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CloudDatacenterStorageVirtualization

Virtual Storage Appliances may fundamentally change virtualization landscape

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

One of the biggest hurdles for virtualization adoption in the small business area has been the need for expensive, shared storage.  The Virtual Storage Appliance is looking to change that.  By utilizing the relatively cheap, attached storage in host systems and pooling those into a storage array, vendors are looking to extend the goodness of virtualization to the final frontier – the small business.  But its not just applicable there – I think that VSA may also have a strong play for virtual desktops and eventually for primary storage in many environments.

A reporter asked me end of 2011 for my predictions in 2012.  Mine was around the VMware VSA and the promise of cheap, shared storage for the masses.  VMworld’s Solutions Exchange was full of vendors with VSA or purpose-built storage solutions looking to address the storage play in virtualization.  Many are looking at SSD, either hybrid or pure SSD, to achieve a large amount of IOPS for virtualization.  In my mind, its possible that a VSA could replace all of these purpose-built solutions by utilizing the local RAID adapters and local storage already within our ESX hosts.

HP has rebranded the LeftHand VSA under the new StoreVirtual VSA moniker.  The StoreVirtual also introduces a reduced cost licensing model which bundles 3 years of service and support along with the virtual appliance.  StoreVirtual VSA allows for active/active clusters using the tried and true Lefthand technology.  StoreVirtual uses iSCSI as its primary transport of storage to the ESX hosts.  The local storage is pulled into the StoreVirtual VSA, then it is carved into LUNs and presented to particular iSCSI initiators.  All of the advanced features of Lefthand are available to customers of the VSA.   The StoreVirtual VSA is the only VSA that is certified as a VMware Metro Storage Cluster, capable of spanning storage over datacenters.

I remember when Lefthand was first demoed for me, before the HP acquisition.  One of their value propositions at the time was repurposing existing hardware into storage nodes within the Lefthand SAN.  The same principle applies in the case of the new StoreVirtual VSA.  Adding disks to existing, very capable ESX hosts may make a lot of sense to companies.  It may also reduce the data center footprint and cooling needs by collapsing storage into running host servers.

VMware also offers a licensable VSA.  It uses NFS to mount a datastore and make it accessible to all nodes in a cluster.  It also allows for replication of data from the datastore to another datastore, but it is a single node active model.  In the event the primary host running the NFS share goes down, the secondary node has to activate the NFS and make it available.   It may not be quite up to par with offering seamless or instant failover, but it is probably good enough for many applications.

Nexenta also had a VSA for View demoed in the Solutions Exchange at VMworld.  It was a very low cost option, licensed per user, to convert local storage into VDI storage.

VSA’s do not come without some challenges.  Customers will need to architect high-availability into any design.  They will need to ensure that advanced features like snapshots and backups are capable, although there are new considerations which come into play.  HP and VMware partner Veeam has introduced a version of its backup software that fully understand the StoreVirtual VSA and the challenges of backup that may be introduced with a VSA. One of these challenges is how exactly to restore a data snapshot onto a storage array running on the same virtual infrastructure.  The VSA creates a circular reference, to some degree.

I stand by my prediction, and I have to admit, its fun to see my thoughts coming true on this front.  Small business is ripe to benefit from virtualization and may be the last, large, untapped area of growth.  And VSA’s may make it possible.

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DatacenterStorageVirtualization

I’ll remember VMworld 2012 for the community

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

VMware is a lucky technology company.  Few companies, short of Apple, seem to have as fierce and vibrant a community as the one that surrounds VMware.  VMworld 2012 was a remarkable time to spend with members of that community, in the realm of influencers and evangelists.  No question, I was around a lot of very smart people.  And it is fun to pick their brain and listen to their opinions about trends and directions of our industry. There is a fertile growth of tech bloggers and Twitterazzi that follow VMware and the virtualization community.  I realize that many of these folks don’t exclusively focus on VMware, but on the trends of technology in general, but virtualization has become extremely large part of that community and a bulk of the talk.

One of my highlights of the week was attending the VMware User Group (VMUG) leaders lunch on Tuesday.  This was another exceptional cross-section of the community, all of whom have rallied behind local user groups, learning opportunities, and devoted themselves to evangelizing the platform.  But it was a fairly small group of people, around 100 or so.  The highlight was hearing directly from CEO Paul Martiz, incoming CEO Pat Gelsinger and CTO Steve Herrod during the luncheon.  All three took an opportunity to talk with the relatively small group about where we’ve come, where we’re going and then all three fielded questions from the leaders.  Unscripted and completely off-the-cuff, these guys are impressive.  Each one is a technologist in their own right and they challenged the group to continue to call them out if their business decisions don’t make sense in the community.

I attended my first VMworld in 2009, I believe, and I was largely oblivious to the community, although it was already growing.  And it has exploded since that year. Not only are there formal events hosted by large, corporate sponsors during the week, the same blogging and Twitter community organizes their own unofficial events – like the VMunderground, #vodgeball tournament and others that even benefit charities with any proceeds raised.

And speaking of growth – the VMworld conference itself has grown to over 20,000 attendees.  VMUG reported over 3,000 new members in the past year and I cannot count the number of new people who I follow both their blog and Twitter for news and tips about VMware.  And its that community that I find myself a part of now – as a tech blogger.  I still consider my contribution relatively small, but I’m inspired by what I see others doing for the benefit of the whole group.

In formal recognition of the contribution of many of these people, VMware introduced a designation a few years back – the vExpert – meant to honor those who have made a signifiant contribution to the community either evangelizing or contributing knowledge, time and wisdom to others in their circle of influence.  I have met many of the vExperts and these are individuals who are passionate about technology, but down-to-earth enough to have a conversation with.  Many of them ask me where we are in the virtualization story and what my stories are from the trenches.  Some of these folks have helped significantly through the blog posts they have written with advice or best practices or with the gotchas they found before me.  Its really quite remarkable to meet and get to talk to them.

But what would this post be without highlighting some of the most influential in these circles.  These are the guys to follow in Twitter, the blogs to bookmark or subscribe and the influencers to listen to.  I was lucky enough to meet many of these guys last week, either in passing or to talk with.  Look them up.  (The list is in no particular order…)

And, I have to have an honorable mention for Crystal Lowe and the Spousetivities program.  My wife attended VMworld 2009 with me and met Crystal for the first round of Spousetivities.  From there, Spousetitives grew into a much larger and corporately sponsored program for tech spouses who come with their signifiant other to conferences like VMworld.  Crystal coordinates activities, tours and social events for spouses to do while their techie is away geeking it up.  If you attend tech conferences, you need to look up @Spousetivies and visit the website at http://www.spousetivities.com for your spouse.

For those I missed on this list – VERY sorry.  There are too many people in this community and I’m sure I’ve missed a few.  Comment or tweet me and I’ll add you to the list.  And most of all, thanks to all of these folks for their contributions to our community!

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CloudDatacenterStorage

HP extending Data Protector backups to vCloud Director

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Many backup vendors support vSphere, VMware’s flagship virtualization platform.  But now, HP’s Data Protector platform supports the extended vCloud layer directly with integration against VMware’s vCloud Director.  Workloads in highly virtualized datacenter are much more dynamic than traditional IT and the addition of vCloud Director to an environment only accellerates the ebb and flow of virtual machines. The new integration in Data Protector offers the ability to setup dynamic backups which can encompass changing workloads by integrating that the top level, vCloud layer.

Data Protector can be pointed directly at a particular vCloud organzation and will be able to backup anything under that organization with a single checkbox.  Regardless of how much or how often the systems under that organization changes, Data Protector will still protect it completely.  The integration fully supports the vCloud vStorage API’s which allows for full, application consistent backups by utilizing VMware’s snapshot capabilities.  The snapshots will call into the VM’s tools and will even coordinate a consistent snapshot with the OS running inside of the VM.  This ensures the most reliable data recoveries possible.

The new vCloud Director integration joins a slew of additional new capabilities within the Data Protector 7 release, including support for the StoreOnce deduplication technology at any level within the backup process.  StoreOnce deduplication has been fully baked into the software in Data Protector 7 allowing for deduplication at the end-point, in transit or at rest on the StoreOnce deduplication device.  It also allows for portability of thin backups without the need for rehydration, saving both bandwidth and time.

A picture is worth a thousand words.  Below is a video demo of the vCloud Director integration into HP Data Protector.  You can get a good idea of how simple the interface for the vCloud integration is within the backup console.  To an existing customer, the interface looks almost identical to the vSphere integration that has existed for several years.

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CloudVirtualization

VMware introduces new vCloud Suite

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

This morning, incoming CEO Pat Gelsinger introduced a new bundled product offering – the vCloud Suite.  The solution marries vSphere with vCloud Director, networking and security  to create a fully automated, software-defined datacenter.  The announcement is directly related to needing to change how existing infrastructure is managed to allow it become more agile and save time to free up IT staff to focus on the greater change to achieve an overall cloud vision.  The announcement also included the release of version 5.1 for vSphere, vCloud Director and Site Recovery Manager.

The suite has three different levels ranging from Standard to Advanced to Enterprise Plus.  The Enterprise Plus offers almost the entire VMware portfolio of software to the customer, including Site Recovery Manager, Operations Manager, Configuration Manager and the vFabric Application Director.

The vCloud Suite Standard level is also being offered as a free upgrade to customers with vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses and up-to-date Software and Service (SnS).  Customers with vSphere Enterprise may also take advantage of a discounted upgrade program.  This is a considerable new feature grant to existing customers who have loyally paid their annual service and support.  It also represents a switch back towards building in new enablement features in the existing licenses that customers own after VMware arguably removed some functionality with the vSphere 5.0 release, like guest OS patching.  The free upgrade will allow customers vCloud Director and other additional features without the need to purchase new licenses.

Primarily, the new bundles is intended to simplify the purchasing process for customers hoping to adopt VMware solutions. The suite moves everything to a per CPU (socket) licensing model across all the products and bundles many of the necessary tools together to allow customers to build a cloud.  Any products that have been traditional licensed on a per VM basis are now per CPU, as well, including VMware’s Site Recovery Manager.

In addition to the per CPU licensing, the restrictions on number of cores is also absent.  vSphere 4.1 had limits on the number of cores per socket that a customer could run.  These restrictions were lifted with vSphere 5.0 last year, but VMware introduced the controversial vRAM entitlements at that time.

The new bundles accompanied the news that the poorly received vRAM entitlements would no longer be used for vSphere licenses.  Introduced last year, the vRAM  entitlements (the vTax, as it was referred to) initially set off a backlash from customers who thought the entitlements were too low and would mean spending a lot of additional money to continue running vSphere.  VMware quickly increased the entitlements, but it didn’t do much to help sales staff trying to educate users of the new licensing model.  Sales people said that the vRAM entitlements were difficult to explain to customers.  The transition back to a per socket model will make things simpler to understand for everyone.

In general, it seems that VMware is working hard to battle increased competition by making customer’s existing licenses provide more value and capabilities.

Note: This post went up a little early without the final details.  I apologize.

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DatacenterStorageVirtualization

VMware announces version 5.1 of infrastructure products

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Today at VMworld, VMware announced the availability of version 5.1 of its infrastructure products.  New CEO Pat Gelsinger likened the release schedule of VMware’s infrastructure product to the Intel tick-tock release of a major every two years and minor revision on the year in between each major, but for a minor (tock) release, version 5.1 of vSphere includes a number of major enhancements.

Among the features in this release, virtual machines will have a new virtual machine format – version 9 – that will allow for larger virtual machines, performance counters and shared graphics acceleration.  That’s not the only upgrade to VM’s in the release – a new version of VMware Tools will accompany the release, but this version of tools will mark the end of reboots for subsequent VMware Tool upgrades.  That is welcome news for all administrators.

In addition to these VM enhancements, overall compute capabilities within virtual machines has been enhanced.  The MonsterVM, introduced last year with vSphere 5.0, seems to have been working out over the past year.  He’s back and bigger (see the photo to the right).  VMs can scale to 64 vCPU’s per and can handle over 1 million IOPS per VM.

In the networking space, VMware has made a number of enhancements to the vSphere Distributed Switch.  VMware has added network health check, configuration backup and restore, rollback and Link Aggregation Control Protocol support.  Chris Wahl of the Wahl Network has posted a deep dive of the new features in vSphere Distributed Switch for version 5.1.

In terms of storage, one of the stand-out new features is shared-nothing Storage vMotion – meaning that you can move VM’s between clusters that don’t share common storage with zero downtime.  This extends vMotion to direct attached storage and clusters with different SAN attached storage.

Another major new feature is the vSphere Web Client, enabling cross-browser administration of vSphere deployments in a capable web interface.  Not only is it full-featured and impressive-looking from demonstration, but it is extensible and will allow third-party plug-ins from partner companies to enable direct hardware and software management from within the vSphere (and vCloud Director) web interface.  CTO Steve Herrod said that the lines between vCloud Director and vCenter have begun to blur and this is a towards unification of those two management interfaces.  Single Sign-On has also been added to allow users to sign into the web client once and not be required to sign in, again, to additional components.  Orchestrator has also been integrated and can be launched directly from the web client.

For all the details of What’s New, see this guide from VMware.

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Virtualization

VMworld 2012 General Session Day 1

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Paul Martiz is about to take the stage this morning for his last time as CEO of VMware to address an eager audience of attendees for VMworld.  VMware is expected to announce changes to licensing models and possibly to product bundles as reported last week from CRN.  I’ll be live blogging updates beginning in about 10 minutes.

[liveblog]

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CloudVirtualization

On the ground at VMworld 2012

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

I’m on the ground now in San Francisco for VMworld 2012.  This will be an extremely busy week packed with sessions, meetings, keynotes and social meet-ups.  This year seems a little different already than years past that I have attended.  There is a lot less official pre-event news but a lot more rumors and speculation.  That causes me to believe that VMware has some pretty big news to share early this week.  The Solutions Exchange is back in full force this year after a couple of years of very scaled back

The week has already started out well, with an unexpected meet-up on my first flight of the morning that offered a chance to catch up with another techie I hadn’t seen in several years.  And it didn’t take long once I arrived in the city to find more of the friends I’ve made during the past several years.  It is great to catch up and see what they are doing, congratulate them on promotions and job changes and of course, talk tech.

But, I am coming to the event with a couple specific agendas — one is to nail down a short list of patch management solutions as I’m searching for a replacement for VMware Update Manager for guest OS patching.  I’m also looking to see what’s new in management software for vSphere and any new enhancements for the upcoming vSphere 5.1 release.  And last, I’m looking for good vendors solutions tailored for a smaller service provider.

I was fortunate to even be attending this year but thanks to free pass to the conference from a local friend and HP’s continued support in the way of accommodations and flights, I’m able to attend.  And, I’m going to capitalize on that luck for as much as I possibly can.

A screenshot of a computer Description automatically generated with medium confidence
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CloudComputeDatacenterSoftware

CloudSystem for Service Providers provides path for cloud brokers

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

I’ve posted before about my impressions of CloudSystem Service Provider, but it seems I had some facts wrong about the solution.  I’ve had a lot of exposure to the core CloudSystem solution from briefings and demonstrations from HP, but whenever discussed, it seems I missed a critical fact about the Service Provider offering.  HP is positioning CloudSystem Service Provider as a solution to assist smaller providers in offering third party cloud services and becoming a cloud broker for their existing customers.  I had wrongly assumed that like the other CloudSystem offerings, all of the cloud solutions would be housed in the same, local infrastructure.

CloudSystem Service Provider is really built around a concept that HP calls its Aggregation Platform for Software as a Service (or AP4SaaS).  The AP4SaaS allows the service provider to create a very customized portal experience for their customers where they can order cloud services hosted locally by the provider, hosted at a third party datacenter or even cloud services provided fully by third party cloud vendors, all while keeping the customer, their billing and relationship in-house.

It really introduces the concept of a cloud broker, a company who has expertise and knowledge to assist customers with cloud services without having all the cloud solutions in house.  It allows the broker to provide the best of breed cloud services to their customers by selecting the top-tier cloud providers as their backend partners.  It’s an interesting proposition for smaller, regional providers who cannot compete with the scale of an Amazon, Saavis or Terremark.  Its  the cloud version of VAR, where a provider packages their services and expertise with the product offering of their partner, and where the service provider retains the billing and customer service relationship with the end-user.

HP has worked with a set of SaaS providers to allow for API calls directly to them to provision and provide services for CloudSystem Service Provider.  These ties allow for a fully-integrated solution.  Within the portfolio of available SaaS solutions are video and web conferencing tools, project management tools, traditional Microsoft Sharepoint and Exchange hosted, and mobile device management tools.  It’s an impressive slate of solutions that can be provided quickly without any capital expense.

But in addition to the cloud services, CloudSystem at its core is an orchestration and automation solution that the Service Provider can use to host their own customized or local solutions where they make sense.  And like the other flavors of CloudSystem, the pre-defined Cloud Maps are really what help to drive repeatable, consistent deployments of any hosted software.  While I have been able to find some other software packages that assist a company in becoming a cloud broker, I have yet to see a fully integrated solution of infrastructure, orchestration and cloud brokering software in a single package or from a single vendor.  In that, HP is unique.

Here is a short video about CloudSystem Service Provider:

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Virtualization

VMware Update Manager downloads fail for Windows Updates

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Update: VMware has published a KB article related to this issue.  It is available at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2018897.

Several months ago, our VMware Update Manager simply stopped updating from its Shavlik repository.  It seemed to only affect Windows patches being downloaded and the VMware patches continued without any issues.  After a few months of troubleshooting with VMware support, a resolution was located and implemented in our environment and its a pretty simple solution.

Problem background

For a bit of background, the primary issue we noticed is that when trying to download updates from the repository, I received a generic error “Cannot download patch definitions” in the vCenter tasks.  After looking into it, I found that if I unchecked the Windows patch option in the Patch Download Settings section of Update Manager’s configuration tab, the error would not appear.  It was only when Windows patches were enabled that the error happened.

I uninstalled and reinstalled Update Manager against the same database and reinstalled a second time with a new database.  Neither of these steps fixed the problem and so I opened a case with VMware support.

With support, I began digging into the log files for Update Manager and found more details in the files.  We noticed the Update Manager would pull down a .cab file from the Shavlik servers.  After the successful download, Update Manager  immediately logged an error, “Error downloading new Windows updates: Cannot de-obfuscate Shavlik metadata file.”  Although the error gives a little more detail, it still wasn’t enough to point to a concrete cause.  It took VMware a couple of months, but finally, a simple solution was found.

The Solution

The issue is due to an untrusted certificate associated with the signed .cab file being downloaded.  Since the file is digitally signed, the untrusted certificate was causing the issue.  At some point earlier this year, the Shavlik Windows patches began using a new Verisign certificate that was not installed on my Windows Server 2008 server (not R2).  To fix the problem, follow these steps:

  1. Using Firefox (a VMware recommendation), download the following cabinet file: https://xml.shavlik.com/data/pd5.cab
  2. Right click the pd5.cab file and go to Properties.
  3. Go to the Digital Signatures tab, click on the name of the signer, which should be Shavlik Technologies, and click the Details button.
  4. The Digital Signature Details window will appear.  Click the View Certificate button.
  5. The Certificate window will appear.  Go to the Certification Path tab.  Go to the root Verisign certificate and make sure that the Certificate status says “This certificate is OK.”
  6. Click the certificate labeled “Verisign Class 3 Code Signing 2010 CA” and click View Certificate.  Ensure that this certificate is valid and trusted.  Click the Install Certificate button and the Certificate Import Wizard will appear.
  7. Click Next and choose the Place all certificates into the following store option.  Click Browse and select the Trusted Root Certification Authorities store.  Click Next and then click Finish.

At this point, the missing trusted CA certificate is installed and your download process should begin working again.  In my environment, Update Manager is running under original Windows Server 2008 version and not under the 2008 R2 version.   I suspect many people have vCenter and Update Manager running on Windows Server 2008 R2, which may not encounter this issue (I am not sure).   VMware Support indicated that a KB article will be published for this issue.  I will try to followup and link it once it is published.

 

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CloudComputeDatacenterSoftware

Finding the business case for cloud

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

I went to New York two weeks ago with a single cloud question still lingering in my head. What is the real technical advantages that are driving people towards cloud. Why is this something I should be considering or advocating at work?

Cloud is both a marketing term and a technical term that I am hearing from every vendor, in lots of variation. But as I posted earlier, I can’t see the clear cost savings or footprint reduction associated with cloud that we saw with virtualization. If anything, cloud seems to create new work for IT departments. So, why is this something to move forward with?

I believe I may have found an answer in New York at HP’s Pathways to Cloud event, an annual road show event to take the cloud message to HP’s customers, partners and employees around the country. Unlike other changes to the datacenter, it is business and not technological advances that is driving the adoption of cloud. (I had heard this before and obviously forgotten it.) Cloud is more agile, to borrow from the HP dictionary, meaning that the turn around necessary to deploy new solutions on the cloud is measured in hours rather than weeks with traditional IT and procurement. Business is now dictating quick turn around of the supporting services that they need to meet customer needs faster.

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