Last week I had the chance to catch up with one of our Virtual SAN customers. I connected to Neil Cresswell through twitter and after going back and forth we got on a conference call. Neil showed me what they had created for the company he works for, a public cloud provider called IndonesianCloud. No need to tell you where they are located as the name kind of reveals it. Neil is the CEO of IndonesianCloud by the way, and very very passionate about IT / Technology and VMware. It was great talking to him, and before I forget I want to say thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule Neil, I very much appreciate it!
IndonesianCloud is a 3 year old, cloud service provider, part of the vCloud Air Network, which focuses on the delivery of enterprise class hosting services to their customers. Their customers primarily run mission critical workloads in IndonesianCloud’s three DC environment, which means that stability, reliability and predictability is really important.
Having operated a “traditional” environment for a long time Neil and his team felt it was time for a change (Servers + Legacy Storage). They needed something which was much more fit for purpose, was robust / reliable and was capable of providing capacity as well as great performance. On top of that, from a cost perspective it needed to be significantly cheaper. The traditional environment they were maintaining just wasn’t allowing them to remain competitive in their dynamic and price sensitive market. Several different hyperconverged and software based offerings were considered, but finally the settled on Virtual SAN.
Since the Virtual SAN platform was placed into production two months ago, they have deployed over 450 new virtual machines onto their initial 12 node cluster. In addition, migration of another 600 virtual machines from one of their legacy storage platforms to their Virtual SAN environment is underway. While talking to Neil I was mostly interested in some of the design considerations, some of the benefits but also potential challenges.
From a design stance Neil explained how they decided to go with SuperMicro Fat Twin hardware, 5 x NL-SAS drives (4TB) and Intel S3700 SSDs (800GB) per host. Unfortunately no affordable bigger SSDs were available, and as such the environment has a lower cache to capacity ratio than preferred. Still, when looking at the cache hit rate for reads it is more or less steady around 98-99%. PCIe flash was also looked at, but didn’t fit within the budget. These SuperMicro systems were on the VSAN Ready Node list, and this was one of the main reasons for Neil and the team to pick them. Having a pre-validated configuration, which is guaranteed to be supported by all parties, was seen as a much lower risk than building their own nodes. Then there is the network; IndonesianCloud decided to go with HP networking gear after having tested various products. One of the reasons for this was the better overall throughput, better multicast performance, and lower price per port. The network is 10GbE end to end of course.
Key take away: There can be substantial performance difference between the various 10GbE switches, do your homework!
The choice to deploy 4TB NL-SAS drives was a little risky; IndonesianCloud needed to balance the performance, capacity, and price ratios. Luckily having already run their existing cloud platform for 3 years, there was a history of IO information readily available. Using this GB/IOPS historical information meant that IndonesianCloud were able to make a calculated decision that 4TB drives with 800GB SSD would provide the perfect combination of performance and capacity. With very good cache hit rates, Neil would like to deploy larger SSD drives when they become available, as he believes that cache is a great way to minimise the impact of the slower drives. Equally, the write performance of the 4TB drives was also concerning. Using the default VSAN stripe size configuration of 1 meant that at most, only 2 drives were able to service write de-stage requests for a given VM, and due to the slow speed of the 4TB drives, this could have an impact on performance. To mitigate this, IndonesianCloud performed a series of internal tests that baselined different stripe sizes to get a good balance of performance. In the end a stripe size of 5 was selected, and is now being used for all workloads. This also helps in situations where reads are coming from disk by the way, great side effect. BTW, the best way to think about Stripe Size and Failures to Tolerate is like Raid 1E (mirrored stripes).
Key take away: Write performance of large NL-SAS drives is low, striping can help improving performance.
IndonesianCloud has standardised on a 12 node Virtual SAN cluster, and I asked why, given that Virtual SAN 5.5 U1 supports up to 32 nodes (64 with 6.0 even). Neil’s response was that 12 nodes is what comprises an internal “zone”, and that customers can balance their workloads across zones to provide higher levels of availability. Having all nodes in a single cluster, whilst possible, was not considered the best fit for a service provider that is all about containing risk. 12 nodes also maps to approximately 1000 VMs, which is what they have modelled the financial costs against, so 1000 VMs deployed on the 12 node cluster would consume CPU/Memory/Disk at the same ratio, effectively ensuring maximum utilisation of the asset.
If you look at the workloads IndonesianCloud customers run, they range from large databases, time sensitive ERP systems, webservers, streaming TV CDN services, and they are even running Airline ERP operations for a local carrier… All of these VMs are from external paying customers by the way, and all of them are mission critical for those customers. On top of Virtual SAN some customers even have other storage services running. One of them for instance is running SoftNAS on top of Virtual SAN to offer shared file services to other VMs. Vast ranges of different applications, with different IO profiles and different needs but all satisfied by Virtual SAN. One thing that Neil stressed was that the ability to change the characteristics (failures to tolerate) specified in a profile was key for them, it allows for a lot of flexibility / agility.
I did wonder, with VSAN being relative new to the market, if they had concerns in terms of stability and recoverability. Neil actually showed me their comprehensive UAT Testing Plan and the results. They were very impressed by how VSAN handled these tests without any problem. Tests ranging from pulling drives, failing network interfaces and switches, through to removing full nodes from the cluster, all of these were performed whilst simultaneously running various burn-in benchmarks. No problems whatsoever were experienced, and as a matter of fact the environment has been running great in production (don’t curse it!!).
Key take away: Testing, Testing, Testing… Until you feel comfortable with what you designed and implemented!
When it comes to monitoring though, the team did want to see more details than what is provided out of the box, especially because it is a new platform they felt that this gave them a bit more insurance that things were indeed going well and it wasn’t just their perception. They worked with one of VMware’s rock stars (Iwan Rahabok) when it comes to VR Ops on creating custom dashboards with all sorts of data ranging from cache hit ratio to latency per spindle to ANY type of detail you want on a per VM level. Of course they start with generic dashboard which then allow you to drill down; any outlier is noted immediately and leveraging VR Ops and these custom dashboards, they can drill deep whenever they need. What I loved most is how relatively easy it is for them to extend their monitoring capabilities. During our WebEx Iwan felt he needed some more specifics on a per VM basis and added these details literally within minutes to VR Ops. IndonesianCloud has been kind enough to share a custom dashboard they created, where they can catch a rogue VM easily. In this dashboard, when a single VM, and it can be any VM, generates excessive IOPS it will trigger a spike right away in the overall dashboard.
I know I am heavily biased, but I was impressed. Not just with Virtual SAN, but even more so with how IndonesianCloud has implemented it. How it is changing the way IndonesianCloud manages their virtual estate and how it enables them to compete in today’s global market.
alex says
Is it possible to get the export of the dashboard to import in to my Vrops?
iwan 'e1' rahabok (@e1_ang) says
See this http://virtual-red-dot.info/follow-up-on-duncans-blog-on-indonesiancloud/
Alex says
Iwan, I couldn’t leave a reply on your blog as i couldn’t register, only login was available and i don’t have an account so I’m posting it here. Thank you for taking the time to help with this. Just bought your book 🙂
Iwan 'e1' Rahabok says
You are most welcomed. Posting here is fine too.
Hope you enjoy the book!
Alex says
Iwan – I imported the file in today. Seems to work ok except for the plotting graph its not working. Says “No data” for some reason. I attached a screen shot of it here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/d3dpr0oamlze6rh/vrealize.png?dl=0
Any ideas what it can be?
sorry for posting it here, i can’t register on your forum for some reason.
Iwan 'e1' Rahabok says
I don’t see the Reply button on your post, so I’m replying here.
You need to apply the super metric. See this http://virtual-red-dot.info/vrealize-operations-how-to-add-supermetric/
Alex says
ah that’s what i was missing. i just applied it and its still showing no data. definitely user error 🙂
on which resource do i need to apply it?
here is what i have:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3764zqq4jsshvt6/Screenshot%202015-06-05%2019.27.37.png?dl=0
iwan 'e1' rahabok (@e1_ang) says
Alex, you did the right thing. If it still does not show up, it could be the View not showing up the right metric.
1. Go to the list of View,
2. Find this View. Edit it.
3. In the counter section, make sure it’s the super metric counter.
If it does not work, email me at e1 at vmware. I feel bad to Duncan that I’m using his blog here to exchange info.
Alex says
It started working by itself. Thank you
Zach Dickinson says
Love to see this implementation, and it seems like a perfect fit for the application, skill set, and processes in place. We have vSAN in place and have not been able to break it, but I would say that we are a bit smarter than the average bear.
I participate in the vSAN forum and I am wondering about the positioning of vSAN in small 3 node configurations for small shops with low budget and not applicable skill sets. It seems like these deployments get into trouble. Thoughts?
Thank you, Zach.
Duncan Epping says
I guess that depends on how you design it. I believe that VSAN is definitely easier to manage than a normal storage system. If you design it in a decent way than I don’t see a problem myself. But of course with 3 nodes you are limited in terms of scale / availability… Still better than a 1 storage processor system 🙂
Iwan 'e1' Rahabok says
Hi Zach, regarding “Love to see this implementation, and it seems like a perfect fit for the application, skill set, and processes in place.”, I completely agree it would be awesome if IndonesianCloud can share at the global scale. They have vCNS + vCD + VSAN + vRealize Ops Insight + vSphere delivering great performance. See this for the VSAN performance https://twitter.com/IndonesianCloud/status/604239878671368192. While they would humbly say they learn from me, I think I’m the one that benefits from the engagement.
I’m flying to Jakarta on 16 June. Would discuss with Neil if he is open to share. I would respect them if they decline to reveal, as this is a key differentiator for them.
Finger crossed! 🙂
Neil Cresswell says
Re the dashboard, i will discuss with Iwan as its his creation.
Re wanting to see the implementation, connect with me on twitter and we can arrange something.
Neil
iwan 'e1' rahabok (@e1_ang) says
Thanks Neil for the speedy approval.
For Alex, I’d re-create it in VMware ASEAN lab as what you want is the template, not the content. The content also contains IndonesianCloud specific data, which I should not share as that certainly belongs to IndonesianCloud.
Alex says
Thank you Iwan, that is correct, i just want the template
Martin Gavanda says
It would be greate if there will be a new bundle “Essentials Plus +” Because you need typically 4 nodes – 3 in production with some kind of virtual storage (VSAN, HP VSA, …) and then one dedicated backup node with large NL disks but all in one VCSA enviroment
Duncan says
Great suggestion, I will provide it to the product team!
nilic says
Very interesting case study. Which FTT value was chosen and is it uniform across all VMs or something that the customer can choose as a part of the SLA?
Neil Cresswell says
We went with Stripe Size 5 and FTT of 1. For our “vip” customers, we also offer FTT 2, which gives a little extra protection, but then we charge them more..