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DatacenterVirtualization

An easy fix for vSphere 6.5, web client and certificates to keep your uploads flowing

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

An upgrade vSphere 6.5 means no more beloved Windows/C# vSphere Client and loads of people are being forced to the web client.  With the web client, certificates play a much more important role in the overall design and untrusted certificate on your vCenter and ESXi hosts will plague you when trying to deploy new VMs, import OVF’s and other upload situations.  This is because those uploads talk directly to the ESXi host, so even if you’ve accepted the certificate for the vCenter and you’re uploading from vCenter, the upload itself occurs between your machine and the ESXi, whose certificate is also untrusted.

The fix is fairly simple.  At vSphere 6.0, VMware introduced the VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA) as part of the Platform Services Controller component of vCenter.  The VMCA has its own root certificate that is used to issue all host and service certificates in the environment.  If your computer trusts the root certificate, you trust all of the issued certificates from this CA.   The solution is to download and import the root certificate from your VMCA.

To do this, navigate to your vCenter’s web UI.  Accept the untrusted certificate when prompted and then the Getting Started page is displayed.  On the lower right side of the page, there is a link to download the trusted root CA certificates.  

This will begin a download for a zip file.   In vCenter 6.5, the zip file is organized with a certs subfolder, then subfolders by operating system.  Navigate to your OS folder.  In simple deployments, a single certificate will be inside of the zip file along with a .crl file or files.

For Windows, double click the .CRT file and a properties window appears.  Click Install Certificate…  then choose Local Machine & Next, allow the UAC if prompted, choose the Place all certificates in the following store and then click Browse…

In the window that appears, choose Tursted Root Certificate Authorities as the certificate store, then click OK.  Click Next and Finish to complete the process.

A reboot may be required to activate the change, but afterwards, the pesky untrusted certificate warnings will be gone.

While at VMworld this year, I attended a great session from Adam Eckerle about certificate management in vSphere 6.5.  He recommended this method, as opposed to making your VMCA a subordinate CA.  Its not the first time he’s presented this information – if you’re interested, you can see the presentation from VMworld 2016 posted online for free.  The 2017 session with info about 6.5 should be posted later.

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News

Kingston – NVMe Overview at VMworld 2017 – Tech Field Day Extra.

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

Today I’m at Tech Field Day Extra at VMword. I had the chance to sit in on a presentation by Kingston.

Overview of NVMe by @kingstontech at #TFDx #VMworld #vmworld2017 ‬

 

Kingston has developed and released a couple NVMe products with a read focus. Below are the slides highlighting the products.

Kc1000 card

DCP1000 SSD Datasheet.

 

These products are focused on Read Intensive use cases like VDI.

 

Below are the Slides from the Presentation. Edit : Updated Slides. Videos are below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kingston can be found on:
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/kingstontechmemory
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/kingstontechnology
Twitter: https://twitter.com/KingstonTech
Instagram: https://instagram.com/kingstontechnology/
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/kingston

 

Thanks

 

Roger Lund

 

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VirtualizationVMworld

VMworld 2015 Sponsors – Zerto and Opvizor

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

The final 2 sponsors for vBrainstorm at VMworld 2015 are Zerto and Opvizor!

First up is Zerto!  Zerto says it best with this excerpt from their web site:

Zerto provides enterprise-class business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions for virtualized IT infrastructure & cloud.

They not only provide your typical backup of VMs but also virtual replication of VMs to a remote location.  vSphere, Hyper-V and even Amazon Web Services (AWS) is supported by Zerto.  Visit their web site for videos and customer testimonials.

So what is Zerto doing at VMworld?  Zerto is famous at VMworld for “Red Wednesday”!  This is the day that you wear your Zerto Red T-Shirt that you get at their booth to win some great prizes!  I was fortunate enough one year to win some Beats headphones from Zerto.  It is as simple as their prize team spotting you around VMworld and choosing you for a prize!  It really is that simple.  Zerto is also throwing a party and I am super excited about this one.  The are going to have an all female Queen cover band called “Killer Queens”!  I cannot wait to hear some of that!

You can find Zerto at booth #623.  You can also read more about what Zerto has in store at VMworld at http://www.zerto.com/zerto-at-vmworld-2015/.

Finally our final sponsor is Opvizor!  Opvizor provides solutions to monitor the health of your VMware environment as well as monitoring VM snapshots in your environment.  Opvizor says this statement about their solution on their web site:

With Opvizor you control everything you love about VMware, and Opvizor automates all the rest

Opvizor’s Health Analyzer solution analyzes your VMware infrastructure, offer resolutions, provide reporting and help you optimize virtual applications!  Opvizor’s Snapwatcher solution monitors VMware snapshots across vCenter systems, tracks the snapshots, finds invalid snapshots and helps free wasted disk space by fixing broken, old and invalid snapshots.

Opvizor is not going to be at VMworld this year so I highly encourage you to visit the web site for more information: https://www.opvizor.com/

Look for myself (rolltidega), Roger (rogerlund) and Aaron (virtualroads) wearing the shirt below around VMworld!  We can help you find Zerto’s booth on the show floor!  Hope to see you there!

ZertoOp

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DatacenterStorage

HP introduces new 3PAR StoreServ 8000 series arrays for the midrange

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

HP 3PAR 8000 SeriesAfter almost a 3 year run, HP is replacing the 3PAR StoreServ 7000 series with all new 3PAR StoreSev 8000 series arrays.  This news comes while HP is celebrating how well its mid-range 3PAR arrays have been selling versus competitors. The new arrays features upgraded hardware including 16-gigabit fibre channel and 12-gigabit SAS connectivity for its drives and will feature the same fifth-generation ASIC that were introduced in the 20000 series arrays earlier this year.  The 8000 series also increases the density of storage possible across the board in the 3PAR arrays, reducing the footprint and increasing the top-end capacities.

In terms of portfolio, HP touts a single architecture, single OS and single management across a wide range of solutions with the HP 3PAR.  With the 8000 series introduction, the difference between 3PAR models comes down to the number of controller nodes and associated ports, the types of drives in the array and the number of ASICs in the controllers.  The 8000 series features a single ASIC per controller node and the 20000 series features 2 ASICs per controller node along with more CPU capacity and more RAM for caching.

Both the 8000 and 20000 series arrays feature the 3PAR Gen5 ASIC, which is the latest generation introduced earlier in 2015.  If history repeats, additional capabilities of the Gen5 ASIC will get unlocked by future software upgrades on these two new series of arrays, but out of the gate, the new platforms are already touting density and performance gains in the new platforms.  HP says that they have increased density by 4x, performance 30 to 40 percent and decreased latency by 40 percent between the 7000 and 8000 series arrays.  HP says the 8000 series can provide up to 1 million IOPS at 0.387 ms latency.

HP also announced a new 20450 all-flash starter kit.  This model scales to a maximum of 4 controller nodes as opposed to 8 controller nodes in the 20800 and 20850 models. The 20000 series are the high-end storage arrays HP introduced earlier this year to replace the 10000 series arrays, and are typically targeted at large enterprise and service providers.

That rounds out the HP 3PAR portfolio with the following models:

  • HP 3PAR StoreServ 8200 is the low-end dual-controller model that scales up to 750TB of raw capacity
  • HP 3PAR StoreServ 8400 scales up to 4 controller nodes and is capable of scaling out to 2.4PB of raw capacity
  • HP 3PAR StoreServ 8440 is the converged flash array that provides similiar high performance to an 8450 array, but with the ability to also have spinning disks.  It scales up to 4 controller nodes and includes an increased amount of cache on the controller pairs, comparable to the cache on node with an all-flash array.
  • HP 3PAR StoreServ 8450 is the all-flash storage array scales up to 4 controller nodes and up to 1.8PB of raw capacity and a usable capacity over 5.5PB.  This is the model HP talks about when it says 1 million IOPS at under 1 ms of latency.
  • HP 3PAR StoreServ 20450, a quad-controller, all-flash configuration with larger scale than the 3PAR 8450
  • HP 3PAR StoreServ 20800, the workhorse array with up to 8 controller nodes and a mix of hard disk and solid state drives.
  • HP 3PAR StoreServ 20850, the all-flash configuration of the 20000 series.

3PAR8000-1-1024x441

HP announced the new 8450 all-flash array is available in 2U starter kit priced at just $19,000 for 6TB of usable storage.  When HP talks about usable storage and the all-flash array, it assumes a 4 to 1 compaction using its thin-provisioning and thin-deduplication – both native, realtime capabilities powered by the ASIC.  The same array can also be configured with up to 280TB of usable capacity in just 2U of space.

All this news comes just in time for VMworld, where HP is going to be showing the new arrays publicly for the first time.  I look forward to checking them out on the show floor and talking with some HP folks to find out more.

 

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DatacenterStorageVMwareVMworld

Early peak at the #vBrownBag TechTalks Schedule at VMworld US 2015

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

The professionalvmware.com site, the home of the #vBrownBag goodness, has posted an early look at the schedule for the #vBrownBag TechTalks in the hang space at VMworld US 2015.  I wanted to re-post the schedule here to increase awareness of these talks.  If you are going to hang out in the hang space, please come and support this individuals!
(Note:  Info shared from http://professionalvmware.com/2015/08/vbrownbag-techtalks-schedule-vmworld-usa-2015/)

Time   Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday
10:30 vExpert Daily vExpert Daily vExpert Daily vExpert Daily
11:00 Edward Haletky @Texiwill 6-Step Program for Hybrid Cloud Edward Haletky @Texiwill Let’s Throw in Some Security: A hybrid
Cloud Security Model		 Virtualization Practise Panel Chris Wahl -Scripting and Versioning with PowerShell ISE and Git Shell
11:15 Irfan Ahmad – CloudPhysics – The Unofficial VCDX Toolchest Irfan Ahmad – CloudPhysics – Help! My Dashboards Suck! continued Vaughn Stewart – Run 20% – 40% more VMs per host with Flash Storage
11:30 Michael White – Spotlight on Your Data Kenneth Hui -The Easy Button For Turning Your vSphere Environment Into A Private Cloud Gabriel Chapman – Solidfire – Infrastructure Agility in the Software Defined Data Center Josh Atwell – DevOps with PowerCLI and PowerShell DSC
11:45 Andy Warfield – Coho Data Andy Warfield – Coho Data continued Cody Hosterman – Space Reclamation in vSphere 6
12:00 VMUG LATAM Panel (Spanish) Anthony Spiteri – NSX – An Unexpected Journey VMware Communities Podcast Eric Wright – Getting to the Core with CoreOS
12:15 continued Ken Thomas -One Solution for All: Deploy to VMs and Physical using MDT continued James Brown -Virtual Design Master
12:30 Dave LeClair – Unitrends – Recover Simplicity! Dave LeClair – Unitrends – Is your data protection and DR solution built for a cloud-driven world? continued continued
12:45 Joseph Griffiths – Reference Architecture for Automation Luis Concistre – Horizon View & VMware NSX continued Tim Carr – Versioning deployments with Puppet, R10K, and Git
13:00  Kevin Moats – GPU virtualization in the home lab HP Blogger Briefing Dave Frederick – The Advantages of a Tiered Approach to VM Storage Steve Flanders – The importance of customer experience
13:15 Gina Rosenthal (Minks) – Why you need to #BackThatSaaSUp continued Gabriel Maciel – VMware NSX Architecture and Components Interaction
13:30 Scott Davis – Infinio – Disruptive Storage Innovations and the Impact on Virtual Desktop Solutions continued vBrownBag LATAM Panel (Spanish)
13:45 Scott Davis – cont continued continued
14:00 Jaison Bailley and the vBrisket community continued Paul Braren – Home Virtualization Lab Productivity Tips Hang Space Closed
14:15 Luke Brown – Dinosaurs Didn’t Do DR continued Anthony Chow – Micro-Segmentation – a perfect fit for microservices security
14:30 Craig Waters – Anatomy of an SSD Craig Waters  – How to start a user group (BYOUG) Shruti Bhat – Liuve demo – Running your ESXi workloads in AWS
14:45 Jonathan Frappier and Tim Jabaut – Stop being an “Admin” and learn to embrace “DevOps” Edward Haletky @Texiwill – Proper Use of RBAC to Secure your Virtual Environment John Arrasjid – IT Architect: Foundation in the Art of IT Infrastructure Design
15:00 In Tech We Trust Podcast Speaking in Tech Podcast Geek Whisperers Podcast
15:15 continued continued continued
15:30 continued continued continued
15:45 continued continued continued
16:00 Dennis Bray and Chip Copper – Brocade – NSX based Advanced Network Architecture in SDDC to deploy highly automated IT Service Delivery Elver Sena Sosa and Anuj Dewangan – Brocade -Scaling your cloud network: Building a massively scalable cloud infrastructure with VMware NSX & advanced physical network architectures Tony Foster – Sizing for GPU Workloads
16:15 David Siles – Proactive Data-Awareness Inside Your VMs David Klebanov – SDDC Gone Global with Software Defined WAN Brian Trainor – Automatic” remediation with vRealize Operations
16:30 Michaell Rice – Rackspace – Stop testing scripts in production; Meet vCenter Simulator Luke Huckaba – Rackspace – A distilled version of the SRM talk David Klee – SQL Server Virtualization Gotchya’s
16:45 Michael Rice – Introduction to pyVmomi Michael Rice – YAVIJAVA an alternative Java SDK for vSphere Michael Rice – vCenter Simulator For Functional Testing
17:00 Hersey Cartwright – Using PowerCLI to manage SSH on ESXi Hersey Cartwright – Managing vCenter Roles and Permissions with PowerCLI Hang Space closed
17:15 Eric Wright – Abstract all the things! Simplifying the whole stack James Green, Emad Younis – ”Batman” is Not A Career Strategy
17:30 Cisco Panel Nigel Hickey – The #vExpertSpotlight
17:45  continued Steve Flanders – Quality log messages and how to write them  
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DatacenterNewsStorageTech Field Day

I’m a Delegate at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2015

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

I’m excited to announce that I am a Delegate for Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2015

I will be on Monday’s Delegate Panel.

 

What is Tech Field Day?

 

”

http://techfieldday.com/about/

Our Field Day events bring together innovative IT product vendors and independent thought leaders to share information and opinions in a presentation and discussion format. Independent bloggers, speakers, freelance writers, and podcasters have a public presence that has immense influence on the ways that products and companies are perceived and by IT practitioners. The world of media has changed, with social media and blogging gaining special importance. Our Field Day is an opportunity for tech companies and independent writers to meet, update and discuss products and form new communications.

We provide a valuable forum for engagement, education, hands-on experience, and feedback for vendors. And the attendees get access to the best information, high quality resources that lead to informed, more nuanced discussion about the marketplace.

I have been lucky to been a part of Tech Field Day for a couple years, and find it an increasingly valuable event to be part of.

Below is the Agenda for Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2015

Below Content is from http://techfieldday.com/event/evmwu15/

“

TFD Extra VMworld-300
Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2015 August 31–3, 2015
Who: Virtualization
What: Extra		 When: Future
Where: San Francisco

 

“For Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2015, we will have three different delegate panels, one per day.

Monday Tuesday Wednesday

Delegates

Delegates are selected by the Field Day Delegate community. For more information on our selection process, please see our page about becoming a Field Day Delegate.

Alastair Cooke @DemitasseNZ
Trainer, Writer, Consultant, Geek. From New Zealand.
Amit Panchal @AmitPanchal76
Technical IT Manager and blogger at apanchal.com.
Amy Manley @WyrdGirl
12 years in IT, vExpert and an automation junkie
Andrew Mauro @Andrea_Mauro
IT Architect with focus on virtualization, cloud and storage
Chris M Evans @ChrisMEvans
Chris is a UK-based consultant with an interest in all technologies, focusing on storage, virtualisation and cloud.
Christopher Kusek @cxi
CTO at @Xiologix – EVP of Engineering, Technology Evangelist, vExpert, EMC Elect, BDA, CISSP, MCT, Cloud, Ninja, Vegan, Single, Father, Cat, Humorist, Author
David Davis @DavidMDavis
David Davis is a well-known author, speaker, and trainer covering datacenter technologies.
Enrico Signoretti @ESignoretti
An IT consultant, entrepreneur and passionate blogger at juku.it (not necessarily in that order).
Eric Shanks @Eric_Shanks
Independent Blogger for theITHollow.com, technical consultant, and Chicago VMUG Leader.
Howard Marks @DeepStorageNet
Storage Analyst Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
Joep Piscaer @JPiscaer
Joep Piscaer is an IT architect at OGD ict-diensten, VMware VCDX #101, vExpert 2009, 2011 – 2013, member of the NL VMUG Customer Council and actively involved in the international VMware community. He writes on his blog, VirtualLifestyle.nl.
Keith Townsend @CTOAdvisor
Keith Townsend is the founder of Virtualizedgeek.com and is an IT management consultant with more than 15 years of related experience.
Larry Smith @MrLESmithJr
19 yrs. in IT | 11 yrs. VMware virtualization | VMware NSX Nut
Marco Broeken @MBroeken
Dutch Virtualization Admirer and DaaS Lover, Blogger at www.vClouds.nl
Mark May @CincyStorage
Storage expert, unix curmudgeon, IT nerd, and sporadic blogger
Matthew Leib @MBLeib
Phoummala Schmitt @PhoummalaSchmit
Just trying to survive in IT as a (woman) Sr. Systems Engineer with a focus on Messaging , Virtualization, Storage.
Roger Lund @RogerLund
Roger evangelizes virtualization by night, and is a Sr. System Administration for a call center in the
day.
Scott D. Lowe @OtherScottLowe
Scott D. Lowe is an independent consultant, blogger, and author focusing on issues that affect the CIO and on the virtualization and storage markets.
Shane Williford @coolsport00
Stephen Beaver @SBeaver
Stephen Beaver is the co-author of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center and Scripting VMware Power Tools: Automating Virtual Infrastructure Administration.
Theresa Miller @24x7ITConnect
Citrix Technology Professional (CTP), MBA and Microsoft Exchange geek. Enjoying blogging and technical speaking.

“

That’s an impressive list of delegates!

”

Presentation Calendar

Most presentations are streamed live on this page, at TechFieldDay.com, and at some delegate and presenter web sites. After the event, the following pages contain video recordings of these presentations.

August 31, 2015 12:00-13:00 Data Gravity Presents at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2015
Delegate Panel: Amit Panchal, Enrico Signoretti, Larry Smith, Marco Broeken, Mark May,Matthew Leib, Roger Lund, Scott D. Lowe
September 2, 2015 14:30-15:30 Datto Presents at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2015
Delegate Panel: Alastair Cooke, Andrew Mauro, Chris Evans, Christopher Kusek, Enrico Signoretti, Keith Townsend, Marco Broeken, Theresa Miller
August 31, 2015 13:30-14:30 Platform9 Presents at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2015
Delegate Panel: Amit Panchal, Enrico Signoretti, Larry Smith, Marco Broeken, Mark May,Matthew Leib, Roger Lund, Scott D. Lowe
August 31, 2015 15:00-16:00 Cirba Presents at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2015
Delegate Panel: Amit Panchal, Enrico Signoretti, Larry Smith, Marco Broeken, Mark May,Matthew Leib, Roger Lund, Scott D. Lowe
August 31, 2015 16:30-17:30 Velostrata Presents at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2015
Delegate Panel: Amit Panchal, Enrico Signoretti, Larry Smith, Marco Broeken, Mark May,Matthew Leib, Roger Lund, Scott D. Lowe
September 1, 2015 12:30-13:30 Primary Data Presents at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2015
Delegate Panel: David Davis, Howard Marks, Joep Piscaer, Justin Warren, Phoummala Schmitt, Shane Williford, Stephen Beaver, Theresa Miller
September 1, 2015 15:30-16:30 SanDisk Presents at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2015
Delegate Panel: David Davis, Howard Marks, Joep Piscaer, Justin Warren, Phoummala Schmitt, Shane Williford, Stephen Beaver, Theresa Miller
September 1, 2015 17:00-18:00 Reduxio Presents at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2015
Delegate Panel: David Davis, Howard Marks, Joep Piscaer, Justin Warren, Phoummala Schmitt, Shane Williford, Stephen Beaver, Theresa Miller
September 2, 2015 13:00-14:00 Violin Memory Presents at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2015
Delegate Panel: Alastair Cooke, Andrew Mauro, Chris Evans, Christopher Kusek, Enrico Signoretti, Keith Townsend, Marco Broeken, Theresa Miller

”

 

I’m looking forward to it! And you can look forward to me having some upcoming posts from me on the presenting companies.

Roger L

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ComputeDatacenterSoftwareStorageVirtualization

HP announces Hyper-Converged Systems based on StoreVirtual VSA

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

HP unveiled the HP Converged System 200-HC StoreVirtual based on HP ProLiant SL2500 series of scalable computing servers and the HP StoreVirtual VSA today at VMworld in Barcelona.  The CS 200-HC StoreVirtual features VMware vSphere 5, the HP StoreVirtual VSA, and HP OneView for management.  The CS 200-HC StoreVirtual line comes in two different models – one with all SAS for higher capacity and one with a mix of SSD and SAS drives for better performance.

Four nodes of compute fit into just 2U of rack space, with shared redundant power for the unit.  From a physical size standpoint, these nodes fit somewhere between a Moonshot card and a BladeSystem blade in terms of sizing.  While they more closely resemble a blade, there is no shared interconnect back-plane.  Each node comes with dedicated 10Gb Ethernet and 1Gb Ethernet network ports and has 6 dedicated disks.

A new addition to the software mix for the Converged System 200-HC line is HP OneView InstantOn  – a streamlined deployment utility that lets customers spin up vSphere with StoreVirtual VSA in a matter of minutes.  According to HP, all that a customer needs to provide is IP addresses and basic license information in order to have a fully working system delivered directly from the factory.

CS 200-HC

A comparison of the hardware configuration shows just a few differences between the two initial StoreVirtual models:

CS 240-HC StoreVirtual System

  • 4 nodes, each with
  • 2 sockets, 8 cores each socket at 2.0Ghz
  • 128GB of RAM each node
  • 2 x 10GbE and 2 x 1GbE NICs per node
  • 6 x 1.2TB SAS SFF drives per node

CS 242-HC StoreVirtual System

  • 4 nodes, each with
  • 2 sockets, 10 cores each socket at 2.8GHz
  • 256GB of RAM each node
  • 2 x 10GbE and 2 x 1GbE NICs per node
  • 4 x 1.2TB SAS SFF drives per node
  • 2 x 400GB SSDs per node

In terms of scale, up to 8 of the CS 240-HC line units can be coupled together to form up to 32-node clusters and not all of those nodes need to be in a single site because of StoreVirtual’s native replication and multi-site capabilities.

StoreVirtual VSA features Autonomic Optimization, a fancy name for storage sub-lun tiering that the CS 242-HC StoreVirtual is using.  This allows for more often accessed blocks of data to be moved from SAS onto SSD and less used to be moved from SSD down to SAS yeilding greater performance from the storage subsystem.  StoreVirtual also provides a wide range of interoperability options for customers who have already invested in dedicated StoreVirtual 4000 hardware solutions or who have existing StoreVirtual VSA deployments.  In addition, native replication is available to any other StoreVirtual, regardless of form factor, and StoreVirtual offers support for vSphere Metro Storage Clusters, offering the ability to create multi-datacenter replication solutions around the technology.  Beyond native replication, HP StoreVirtual also includes Peer Motion capabilities to allow movement of data from one StoreVirtual environment to another for easy migration.

The advantage to moving to a Converged System solution, according to HP, is easier management and a better support experience for the solution.  The solution is tested and supported together as a package, offering customers a single point of contact for their support.  The firmware, drivers and software are all tested together and the will receive recipe updates so that known good combinations of the software can be run on the platform.

Choice is always at the forefront of HP’s strategy for customers and the hyper-converged system announcement is no different.  The HP Converged System 200-HC models are available in both a StoreVirtual VSA and EVO:RAIL configuration.  The primary difference between the two configuration is the virtual storage appliance, with the EVO:RAIL configuration coming with VMware’s vSAN, though I cannot find any specifics of the EVO:RAIL hardware configuration at this time.

When I was in Houston, TX, for a Converged Systems Tech Day last month, HP staff talked with me about the overall Converged System strategy and there were several key points to the overall strategy.  With all Converged Systems, there is an accelerated deployment timeline with the solution.  Since it has been tested and integrated, the product should deploy quickly so that customers realize faster time to value.  The second point is easy procurement, with a single SKU for the entire solution.  The single SKU also provides single solution support, with a specialized team that supports the entire solution rather than the individual components.  Customers who have built their own solutions from ProLiant and HP Storage have probably experienced the piece-meal support experience, even while in a single vendor. HP’s Converged Systems eliminates that problem by sending all support to a dedicated support team to team to troubleshoot problems and that team understands the entire solution, not just an individual component.

The new Converged System 200-HC StoreVirtual models will be available for purchase in December.  The Converged System 200-HC EVO:RAIL configuration will be available first quarter of 2015.

For more information, check out Around the Storage Block post and video on the CS 200-HC StoreVirtual solution and go to www.hp.com/go/hyper-converge.

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DatacenterStorage

HP readies 3PAR StoreServ with vVol support ahead of vSphere 6

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

3par_array

HP says that they are ready and waiting with Virtual Volume (vVol) support on the 3PAR StoreServ platform when VMware releases vSphere 6.  One of the most discussed topics in storage at VMworld is vVol support and HP says that they have been working with VMware since the pre-acquisition days of 3PAR to implement and support vVols on the platform.  The HP 3PAR StoreServ has also the test architecture for fiber channel with vVols for VMware.

I was able to get a demo of the support at the HP booth during VMworld this week.  The vVol objects look a lot like standard 3PAR Virtual Volumes (VV’s) on the platform.  The two technologies share the same name, which could lead to some confusion, but they do act differently.  vVols create the individual VM objects against the 3PAR system utilizing the Common Provisioning Group (CPG) as the object that they create into.  3PAR VV’s are the traditional LUNs that get provisioned from the pool of disks and are also carved out of a CPG.

From 3PAR CLI, the vVol support on 3PAR looks a lot like standard 3PAR VV’s on the platform.  The thing that becomes clear is that vVols will create exponentially more objects on the 3PAR for the storage administrator to manage against.  Today, within a single 3PAR VV (LUN), you may have 10 or 12 virtual machines.  The storage administrator’s view is a single object, the VV.

This pivots with vVols where the VM provisioning in vSphere creates 2 objects on the 3PAR, a Config- and a Data- object.  In addition, at least 5 objects for a running VM are active on the 3PAR, potentially increasing the number of objects in the storage admin’s view 50x or more. Adding an additional problem, the naming is generated with the Config- and Data- prefix along with a identifier string which may make correlation difficult.   HP is working to ease the management headaches that a potential 50x increase in objects to manage.

3PAR has implemented separate commands in the 3PAR CLI to handle vVols, using things like showvvol instead of showvv administrators currently use.  What’s more, its not an all or nothing choice.  vVols and normal 3PAR VV’s can coexist on the same array and in the same vSphere hosts. Even while the object count increases in the 3PAR console, the usable information also increases.  Since the objects correspond to an individual VM, its easier to use 3PAR’s reporting and CLI to pinpoint performance issues and address them.  vVols also unlock native array capabilities at the VM level, like performing array based snapshots on an individual VM instead of an entire LUN all from the normal workflow and interface of the vSphere client.

vVols support relies on VMware API’s for Storage Awareness (VASA) providers to communicate between vSphere and the storage arrays.  According to a presentation by Ivan Iannaccone (@IvanIannaccone), HP has put their VASA providers directly onto the 3PAR controllers, meaning that customers will not need an additional layer of software located outside of the array to enable vVol support.

I asked a couple HP folks about replication and vVols and at this point, it is not present in the vSphere implementation.  HP says 3PAR is ready to handle replication with vVols since they are basically the same as LUN virtual volumes on the platform, but it will need VMware to deliver support in vSphere first.  That also means users with Peer Persistence configurations cannot benefit from vVols until a later time.

To find out more and see vVols on 3PAR in action, check out this older video that Calvin Zito, @HPStorageGuy, posted back in 2012 showing of vVol on 3PAR.  In the video, Calvin focuses on the 3PAR InServ Management Console (IMC) to show the virtual volumes.  The demo I saw focused on the 3PAR CLI, but you will get the idea.

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