually found that its my antivirus which was causing this issue.....Avast Antivirus...... enabling or disabling the features in the software did nothing however uninstalling Avast worked like a charm and now everything working again as expected.

Hope this would help...

That's it ...:)


Saturday, March 3, 2018

How to Check, Start, Stop or Restart Windows version of vCenter 6.x Services

Today while working on something I rebooted my vCenter server and post reboot when tried to connect to vCenter using Web client, end up with following error,


This error is something which usually occurs when there there is some issue with vCenter Web client, probably the service is set to manual or somehow got stopped.

Ideally Web client service should have startup type set as Automatic and in start state.

To verify this, opened Services and to my surprise couldn't find the vCenter Web Client Service listed there, even vCenter service was not there (ideally this shouldn't be the case).


So, here how would you check the status of Web Client Service or for any other service not listed in Services.

For Windows version of vCenter, to list the vCenter Server and/or Platform Services Controller services,
  • Open command prompt as Administrator and change the directory to C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\bin (or any other relevant path, if you didn't install vCenter on default location)
  Now we will use Service-control utility, available here to check the status of service or perform a related operation on it.
      To view the available option, run service-control --help
  • Run following command to list vCenter Server and/or Platform Services Controller services,
          service-control --list-services
  • Run this command to view the current status of all vCenter Server and/or Platform Services Controller services: 
    service-control --status

     To check the status of individual services, use this,

      For Web client Service:
    service-control --status vsphere-client

  For vCenter service:
         service-control --status vpxd
    

 From here, you can start, stop any of vCenter Server and/or Platform Services Controller   services using below cmd,

service-control --start 'Service Name'

Or to start all services,

service-control --start --all


Note:To perform a dry run of the command, add the option --dry-run to the command, doing so will display what actions the command will run without executing the actions. 

Hope this would be helpful.

Reference: VMware kb# 2121043 & 2109881
Related Post: VMware vCenter Server 6.x Appliance services: how to find service status or start/stop

That's it... :)