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DatacenterStorageVirtualization

vSphere users get just the beta this year at VMworld

by Philip Sellers
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.

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DatacenterStorage

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

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

photo (2)

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.]

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Virtualization

VMware says vSphere + Docker is “Containers without Compromise”

by Philip Sellers
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.

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DatacenterNewsStorage

See the data, not just the storage with DataGravity

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

DataGravity @DataGravityInc has revealed what the announced secret gravity sauce is all about. Be sure to check out the press release ” DataGravity Unveils Industry’s First Data-Aware Storage Platform”

“NASHUA, N.H., August 19, 2014 – DataGravity today announced the launch of the DataGravity Discovery Series, the first ever data-aware storage platform that tracks data access and analyzes data as it is stored to provide greater visibility, insight and value from a company’s information assets. The DataGravity Discovery Series delivers storage, protection, data governance, search and discovery powered by an enterprise-grade hardware platform and patent-pending software architecture, enabling midmarket companies to glean new insights and make better business decisions.”

We often see new storage Array’s, with a impressive list of new features. Lets see how this stacks up.

From http://datagravity.com/sites/default/files/resource-files/DataGravity-DiscoverySeries-Datasheet-081714.pdf copyright Datagravity

Looks fairly standard, a nice sharp looking box. But what makes this unique?

Why the fuss? why do we care what is on our storage? With the increasing costs of data, many are looking to what what is taking the space, and using the disk.

“The unstructured data dilemma is growing, and IDC has been predicting technology would catch up to provide an answer to the market demand,” said Laura Dubois, program vice president of storage at IDC. “The DataGravity approach is transformational in an industry where innovation has been mostly incremental. DataGravity data-aware storage can tell you about the data it’s holding, making the embedded value of stored information accessible to customers who cannot otherwise support the cost and complexity of solutions available today.”

Source http://datagravity.com/datagravity-unveils-first-data-aware-storage

“The Digital Universe in 2020″ report, IDC estimates that the overall volume of digital bits created, replicated, and consumed across the United States will hit 6.6 zettabytes by 2020. That represents a doubling of volume about every three years. For those not up on their Greek numerical prefixes, a zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes, or just over 25 billion 4-TB drives.” Source http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage/2014-state-of-storage-cost-worries-grow/a/d-id/1113476

Today companies often lavage things like Hadoop, EMC ESA or new offerings like CloudPhysics to learn what people are using storage for in their environment, or to get data out of the system.

This becomes more complex with Big Data

That’s all great, but how does DataGravity change things?

From http://datagravity.com/sites/default/files/resource-files/DataGravity-DiscoverySeries-Datasheet-081714.pdf copyright DataGravity

DataGravity Discovery Series Demo: End user role-based access

DataGravity Discovery Series Demo: Analyze your file shares

DataGravity Discovery Series Demo: Find Experts and Collaborators

Great, I See some neat features. But what about standard storage features, like data protection? And Data Protection?

DataGravity Discovery Series Demo: Preview, download and restore files

DataGravity Discovery Series Demo: Provision and protect your storage

I’m excited to see this at VMworld. VMworld attendees can see it in action at the DataGravity booth, #1647, August 24 through 28 in San Francisco.

I will be attending VMworld, and Tech Field Day. Make sure to check back to the DataGravity page. http://techfieldday.com/appearance/datagravity-presents-at-tech-field-day-extra-at-vmworld-us-2014/

Lets check out what others are saying about DataGravity

DataGravity – First Look

“Perhaps you’ve heard of DataGravity (@DataGravityInc), or perhaps you haven’t. They’ve been staying pretty quiet about what they’ve been working on. Today, however, they’re dropping the veil. Read on for a look into what you can expect from this exciting announcement!”

by James Green

Why is DataGravity Such a Big Deal?

“DataGravity just released their embargo and my little techie corner of the Internet is on fire. There’s a very good reason for that, but it might not be obvious at a glance. Read on to learn why DataGravity is a Big Deal even though it might not work out.”

by Stephen Foskett

Make sure to check the full articles out.

I hope you enjoyed the write up.

Roger Lund

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DatacenterStorageVirtualization

VMware releases VSAN and the power of policies

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers
vsan

VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN)
Diagram by VMware

VMware is pushing back on storage vendors as it seeks to show the world the full power of software-defined storage.  A couple weeks ago, VMware announced the VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN), a new software-defined storage platform tightly coupled with vCenter server.   The new platform requires both hard disks and solid state disks to create a pool of redundant, shared storage within a cluster.  The hard disks are the core of the storage and the SSD are used for buffering and read caching but do not contribute to the total amount of storage.  And although the name has SAN in it, the traditional SAN that is bread and butter of its parent company, EMC, could not be more different than VSAN.

In many ways, this is similar to the VMware Virtual Storage Appliance, but VSAN is much more integrated into vCenter and the vSphere platform.  The requirement of SSD is also new and will greatly contribute to overall responsiveness for the storage.  But more importantly, the new software defined storage platform is an example of the possibilities yet to come from tightly integrating storage with vSphere.

The real power of what VMware has released is not the storage technology itself or the simplicity that it can be deployed (single-click simplicity like HA and DRS).  The real power is the addition of Storage Policies completely throughout vSphere and VSAN.  The policies are the real capability that can be leveraged across multiple types of storage.  As I said earlier, I think VMware is simply showing all storage vendors this is what is possible.  The VSAN is certainly not a SAN replacement for most enterprise customers, but there are certainly remote office or small office use cases where this will fit nicely without the need of purchasing a purpose built storage array — use cases, by the way, where virtual storage appliances (VSA) currently fit.

But back to the policies.  Introduced in vSphere 5.0, Storage Policies allow administrators to tag and set classing of storage for different pools that are available within a vSphere cluster.  The Storage Policies allow an administrator to abstract the back-end storage and provide a list of capabilities to end-users or operators who are creating new virtual machines – and choose a policy during initial deployment to meet their needs.  You see, what VMware has discovered is that the end users don’t care if the back-end storage is a 3PAR or a VMAX – a Synology or a Drobo.  What they care about is a class of service provided, response times and how those translate to their application and its performance.  They also care about the cost of charge-back, if an organization has implemented those types of billing scenarios.  Policies are all a way of defining those attributes back to the end user and abstracting the actual storage from those decisions.

I am sure many VMware customers are like myself.  When I started the virtualization project, most systems ran on local storage.  The SAN was reserved for our most mission critical systems and most of those were clustered.  Today, however, vSphere has moved all of those workloads onto the SAN.  It has increased my resiliency and ability to survive a disaster, but its also driven storage costs up exponentially.  Yes, VMware is owned by EMC – goal to sell disks accomplished.

But the VSAN must run a bit counter to the EMC culture, so back to my original point.  In many ways, I think the VSAN is simply a proof of concept of what is possible with software defined storage.  It is a way for VMware to show the rest of the world what we can do.  VMware is very good at fostering its ecosystem and partner vendors, so I think this will spur new innovation.

And so, for a third time, back to policies.  With the introduction of VSAN, VMware is extending this capability of Storage Policies to allow administrators to assign a policy to a VM on creation and then the policy lives with the VM allowing policy based management of the VM over time.  Not only can it be setup initially with the VM, it can follow and adapt as the back-end storage changes over time.  With the addition of storage pools and maintenance mode for storage, VMware has automated a lot of the manual labor around managing storage.  By creating the pools of storage and moving datastores in and out of them, administrators and move or remove storage without interrupting service of virtual machines.  And also by applying tags and policy around those storage pools, it allows for the addition and removal of datastores as required to onramp or offramp storage as purchasing or lease cycles dictate.  All of this while maintaining service levels and agreements for customers and workloads – whether those customers are internal or external to your organization.

Beyond backend maintenance of storage, say the attributes of a particular application or VM changes over time.  Say it now requires a higher tier of storage – well thats an easy policy change as well on the VM and with the magic of storage vMotion and fully-automated storage DRS, the vSphere platform will perform the necessary moves to increase performance and move the workload onto the appropriate storage de jour.

In many ways, this is all done with the idea of reducing the menial tasks that an administrator has to perform.  Its mean to kill the tracking spreadsheets and other mechanisms we have traditionally relied upon for classing storage or moving workloads appropriately.  It all goes to making the storage layer of vSphere smarter and more automated.

Now, the last piece of policy that really sets VSAN apart from the competition.  Within VSAN, the vSphere administrator can dictate the type of RAID, the number of stripes and copies that are present for a particular VM or datastore.  For the first time, the core vSphere platform is controlling storage down the stack and automating how it operates.  vSphere policy now defines where and how replication occurs, how and where stripes of data are implemented, and on a per VM basis, quality of service attributes to prevent noisy neighbor problems.  And combining those together gives context and visibility up the stack in vSphere, too.  The two way communication of the policy and the storage implementation means that the administrator can more granularly dictate how the storage should act to support the requirements of the virtual workload.

So, I have to say, after a week in San Francisco at VMworld 2013, the VSAN is the one piece I am most excited to test and evaluate.  If for no other reason, you should sign up for the VSAN beta to see where the future of storage is going.  I think the writing is on the wall of every vendor is talking software-defined, the VSAN represents the first software-defined storage product with such a deep level of integration into vSphere.  I fully expect to see other vendors like Nexenta and HP StoreVirtual quickly adopting this paradigm – maybe even making it to market with product offerings around the same time that VSAN becomes generally available.  API calls and other integration points should be very simple for software storage implementations.  I’m excited to see where this next step takes us.

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Virtualization

HP Virtual Performance Viewer offers heat map for virtual performance

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

A couple weeks ago at VMworld, I stopped by the HP booth to see what they had new for this year and I was introduced to HP Virtualization Performance Viewer (vPV).   Presented as a virtual triage tool, the idea behind vPV is to quickly let a virtualization administrator identify host spots of CPU or Memory that deviate from their baseline so they can pinpoint and fix problems quickly.

vPV comes in two editions – a free edition supporting up to 200 VM objects and a paid for edition with no limit.

The interface is clean and shows an overview of the entire environment, color coded – with shades of greens being good and oranges and red representing the problem areas.  What is even better is you are able to drill down into a specific host or VM by double clicking one of the blocks.  Drill down is simple and acts as it should, filtering the results to a specific cluster, resource pool, datastore or host to view what is happening inside of that object.  This provides quick information about why a particular object is deviating from its norm.

A simple toggle radio button on the right side allows users to switch between vSphere and Hyper-V in the interface.

HP Virtualization Performance Viewer

Screenshot of the HP Virtualization Performance Viewer dashboard — click for larger image

Hypervisor Support

vPV documentation says the system supports both VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM and Xen hypervisors.  In addition, it supports OpenStack OS in a private cloud deployment and HP Cloud Application Platform as a Service (Paas).

In the free edition that I downloaded, I was able to see where I could configure against VMware vCenter or Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, but not against the other hypervisors or hosts listed.  vCenter requires no agent.  For Hyper-V, it appears SCVMM is required and to communicate with SCVMM an additional data collector must be installed.  I did not see a requirement for SCVMM in the documentation, however.

HP is very big on the message of customer choice and support across heterogeneous virtualized environments.  This is another product supporting the message, in my opinion.

Installation

HP documentation says that deployment should take about 15 minutes and I found that to be true.  vPV is packaged as a virtual appliance, so the installation into VMware was quick and simple from an OVA template.  After spinning up the OVA, configuration against vCenter was simple, too, except I had too many VM objects for the free edition and so vPV presented an error.  I was able to begin testing against a subset of VMs by creating a special username and limiting permissions to specific hosts, so the free tool can be useful even in a larger environment against a subset of virtual guests.

Free versus Licensed

The free edition of vPV does not provide any security for the application.  If you can get the URL for your browser, you are in and able to make configuration changes.  The licensed edition includes AD integration and password protection for the application.  The licensed edition also includes 3 months of data retention, while the free version only includes 1 day.

Integration

The licensed version of vPV has integration points against other HP management software packages – HP Performance Manager and HP Business Software Manager (BSM).

Support

For the free edition, community support is available from an HP support forum.

Video Overview – How to install vPV in under 15 minutes


More Information

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DatacenterStorageVirtualization

VMware unwraps vSphere 5.5 – What’s in it for your Datacenter?

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

IMG_6559Almost two weeks ago now, VMware unwrapped vSphere 5.5 to the public.  The release, which ships later this year, includes a lot of enhancements and some new features for the datacenter.  I won’t lie – 5.5 has a lot more in it for the datacenter than 5.1 enhancements.  And I left VMworld 2013 much more excited about the direction of the virtual datacenter than I did at the end of VMworld 2012.  So what are the things that sys admins will really care about in vSphere 5.5?

Expected enhancements – bigger maximums and more Web Client

As expected, the new release of vSphere increases maximums.  The ESXi host maximums were doubled from vSphere 5.1 to vSphere 5.5 in all cases, except for the maximum LUN size, which got a surprising 32X bump in limit to 64TB.  The number of logical CPU’s doubled to 320, the number of virtual CPU’s doubled to 4096 and the amount of RAM has doubled to 4TB per host.  Those represent some pretty incredible numbers.  vSphere 5.5 also introduces Virtual Hardware version 10.  The new hardware version is introduced to support newer CPU architectures as well as a new virtual-SATA Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) with up to 4 controllers and 30 devices per controller.  So, the new AHCI supports 120 total devices connected to a single VM.

Also expected, vSphere 5.5 drives users more towards into the vSphere Web Client for management.  All new capabilities are controlled from the vSphere Web Client.  This follows suit with vSphere 5.1, whose new capabilities like shared-nothing vMotion, were available only in the Web Client.  One thing I am hearing repeatedly on social media is that the vSphere 5.5 Web Client is noticeably more responsive, which is great.  I am also hearing the new Virtual Hardware 10 VMs can only be managed through the Web Client, which could cause heartburn for stand-alone hosts, but the final release may change this functionality.  The beta version of the Windows VI Client throws an error if you try to edit a Virtual Hardware 10 VM.  The error says the version 10 VM must be managed through the Web Client. This just means that resiliency of the vCenter servers continue to be critical parts of virtual deployments as it is a required part of managing the infrastructure.

And speaking of vCenter Server, the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance (VCSA) continues to become a more capable alternative to a Windows server deployment of vCenter.  With vSphere 5.5, the VCSA has a retooled embedded Postgres database capable of supporting 100 hosts and 3000 VMs, although those numbers may actually change for better or worse.  During one Ask the Expert session during the week, a member of the VMware Labs team said they were using a single VCSA to support as many as 500 hosts, but mileage my vary.  This is one of those numbers that may change during final release.

I’ll file SSO enhancements under expected as well.  While most people outside of VMware did not know what VMware intended to do with SSO, one session at VMworld pretty much summed it up by saying that the new version of vSphere SSO releasing with vSphere 5.5 will be what should have been released the first time.  To many adminstrators, myself included, the version of SSO introduced with vSphere 5.1 just didn’t seem up to VMware standards.  It seemed to be a third party tool that was included but not fully streamlined into the vSphere implementation.

The vSphere 5.5 SSO version includes a number of streamlined improvements.  AD integration is much improved and includes the ability to tie it to multiple forests, which is needed for many larger environments – or anywhere a merger has occurred.  There is no longer a need for an external database.  And there is a multi-master replication model built into this new version.

Storage improvements

There are many storage improvements included in vSphere 5.5.  One that I am very happy about is the streamlined and scriptable UNMAP process used to identify and clear out free space on a VMFS datastore so that your storage array can re-thin and free the space on the back-end.  This is a big one for me with 3PAR.  I want to keep my LUNs on a diet and this new ESXCLI command will go a long way towards helping me do that.  In addition to the new command line, the back-end functionality has changed with UNMAP, hopefully making it more acceptable to run during production hours and moving towards a time when automatic UNMAP during deletes might return to default functionality.  UNMAP can now stagger the reclamation process so that it doesn’t saturate a backend array with IO.

Another nice feature, from an administrative standpoint, is the automatic removal of permanent device loss (PDL) state feature.  This is especially handy in the event of array failures, which have been known to happen.  In the event of a failure, automatically clearing a LUN in PDL will keep the administrator from having to perform rolling reboots to completely clean up the mess.   The handling of PDL conditions has improved greatly over the versions I have used from 3.0 forward.  There as a time that a PDL could completely hose an ESX host and a reboot was the only way to recover.

vSphere 5.5 also features enhancements around SSD and Flash storage.  The ESXi hosts now have the ability to work with add-add and removal of SSD devices, allowing a graceful handling of SSD storage as it becomes increasingly more common.  In the world of Flash, a new read cache feature is introduced allowing for the aggregation of Flash storage into a pool that can be consumed by VMs for the purpose of accelerating read intensive workloads.   Last, but not least, 16Gb Fiber Channel support, end to end,  is available in vSphere 5.5.

Network enhancements

In the networking world, vSphere Distributed Switches just got a needed boost of capabilities.  Traffic filtering has been added allowing administrators to filter the types of traffic.  QOS has been added to the mis allowing for prioritization of traffic from the vSwitch up to the physical switch layer.  Security officers and admins troubleshooting will both be happy to see the addition of a host level packet capturing tool that is the equivalent of tcpdump to Linux admins.   40Gb NIC support is also being introduced with vSphere 5.5.

Mission critical workloads

One of the message points from VMware during VMworld 2013 was about making vSphere a platform that can run any mission critical workload.  The maximum enhancements and other resiliency features are all targeted towards that goal, but in particular one additional capability was introduced with vSphere 5.5 that is meant to assist with virtualizing latency sensitive workloads, like VOIP.   A new Latency Sensitivity setting is now available on VMs which help reduce latency for necessary virtual workloads.  When set to a ‘high’ setting, the hypervisor actively tries to reduce latency by reserving memory, dedicating CPU cores and disabling network feature prone to latency.

Tying it all together…

There is really so much more in vSphere 5.5 – a couple great places to get more detail is available from Kyle Gleed in his A Summary of What’s New in vSphere 5.5 post and in the What’s New in vSphere 5.5 document on the VMware website.

All in all, I left the Monday morning keynote of VMworld 2013 feeling a little let down.  Many of the enhancements that will really improve the admin’s life didn’t get any stage time or mention during the keynote – one reason for the delay in posting details – I had to find details…  Two of the big deals that were given stage time this year were the VMware VSAN, a software defined virtual storage implementation baked heavily into vSphere, and NSX, the network virtualization platform that VMware acquired with Nicira.  I hope to post on these two in depth in the coming weeks.

I was very happy to see a bit of a return by VMware to its core audience and products – centered around datacenter virtualization.  I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of other bloggers and industry folks while I was at the conference and I found several who shared my view that VMware had strayed from its roots in years past chasing the cloudy dream — a dream that we felt was a bit beyond the masses.  And while cloud adoption is growing, most enterprise datacenters are still reliant upon VMware and its vSphere platform to running daily operations.  Its good to see that VMware did not abandon us all and that they are are still working very hard to build the best and most resilient datacenter platform available.

Questionable decisions in years past – like the nasty 4 letter word – VRAM – can now be jokes and chuckles.  With so much attention given to vCloud and programming layers in the past couple years, it was welcoming to see things added to vSphere, where I live and work.  In my opinion, this year VMware had to deliver something valuable to all of its customers to starve off competition and justify the continued spend for Service and Subscription (SnS) contracts.  In many ways, I think they delivered.  I’ll save my thoughts on where they still miss for another post.

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DatacenterStorage

vSphere 5.5 introduces new, simpler UNMAP command

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Welcome news for anyone using array-based thin provisioning with vSphere, VMware has introduced a new and simpler UNMAP command that can be invoke from esxcli with vSphere Platform 5.5.  This will help 3PAR customers more easily perform the UNMAP process to free space on LUNs so that the array can discover and free the space on the back-end.  This is a big deal for any thin-provisioned LUNs in a vSphere environment.  In addition to an easier way to invoke the UNMAP, VMware has also made changes in how the UNMAP occurs on the array.

According to VMware’s What’s New document, the previous method of creating a temporary file and then informs the array the the blocks in the temporary file can be reclaimed.  In the case of the 3PAR, the zero detect process then runs to identify the free space and reclaim it.  With version 5.5, the reclaim allows the administrator to specify the size in blocks rather than a percentage and now the dad space can be reclaimed in increments instead of all at once – to help shops that experience performance degradation with the old method.

The new command is run from esxcli, logically under storage and VMFS.

[code]esxcli storage vmfs unmap[/code]

The full syntax of the command is not clear yet and I’ll have to wait for my 5.5 upgrade to test or get more details.

The fact that the new UNMAP is run from esxcli makes me hopeful that I will be able to script and schedule the UNMAP to occur during non-peak hours when the maintenance would not be service affecting.

What is UNMAP and what does it do?  See this post for more information. 

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DatacenterStorageVirtualization

vSphere 4.1 to 5.1 lessons learned

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

For the last two years, I’ve been behind the curve with VMware vSphere. My deployment has continued to run at vSphere 4.1 while the rest of the world ticked along with 5.0 and 5.1. We were stuck because we relied on VMware’s Update Manager product to handle guest OS patching in our environment and we needed to find and implement a replacement for this product.

After many months of evaluations, we ultimately decided up on VMware’s vCenter Protect product for patch management and upon implementing it earlier this year, we were finally free to upgrade to the latest and greatest vSphere.

At the same time, my last official VMware training class was with version 3.5 — and that class was only an update class.  A lot has changed.  I read blogs online and also buy books to try and keep up, but its hard to get well versed with you aren’t hand-on.  So, there were a number of things in this upgrade that I learned – some through reading – some through experience.

What I Learned

The jump from 4.1 to 5.1 is not a trivial one.  We ran good ‘ole ESX in our 4.1 environment and so the move to 5.1 meant the disappearance of the service console.  Fortunately, we did not use any specific agents or plug-ins inside of ESX, but we were quite used to the service console for troubleshooting.

Lesson 1: Get familiar with PowerCLI and ESX-CLI before moving from ESX to ESXi.

Troubleshooting and configuration is all handled remotely now from either PowerCLI, ESX-CLI or from the vSphere Management Appliance.  It is imperative that you get familiar with these tools before the move.  The great news is that you can use any of these tools against ESX installs the same as ESXi installs.  I spent about 6 months with PowerCLI getting very familiar with it and spending some time on ESX-CLI before our transition.  It was time VERY well spent.

Another major change with ESXi is the footprint of the actual hypervisor installation.  Frankly, its small.  There is really no need to have local spinning disks for accommodate the hypervisor installation and many of my peers have chosen to go with local USB Flash or SD storage instead.  Several years ago, when VMware first announced ESXi, this was one of their big features touted for the version – a smaller footprint and the ability to install it on USB Flash storage.  It holds true today, although I found that the ESXi 5.1 installer does not create a location for logs and persistent host data on the USB or SD.

Lesson 2: If you install ESXi to USB or SD, you also need to setup a place to store logs and crash dumps on shared storage elsewhere.

Quickly after installing ESXi for the first time on USB, my hosts alerted me that I needed to establish a shared storage location for logs and crash dumps.  A bit of searching on the VMware Knowledge Base, I found the following:

Due to the I/O sensitivity of USB and SD devices, the installer does not create a scratch partition on these devices. As such, there is no tangible benefit to using large USB/SD devices as ESXi uses only the first 1GB. When installing on USB or SD devices, the installer attempts to allocate a scratch region on an available local disk or datastore. If no local disk or datastore is found, /scratch is placed on the ramdisk. You should reconfigure /scratch to use a persistent datastore following the installation.

Basically, you need a VMFS datastore on which to save your persistent host data and a single datastore can work for all hosts in a cluster.  Once the USB or SD card is used for boot, it does very few write operations back to the disk – instead choosing a medium more suited to handling log data.

Each hardware vendor seems to create a customized distribution of ESXi that is available directly from VMware – whether you have Dell, HP or IBM hardware.  The custom image includes agents and drivers baked into the distribution for your specific hardware.

Lesson 3: Its worth using the vendor specific ESXi distribution because it helps light up CIM information in vCenter.

vCenter does a good job of keeping alarms and alerts front and center for the administrator.  With the OEM specific ESXi distributions or by adding the OEM specific packages to a standard ESXi installation, you will enable CIM agents to report on hardware issues and environmental conditions through a familiar interface.

On the topic of familiar interface, vSphere 5.1 marks the first version with the vSphere Web Client.  The Web Client is the destination for all the latest features and functionality  including enabling version 9 virtual hardware, shared-nothing storage vMotion, and version 5.1 Distributed Virtual Switches among other features.

Lesson 4: If its a new feature to 5.1, look for it in the Web Client.  And get to know the vSphere Web Client – it is the future.

VMware, as a company, has been very straight forward when it makes decisions – like eliminating ESX in favor of ESXi.  It gives its customers the information and then slowly weens them away from the old way towards its new direction.  The vSphere Web Client is the next in the list of these.  It is obvious that VMware is seeking to unify its client away from different interfaces and functionality towards a unified web portal for all its products and management.  The vSphere Web Client today already has the core vCenter and vCenter Orchestrator functionality packaged into the web client.  Unfortunately, administrators will have to run both the Win32 and Web Client to get the total picture.  VMware Update Manager only exists in the Win32 client today – so patching and upgrading your hosts and VMware Tools will need to be done there.  As of VMworld last August, VMware committed to moving the Update Manager functionality into the Web Client soon.  Search in the vSphere Web Client seems particularly powerful for locating both VM objects, infrastructure objects and settings.

There was a time when vCenter did all the heavy lifting for a vSphere deployment.  Increasingly, there are a number of additional solutions that most shops need to deploy along with vCenter.  One of the additions for 5.1 is the vSphere SSO Server – used for centralized authentication.  The SSO Server opens a number of new possibilities as the eco-system continues to grow.  It is a necessary part of the 5.1 deployment and should not be ignore; frankly, it cannot be ignored.  It is required.  As the eco-system continues to grow, interoperability becomes a bigger concern for administrators.

Lesson 5: Use the VMware Product Interoperability Matrix.  Check your database interoperability   Check version interoperability of all your other VMware ecosystem components.

Whether you’re using vCenter Server Heartbeat, vCenter Operations, Update Manager, Converter or any other component, the interoperability matrix will give you the information you need to ensure your components work together.  In general, vCenter Server 5.1 and ESXi 5.1 will require all the other components to be at version 5.1, but there are some components like vCenter Server Heartbeat that follow a different version numbering, so that matrix is a great resource to ensure you’re where you need to be.

Additional Links for 4.1 to 5.1 upgrade

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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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