Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

MS Word: Paste and Match Formatting by default

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Something that bugged me for a long time on a Mac was the copy/paste behavior. I always wanted it to default to match the formatting of the document I am working in, or even paste in unformatted text. Pasting formatted text just messes up your whole document. I never knew how to do this until I recently saw a tweet about it. As I received a question about it today I figured I would write a short blog as the original post on this topic is difficult to find. I do want to point out that all credits for this trick go to user “BAT”, and of course thanks to Rob Nolen for tweeting this!

So how do you “change” the default “paste” option? Well, you don’t really, but you can configure a shortcut and set it to call a menu item. You do this as follows:

  • Open System Preferences
  • Go to Keyboard
  • Click Shortcuts
  • Add an “App Shortcut”
  • Select “Microsoft Word” as the app
  • Use the following as the “Menu Title”: Paste and Match Formatting
  • And in the keyboard shortcut use the key combination COMMAND-V

Now you have created a shortcut that maps to the “paste and match formatting” menu item. Which is very very handy! Thanks Rob and BAT for sharing this, you saved me from a lot of frustration.

HA Admission control: How can I check how much reserved resources are used?

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I had this question twice in the past three months, so somehow this is something which isn’t clear to everyone. With HA Admission Control you set aside capacity for fail-over scenarios, this is capacity which is reserved. But of course VMs also use reservations, how can you see what the total combined used reserved capacity is including Admission Control?

Well, that is actually pretty simple it appears. If you open the Web Client, or the H5 client, and go to your cluster then you have a “Monitor” tab, under the Monitor tab there’s an option called “Resource Reservation” and it has graphs for both CPU as well as Memory. This actually includes admission control. To verify this I took a screenshot in the H5 client before enabling admission control, and after enabling it, as you can see a big increase in “reserved resources”, which indicates that admission control is taken into consideration.

Before:

After:

This is also covered in our Deep Dive book, by the way, if you want to know more, pick it up.

VMworld Sessions with vSAN Customers

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At VMworld, there were various sessions with vSAN Customers, many of which I have met in some shape or form in the past couple of years. Some of these stories contain some great use cases or stories. Considering they are “hidden” in 60-minute sessions I figured I would write about them and share with you the link where and when applicable.

In the Monday keynote, there were also a couple of great vSAN quotes and customers mentioned. Not sure everyone spotted this, but definitely, something I felt is worth sharing, as these were powerful stories and use cases. First of all the vSAN numbers were shared, with 15k customers and adoption within 50% of the Global 2000 within 4 years I think it is fair to say that our business unit is doing great!

In the Make A Wish foundation video I actually spotted the vSAN management interface, although it was not explicitly mentioned still very cool to see that vSAN is used. As their CEO mentioned, it was great to get all that attention after they appeared on national television but it also resulted in a big website outage. The infrastructure is being centralized and new infra and security policies are put into place, “working with VMware enables us to optimize our processes and grant more wishes”.

Another amazing story was Mercy Ships, this non-profit operates the largest NGO hospital ship bringing free medical care to different countries in Africa. Not just medical care, they also are providing training to local medical staff so they can continue providing the help needed in these areas of the world. They are now building their next generation ship which is going live in 2020, VMware and Dell/EMC will be a big part of this. As Pat said: “it is truly amazing to see what they do with our technology”. Currently, they use VxRail, Dell Isilon etc on their ships as part of their infrastructure.

The first session I watched was a session by our VP of Product Management and VP of Development, I actually attended this session in person at VMworld, and as a result of technical difficulties, they started 20 minutes late, hence the session is “only” 40 minutes. This session is titled “HCI1469BU – The Future of vSAN and Hyperconverged Infrastructure“. In this session, David Selby has a section of about 10 minutes and he talks about the vSAN journey which Honeywell went through. (If you are just interested in David’s section, skip to 9:30 minutes into the session) In his section, David explains how at Honeywell they had various issues with SAN storage causing outages of 3k+ VMs, as you can imagine very costly. In 2014 Honeywell started tested with a 12 Node cluster for their management VMs. This for them was a low-risk cluster. Their test was successful and they quickly started to move VMs over to vSAN in other parts of the world. Just to give you an idea:

  • US Delaware, 11k VMs on vSAN
  • US Dallas, 500 VMs on vSAN
  • NL Amsterdam, 12k VMs (40% on vSAN, 100% by the end of this year!)
  • BE Brussels, 1000 VMs (20% on vSAN, 100% by the end of this year!)

That is a total of roughly 24,500 VMs on vSAN, with close to 1.7PB of capacity, with an expected capacity of around 2.5PB by the end of this year. All running on vSAN All Flash the Dell PowerEdge FX2 platform by the way! Many different types of workloads run on these clusters. Apps ranging from MS SQL, Oracle, Horizon View, Hadoop, Chemical Simulation software, and everything else you can think off. What I found interesting is that they are running their Connexo software on top of vSAN, in this particular case the data of 5,000,000 smart energy meters in homes in the Netherlands is landing on vSAN. Yes, that is 5 million devices sending data to the Honeywell environment and being stored, and analyzed on vSAN.

David also explained how they are leveraging IBM cloud with vSAN to run Chemical Plant simulators so operators of chemical plants can be trained. IBM cloud also runs vSAN, and Honeywell uses this so they can leverage the same tooling and processes for on-premises as well as in IBM Cloud. What I think was a great quote, “performance has gone through the roof, applications load in 3 seconds instead of 4 minutes, they received helpdesk tickets as users felt applications were loading too fast”. David works closely with the vSAN team on the roadmap, and had a long list of features he wanted in 2014, all of those have been released now, now there are a couple of things he would like to see addressed and as mentioned by Vijay, they will be worked on in the future.

A session I watched online was “HCI1615PU -vSAN Technical Customer Panel on vSAN Experiences“. This was a panel session that was hosted by Peter Keilty from VMware and had various customers: William Dufrin – General Motors, Mark Fournier – US Senate Federal Credit Union, Alex Rodriguez – Rent A Center, Mariusz Nowak – Oakland University. I always like these customer panels as you get some great quotes and stories, which are not scripted.

First, each of the panel members introduces themselves and followed by an intro of their environment. Let me quickly give you some stats of what they are doing/running:

  • General Motors – William Dufrin
    • Two locations running vSAN Thirteen vCenter Server instances
    • 700+ physical hosts
    • 60 Clusters
    • 13,000+ VMs

William mentioned they started with various 4 node vSAN clusters, now they by default role out a minimum of 6-node or 12-node, depending on the use-case. They have server workloads and VDI desktops running, here we are talking thousands of desktops. Not using stretched vSAN yet, but this is something they will be evaluating in the future potentially.

  • US Senate Federal Credit Union – Mark Fournier
    • Three locations running vSAN (remote office location
    • 2 vCenter Instances
    • 8 hosts
    • 3 clusters
      • one cluster with 4 nodes, and then two 2-node configurations
    • Also using VVols!

What is interesting is that Mark explains how they started virtualizing only just 4 years ago, this is not something I hear often. I guess change is difficult within the US Senate Federal Credit Union. They are leveraging vSAN in remote offices for availability/resiliency purposes at a relatively low cost (ROBO Licensing). They run all-flash but this is overkill for them, resource requirements are relatively low. Funny detail is that vSAN all-flash is outperforming their all-flash traditional storage solution in their primary data center. Now considering moving some workloads to the branches to leverage the available resources and perform better. Also a big user of vSAN Encryption, considering this is a federal organization that was to be expected, leveraging Hytrust as their key management solution.

  • Rent-A-Center – Alex Rodriguez
    • One location using vSAN
    • 2 vCenter Server instances
    • 16 hosts
    • 2 clusters
    • ~1000 VMs

Alex explains that they run VxRail, which for them was the best choice. Flawless and very smooth implementation, which is a big benefit for them. Mainly using it for VDI and published applications. Tested various other hyper-converged solutions, but VxRail was clearly better than the rest. Running a management cluster and a dedicated VDI cluster.

  • Oakland University – Mariusz Nowak
    • Two locations
    • 1 vCenter Server instance
    • 12 hosts
    • 2 clusters
    • 400 VMs

Mariusz explains the challenges around storage costs. When vSAN was announced in 2014 Mariusz was intrigued instantly, he started reading and learning about it. In 2017 they implemented vSAN and moved all VMs over, except for some Oracle VMs, but this is for licensing reasons. Mariusz leverages a lot of enterprise functionality in their environment, ranging from Stretched Cluster, Dedupe and Compression, all the way to Encryption. This is due to compliance/regulations. Interesting enough, Oakland University runs a stretched cluster with a < 1ms RTT, pretty sweet.

Various questions then came in, some interesting questions/answers or quotes:

  • “vSAN Ready Node and ROBO licensing is extremely economical, it was very easy to get through the budget cycle for us and set the stage for later growth”
  • The Storage Policy Based Management framework allows for tagging virtual disks with different sets of rules and policies when we implemented that we crafted different policies for SolidFire and vSAN to leverage the different capabilities of each platform (reworded for readability)
  • QUESTION: What were some of the hurdles and lessons learned?
    • Alex: We started with a very early version vSPEX Blue and the most challenging for us back then was updating, going from one version to the other. Support, however, was phenomenal.
    • William: Process and people! It is not the same as traditional storage, you use a policy-based management framework on object-based storage, which means different procedures. Networking, in the beginning, was also a challenge, consistent MTU settings across hosts and network switches are key!
    • Mariusz: We are not using Jumbo Frames right now as we can’t enable it across the cluster (including the witness host), but with 6.7 U1 this problem is solved!
    • Mark: What we learned is that dealing with different vendors isn’t always easy. Also, ROBO licensing makes a big difference in terms of price point.
  • QUESTION: Did you test different failure scenarios with your stretched cluster? (reworded for readability)
    • Mariusz: We did various failure scenarios. We unplugged the full network of a host and watched what happened. No issues, vSphere/vSAN failed over VMs with no performance issues.
  • QUESTION: How do you manage upgrades of vSphere and firmware?
    • Alex: We do upgrades and updates through VxRail Manager and VUM. It downloads all the VIBs and does a rolling upgrade and migration. It works very well
    • Mark: We leverage both vSphere ROBO as well as vSAN ROBO, one disadvantage is that vSphere ROBO does not include DRS which means you don’t have “automated maintenance mode”. This results in the need to manually migrate VMs and placing hosts into maintenance mode manually. But as this is a small environment this is not a huge problem currently. We can probably script it through PowerCLI.
    • Mariusz: We have Ready Nodes, which is more flexible for us, but it means upgrades are a bit more challenging. But VMware has promised more is coming in VUM soon. We use Dell Plugins for vCenter so that we can do firmware upgrades etc from a single interface (vCenter).

The last session I watched was “HCI3691PUS – Customer Panel: Hyper-converged IT Enabling Agility and Innovation“, which appeared to be a session sponsored by Hitachi with ConAgra Brands and Norwegian Cruise Line as two reference customers. Matt Bouges works for ConAgra Brands as an Enterprise Architect, Brian Barretto works for Norwegian Cruise Line as a Virtualization Manager.

First Matt discussed why ConAgra moved towards HCI, which is all about scaling and availability as well as business restructuring. They needed a platform that could scale with their business needs. For Brian / Norwegian Cruise Line‘s it was all about cost. The current SAN/Storage architecture was very expensive, and as at the time, a new scalable solution (HCI) emerged they explored that and found that the cost model was in their favor. As they run the data centers on the ships as well they need something that is agile, note that these ships are huge, basically floating cities, with redundant data centers onboard of some of these ships. (Note they have close to 30 ships, so a lot of data centers to manage.) Simplicity and also rack space was a huge deciding factor for both ConAgra and Norwegian Cruise Lines.

Norwegian Cruise Line mentioned that they also still use traditional storage, same for ConAgra. It is great that you can do this with vSAN, keep your “old investment”, while building out the new solution. Over time most applications will move over though. One thing that they feel is missing with hyper-converged is the ability to run large memory configurations or large storage capacity configurations. (Duncan: Not sure I entirely agree, limits are very close to non-HCI servers, but I can see what they are referring to.) One thing to note as well from an operational aspect is that certain types of failures are completely different, and handled completely different in an HCI world, that is definitely something to get familiar with. Another thing mentioned was the opportunity of HCI in the Edge, nice small form factor should be possible and should allow running 10-15 VMs. It removes the need for “converged infra” in those locations or traditional storage in general in those environments. Especially now that compute/processing and storage requirements go up at the edge due to IoT and data analytics that happens “locally”.

That was it for now, hope you find this useful!

CTO3509BU: Embracing the Edge: Automation, Analytics, and Real-Time Business

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This is the last post in this VMworld Sessions series. Although the title lists “CTO3509BU: Embracing the Edge: Automation, Analytics, and Real-Time Business” which is by Chris Wolf and Daniel Beveridge, I would also highly recommend watching Daniel’s other session titled “CTO2161BU Smart Placement of Workloads in Tomorrow’s Distributed Cloud“. Both sessions discuss a similar topic and this Edge vs Cloud and where workloads and data should be placed. Both very interesting topics if you ask me, and definitely topics I am starting to explore more.

Chris discussed the various use cases around Edge Computing and the Technology Drivers, some of these very obvious but some of them not so much. What often is skipped is the business continuity aspect of edge but also things like network costs, limitations, and even data gravity. It is good to see that Chris addressed these. Some people still seem to be under the impression that every workload can run in the cloud, but in many cases it simply isn’t possible to send data to the cloud. Could be that the volume is too high, could be that the time it takes to transfer and analyze is too long (transaction execution time), or maybe it is physically impossible. It could also be that the application is mission-critical, meaning that the service can’t rely on a connection to the internet.

As a company, VMware is aiming to provide a solution for Edge and IoT, yet work closely with the very rich partner ecosystem and the main focus is providing a “native experience” for developers. Which provides customers choice as it avoids lock-in. Now I don’t want to start a lock-in discussion here as one could claim that it is difficult to migrate between platforms, and this is always the case, if not only because of the operational aspects (tooling/processes). A diagram which explains the different initiatives was then presented, and I like this diagram a lot as it differentiates between “device edge” and “compute edge”, on top of that it shows a differentiation between the device edge focussed on things vs people (big difference).

Next discussed is IoT management, Chris explains how Pulse 2.0 will be capable of managing up to 500 million managed objects. Pulse provides central management across different IoT device manufacturers. Instead of having a point solution for each manufacturer we introduced an abstraction layer and automate things like updates etc. (Sounds familiar?) Then ESXi for ARM is briefly touched upon, as Christ mentioned this is not for general purpose intended. VMware is looking for very specific use cases, if you are one of those partners/customers that has a use case for ESXi on ARM then please reach out to us and let’s discuss the use case and opportunity!

First, a new project is introduced by Daniel, it is called Project Nebula. Nebula brings an IoT marketplace, in this marketplace you can select various IoT services (which come in the form of containers), which are then sent to the IoT gateways. It looks pretty cool, as Daniel shows how he simply pushed various IoT services down to capable IoT gateways. So there’s a validation there if the edge services can run on the specific devices. On top of that, a connection to specific cloud services can also be provided so that certain metrics can be send up and analyzed when needed. Pretty smooth, I also like the fact that it provides monitoring, even down to the sensor and individual service as shown in the second screenshot below.

Next, it is briefly discussed why vSphere/VMware is the right platform, and then they jump into the momentum there is around cloud services and edge computing today. A brief overview of Amazon RDS on VMware is given and more importantly why this is a valuable solution, especially the replication of instances from on-premises to cloud and across regions. Of course, AWS Greengrass is mentioned, VMware also has a story in this space. You can run Greengrass on-premises in a highly available manner and it is dead simple to implement. For those who have not seen the announcements around that, read up here. Next Chris and Daniel go over various use cases, I guess Daniel likes wine as he explains how a Winery leverages AWS Lamba and Greengrass to analyze data coming from sensors which then drives control systems. On top of that, based on customer (and sommelier) ratings of wine, leveraging the data provided by sensors and matching that with customer behavior the winery can predict which barrels will score higher and most likely sell better etc. Very interesting story.

Compute edge is discussed next, this is where project dimension comes in to play, however first Chris defines the difference between the different option people have for consuming certain services. When does Cloud, Compute or Device Edge make sense? It is all about “time” or “latency”, how fast do you or the process need a response from the system? Transaction time window within 500ms and latency lower than 5ms? Well then you need to process at “device edge layer”, if a transaction time of below 1s is acceptable and latency of around 20ms then the “compute edge would work. Is a transaction time of larger than 1s okay and latency of higher than 20ms, then the cloud may be an option. As I said, it all revolves around how long you can wait.

Project Dimension delivers a compute edge solution which runs on-premises but is managed by VMware and delivered as a service. What I also liked is that the “micro” and “nano” data center is discussed, meaning that there potentially will be an option in the future to buy small form factor solutions which allow you to run a handful of VMs. More importantly, these solutions will consume less power and require less cooling. These things can make a big difference, especially as many Edge locations don’t have a data center room. Again ESXi for ARM is mentioned, this sounds very interesting, would be interesting to see if there are plans to mix this with Project Dimension over time, but that is just me thinking out loud.

From a networking perspective of course VeloCloud is discussed, and some very cool projects where cloud networks can be utilized and per traffic type certain routes can be used based on availability and performance (I probably should say QoS).

That was it for now as I don’t want to type out the whole session verbatim, for more specifics please watch the two sessions, worth your time, TO3509BU: Embracing the Edge: Automation, Analytics, and Real-Time Business” and/or “CTO2161BU Smart Placement of Workloads in Tomorrow’s Distributed Cloud“.

CTO2860BU & VIN2183BU: It is all about Persistent Memory

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I was going through the list of sessions when I spotted a session Persistent Memory by Rich Brunner and Rajesh V. Quickly after that I noticed that there also was a PMEM session by the perf team available. Both CTO2860BU and VIN2183BU I would highly recommend watching. I would recommend starting with CTO2860BU though, is it gives a great introduction to what PMEM brings to the table. I scribbled down some notes, and they may appear somewhat random, considering I am covering 2 sessions in 1 article, but hopefully the main idea is clear.

I think the sub-title of the sessions make clear what PMEM is about: Storage at Memory Speed. This is what Richard talks about in CTO2860BU during the introduction. I thought this slide explained the difference pretty well, it is all about the access times:

  • 10,000,000 ns – HDD
  • 100,000 ns – SAS SSD
  • 10,000 ns – NVMe
  • 50-300 ns – PMEM
  • 30-100ns – DRAM

So that is 10 million nanoseconds vs 50 to 300 nanoseconds. Just to give you an idea, that is roughly the speed difference between the space shuttle and a starfish. But that isn’t the only major benefit of persistent memory. Another huge advantage is that PMEM devices, depending on how they are used, are byte addressable. Compare this to 512KB, 8KB / 4KB reads many storage systems require. When you have to change a byte, you no longer incur that overhead.

As of vSphere 6.7, we have PMEM support. A PMEM can be accessed as a block device or as a disk, but the other option would be to access it as “PMEM”. Meaning that in the latter case we serve a virtual PMEM device to the VM and the Guest OS sees this as PMEM. What also was briefly discussed in Richard’s talk was the different types of PMEM. In general, there are 4 different types, but most commonly talked about are 2. These two are NVDIMM-N and Intel Optane. With the difference being that NVDIMM-N has DRAM memory backed by NAND, and where persistence is achieved by writing to NAND only during shutdown / power-fail. Whereas with Intel Optane there’s what Intel calls 3D XPoint Memory on the DIMM directly addressable. The other two mentioned were “DRAM backed to NVMe” and NVDIMM-P, where the first was an effort by HPe which has been discontinued and NVDIMM-P seems to be under development and is expected in 2019 roughly.

When discussing the vSphere features that support PMEM what I found most interesting was the fact that DRS is fully aware of VMs using PMEM during load balancing. It will take this in to account, and as the cost is higher for a migration of a PMEM enabled VM it will most likely select a VM backed by shared storage. Of course, when doing maintenance DRS will move the VMs with PMEM to a host which has sufficient capacity. Also, FT is fully supported.

In the second session,VIN2183BU, Praveen and Qasim discussed performance details. After a short introduction, they dive deep into performance and how you can take advantage of the technology. First they discuss the different modes in which persistent memory can be exposed to the VM/Guest OS, I am listing these out as they are useful to know.

  • vPMEMDisk = exposed to guest as a regular SCSI/NVMe device, VMDKs are stored on PMEM Datastore
  • vPMEM = Exposes the NVDIMM device in a “passthrough manner, guest can use it as block device or byte addressable direct access device (DAX), this is the fastest mode and most modern OS’s support this
  • vPMEM-aware = This is similar to the mode above, but the difference is that the application understands how to take advantage of vPMEM

Next they discussed the various performance tests and comparisons they have done. What they have tested is various modes and compare that as well to the performance of NVMe SSD. What stood out most to me is that both the vPMEM and vPMEM-Aware mode provide great performance, up to an 8x performance increase. In the case of vPMEMDisk that is different, and that has to do with the overhead there is. Because it is presented as a block device there’s significant IO amplification which in the case of “4KB random writes” even leads to a throughput that is lower for NVMDIMM than it is for NVMe. During the session it is mentioned that both VMware as well as Intel are looking to optimize their part of the solution to solve this issue. What was most impressive though wasn’t the throughput but the latency, there was a 225x improvement measured between NVMe and vPMEM and vPMEM-Aware. Although vPMEMDisk was higher than vPMEM and vPMEM-aware, it was still significantly lower than NVMe and very consistent across reads and writes.

This was just the FIO example, this is followed by examples for various applications both scale out and scale up solutions. What I found interesting were the Redis tests, nice performance gains at a much lower latency, but more importantly, the cost will probably go down when leveraging persistent memory instead of pure DRAM.

Last but not least tests were conducted around performance during vMotion and the peformance of the vMotion process itself. In both cases using vPMEM or vPMEM-aware can be very beneficial for the application and the vMotion process.

Both great sessions, again highly recommended watching both.