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VMworld 2014

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

by Philip Sellers August 28, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

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.

August 28, 2014 0 comments

vSphere users get just the beta this year at VMworld

by Philip Sellers August 27, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

VMworld has a bit disappointing for core vSphere users this year. Its the first VMworld since at least 2008 where a major release of vSphere wasn’t made during the show. This year, we all have to settle for the vSphere 6 beta which was already publicly available. No news on timelines or release datas for vSphere 6. That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of news on other horizons (pun intended) and initiatives from the company, but for core virtualization, not a lot has been discussed.

VMware did publicly discuss some of the features of the upcoming vSphere 6 release, something everyone who has participated in the beta was unable to do because of non-disclosure agreements. Here is a quick run-down of the features that were publicly discussed:

Compute > Multi-vCPU Fault Tolerance support
Network > vMotion Enhancements across virtual switches and vCenter instances & support for routed vMotion
Storage > Virtual Volumes (vVols) support for storage

vSphere 6 will be bringing a number of improvements in terms of scale and sizing that customers will appreciate. The specifics weren’t covered in the keynote and I have not seen them publicly discussed.

Compute > SMP-FT

vSphere 6 adds multi-vCPU support for Fault Tolerance (SMP-FT), extending this technology to a wider range of uses. Most mission critical apps where Fault Tolerance would likely be adopted were more than 1 vCPU, so this is welcome news for administrators. There are still some limits to the technology, SMP-FT will support up to 4 vCPU and 64GB of RAM. Users will be limited to 4 VM running SMP-FT or 8 total vCPU running SMP-FT. Your FT logging network is required to be 10Gig to support SMP-FT. Julian Wood has some additional details in his blog post on the topic.

Network > vMotion

vMotion gets a number of enhancements, all of which should allow for easier administration. The critical one from an administrator’s point of view is the cross-vSwitch and cross-vCenter vMotion. Much like the shared nothing Storage vMotion that was added in vSphere 5.5, the cross-vCenter vMotion will allow a Virtual Machine to hop port groups between virtual switches, changing assignments. Previously, administrators were limited to either Standard vSwitches with the same port group name in order to cross clusters with vMotion or they needed to extend their Distributed vSwitch across clusters. But crossing a vCenter server is an entirely new capability and this is clearly targeted at multi-site scenarios allowing administrators to move workloads without the requirements of stretching a distributed switch and vCenter across sites. Chris Wahl has an excellent blog post about the new vMotion capabilities.

Storage > vVols

The big, well-discussed feature being added is Virtual Volumes (vVols) support. vVols allows vSphere to talk directly against the storage and provision virtual machines natively, without the need for LUNs. Each virtual machine, natively provisions several files on the storage – one for config, one or more for data and then at boot, the expected RAM files and log files required. This allows the storage administrator to have a native, VMware object level view of the data and using native storage tools, better identify problems and bottlenecks by identifying individual VMs or VM disks instead of a noisy LUN.

If you are familiar with NFS storage vendor Tintri, the whole concept will sound really familiar. With a Tintri, you present one large NFS datastore and then provision VMs inside of it. The storage is VM aware and has a lot of additional performance metrics and management. It allows for things like quality of service at a VM level.

In the vSphere side, the vSphere Administrator is presented with a storage system and they provision against it rather than being presented a LUN and having to format and manage capacity with VMFS datastores and datastore clusters. From the storage administrators view point, instead of having 10 LUNs, they may now have 5 times as many objects within their views. This is where the storage vendor’s implementation becomes a critical point. The views and management consoles will have to adapt and change.

vVols also allows the vSphere administrator to wrap tagging and policy controls around storage. The concept that VMware introduced with the VSAN in vSphere 5.5, policy based storage allows for an abstraction from the array and LUN constructs to a needs-based construct for deploying VMs. What does that mean? Well, to deploy a virtual machine, the user had to make a choice of which datastore to deploy onto. With vSphere 5.5, policies and tagging could allow administrators to define a service profile or level of service abstraction from the physical storage devices and let the user choose options like a Platinum storage location for mission critical applications or a Bronze storage location for dev/test. Those tags and policies allow for the decisions where to place a VM in storage without having to know that Array X is the one the user should use.

In the meantime, all vSphere users will be waiting for the new release and finalization of capabilities. With SMP-FT and vVols, users have been waiting for VMware to deliver these features for a long time and their discussion during the keynote on Tuesday drew lots of applause.

August 27, 2014 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

HP shows off 3PAR 7200 All Flash starter kit, $35K price

by Philip Sellers August 27, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

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On Friday, HP announced the new HP 3PAR StoreServ 7200 All Flash array Starter Kit. HP is it off this week at VMworld in San Francisco. The new package is the dual-controller 3PAR StoreServ 7200 equipped with eight 480GB solid state drives, sports 75,000 IOPS of performance and has a street price of just $35,000.

The array has 3.5TB of raw storage and HP estimates that customers will see at least a 2:1 dedupe and thin provisioning savings on the array, yielding 7TB of usable storage. The Starter Kit uses the same 3PAR OS that is used across all of the HP 3PAR storage products. The drives are the same drives that HP introduced with the 3PAR StoreServ 7450 all flash array back in June at HP Discover, offering a price of $2 per GB for all flash. From a software standpoint, the Starter Kit offers the Reporting Suite, Virtual Copy, and three-year Proactive Care Support. Customers may optionally license additional software features including the Online Import feature which allows easy transition from HP EVA or from EMC VNX or CX arrays.

In its all-flash form, the array can scale up to 230TB of raw storage and HP estimates users will see around 690TB of usable storage out of the array. At full scale, it offers over 250,000 IOPS of performance.

It seems to be yet another step in mainstreaming solid state for primary storage, with HP lowering the barrier to entry even further with this all-flash offering. [As a side note, I did notice the configuration being show in San Francisco has 12 drives and not 8, but I didn’t ask about that.]

August 27, 2014 0 comments

Virtualization

VMware says vSphere + Docker is “Containers without Compromise”

by Philip Sellers August 27, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

During the day 2 keynote at VMworld, VMware CTO Ben Fathi and Raghu Raghuram, the general manage of SDDC for VMware, discussed integrations between VMware’s software and OpenStack and Docker. In particular, they talked at length about Docker’s Container software and positioned it as a complimentary and not a competitive technology, calling vSphere and Docker together a way to run “Containers without Compromise.”

I do infrastructure, why should I care?

If you’re an infrastructure focused person, before you close and dismiss this post, there’s a reason why a sys admin is writing about this. I remember several years ago, Paul Martiz spent a lot of time during VMworld discussing Spring and development software. Frankly, it didn’t resonate with the crowd filled mostly with administrators and infrastructure focused professionals. So, why should infrastructure professionals care about these new API integrations with Docker? Because Docker has the disrupt the way you administer the infrastructure and security that you are responsible for.

As an administrator, you require certain tools in order to ensure compliance and stability for the applications your infrastructure enables. In the same way that vSphere changed and helped you do you job, Docker promises the same for developers. Extending support for Docker running on vSphere is the best of both worlds. Your developers get what they want or need and you get what you require to do your job best.

What do developers want?

For many developers, there is increasing interest in technologies like Docker’s Containers as an enablement software for cloud and service applications. I’m hearing it from some of the developers I work with. While VMware has been enormously strong with traditional applications (client/server), cloud applications are built in a fundamentally different way, utilizing small services and instances across many hosts to form an application. Since there are many instances, it can be a lot of small instances to manage. These small services don’t require an entire operating system to function and Containers allows for the base OS to be shared with many isolated containers running application services. While the concept is form of virtualization, it doesn’t offer many of the features that vSphere offers, like portability between hosts and recovery from hardware failure.

What’s more, Docker is more than just partitioning a Linux machine. Docker is an orchestration and packaging layer for the application. This type of enablement software is critical to deploying applications at cloud scale and Docker has developed an elegant and useful orchestration layer around its containers. It eases the issues that developers face with configuring application software on every instance or server that they run, with updating and deploying the application across multiple instances. Docker delivers on the write once and run anywhere concept.

Best of Both Worlds

The point is that vSphere VM’s bring isolation, security and compliance to the table and Docker doesn’t address these directly. However, Docker hits a major use and need of application packaging and deployment for developers. Marry the two together and you have a great solution that hits IT administration’s need for compliance and security and developers needs for deploying applications. While you can run Docker on physical hardware, I along with many other administrators would be very reluctant to go back to managing physical hardware. vSphere brought massive amounts of consolidation and ease of management that administrators would be reluctant to give up, particularly in small to medium businesses. Bringing in new technologies like NSX can also offer powerful, policy based network compliance that hasn’t previously been available in a physical or virtual environment. vSphere also brought a lot of operational advantages, in higher density, better power utilization, reduction in space and cooling needs.

I remember when the light bulb went off for me about cloud applications and the fundamental differences between them and the traditional applications vSphere virtualized in the past. Cloud applications require completely new architecture, new code, and orchestration. The power of the cloud is all about repeatability, distribution of load, replication of data, and scale. The orchestration and deployment layer is critical in this model but has a promise of easy of management, security and compliance for distributed applications. Docker seems like a great solution for this real problem. And, every software requires patching to stay secure, so a solid orchestration and deployment framework is critical when you begin to scale out applications.

VMware goes on to tout all of the extensibility of vCloud Suite, the hybrid cloud and its vCloud Air service as advantages offering portability of Docker enabled applications wherever the customer wants.

Kit Colbert posted a great blog “Containers without Compromise” on the VMware CTO Blog site with a lot of additional detail.

August 27, 2014 0 comments