There are a couple of sessions I want to plug as they were really successful during VMworld US and are worth attending in my opinion! Now mind most of these are not beginner sessions!

Yes I know… a lot of great sessions and I probably missed out on a few. Considering my session is scheduled on Thursday I am hoping to attend some of these and possible live blog them. The “regular” show runs from Tuesday morning until Thursday 16:00. The Monday before is Partnerday / TAMday / Education-Instructor Day. So if you are a partner, TAM customer or a VMware certified instructor make you sure you sign up for these! Another thing I wanted to point out are the keynote sessions:

Tuesday – 15.30 – 17.00
Wednesday – 09.00 – 10.00
Thursday – 09.00 – 10.30

I’ve been told that Steve Herrod will be speaking on Tuesday this year… be prepared for some cool demos!

** update: time slot changed for our session **

• VMware Appblast –> New project which allows you to start any app in a HTML5 compatible browser on any device.
• VXLAN –> Provides a Layer 2 abstraction to virtual machines, independent of where they are located. (quote from Steve’s article)
• VMware Octopus –> Probably best described as an enterprise level “Dropbox” service

After the keynote I headed over to the VMware Storage Booth and introduced many attendees to the cool new storage features which are part of vSphere 5. There were a couple of things which stood out for me, everyone loved Storage DRS! Profile-Driven Storage is hot and the changes in VMFS-5 were very very welcome.

Next stop was the infamous #VSP1425 aka “Ask the Expert vBloggers”. We had roughly 200 attendees. The panel was formed as follows: Scott Lowe, Frank Denneman, Chad Sakac and I. It was moderated by Rick Scherer (Thanks for buzzing out Chad ) and as we had an empty seat we decided to pull up a person from the audience… I forgot the name of this person (please identify yourself), but once again thanks for joining this session and thanks for your great contribution, much appreciated! This session did extremely well in my opinion. We had great questions from the audience but especially the interaction between the panel members worked great. Definitely something we will do again next year. (We scored 4.8 out of 5 on the survey.)

Next up was a meeting with Tintri. We met up with Kieran Harty and Pratik Wadher and got a demo of the current platform and discussed futures. I already discussed their product in-depth on my blog so I will not repeat our whole discussion or my thoughts. I just want to add that I was impressed by their UI now that we got to play around with it and I expect them to do really well in Europe due to the simplicity of the set up.

After having random chats with other vendors we (when I say we I mean Frank and I) headed over to my Group Discussion (#GD43). Now this was the first Group Discussion I ever hosted… I LOVED IT! This is the best format for a session and can I say thanks to Richard Garsthagen who came up with this excellent concept! I had prepared a couple of slides with questions around VMware Clustering solutions. These questions formed the basis of the discussion. The participation of the audience was excellent. Frank helped driving this session and one of our lead HA engineers, Keith Farkas, joined as well… Believe me when I say that Keith was happy with all the excellent feedback we received from the audience during this session. Next year, and in Copenhagen, I want to do more sessions like these… This is what VMworld should be like, small discussion sessions with lots of interaction with the audience!

Before I head out to breakfast there are a couple of things I would like to mention… Did everyone see PowerCLI-Man? I don’t know who he is or where he all of a sudden came from, but he is my new favorite super hero! What an amazing guy, dropping in on a session hosted by Luc Dekens and Alan Renouf while you know he is fighting operational wars on a day to day basis… amazing. (He even has Facebook?!)

I also forgot to mention VMworld TV in my “Day 1″ report… Sorry Richard here you go. In all seriousness check the VMworld TV youtube channel and watch the great interviews and summaries that Richard and his team produced. It is a great way of getting an impression of what is going on at VMworld. Believe me, it is a madhouse.

Another day at VMworld about to start… hopefully I will have bit more time to watch some sessions myself today. If you are attending I would ask all of you to please fill out the session surveys. Keep in mind that all speakers, and the VMworld organizational, love to feedback on what worked well and what can be improved. Please provide constructive feedback, keep in mind that many of the people presenting at VMworld are just technical people like you and me and not professional “marketing” type speakers! My respect to each and everyone of you who does not do this on a day-to-day basis and presented a session at VMworld. I know it is a huge step and I know it is not easy to get up in front of literally hundreds of people!

• vMotion Architecture, Performance, and Best Practices in VMware vSphere 5

  http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10202

• Understanding Memory Management in VMware vSphere 5

  http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10206

• Performance Implications of Storage I/O Control–Enabled NFS Datastores in VMware vSphere 5

  http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10207

• Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Performance on vSphere 5

  http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10204

• Zimbra Collaboration Server Performance on VMware vSphere 5

  http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10203

• Host Power Management in VMware vSphere 5

  http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10205

• VMware vCenter Update Manager 5.0 Performance and Best Practices

  http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10208

• VMware ESXi 5.0 (Build 469512)
• VMware vCenter 5.0 (Build 456005) (vCenter Server Appliance also available as of today (26/08))
• VMware Data Recovery 2.0 (Build 433157)
• vSphere Storage Appliance 1.0
• VMware vShield Zones for vSphere 5 (Build 216288)
• Documentation link (docs also available in epub and kindle format!)
  • What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.0
  • VMware vSphere 5.0 Release Notes
• Some tools which will come in handy:
  • VMware vSphere PowerCLI 5.0
  • VMware vCenter Update Manager PowerCLI
  • VMware GuestAppMonitor SDK (HA Application Monitoring)
  • VMware vSphere Management Assistant 5.0 (vMA)
  • VMware vSphere CLI
• vSphere 5 Compatible and Updated Products:
  • vCenter Operations 1.0.1 (release notes)
  • VMware vCenter Capacity IQ 1.5.2 (release notes)

Evaluation Guides:

• VMware vSphere 5 Evaluation Guide – Volume One
• VMware vSphere 5 Evaluation Guide – Volume Two – Advanced Storage Features
• VMware vSphere 5 Evaluation Guide – Volume Three – Advanced Networking Features
• VMware vSphere 5 Evaluation Guide – Volume Four – Auto Deploy
• VMware Data Recovery Evaluation Guide

What’s new whitepapers (release at launch last month):

• What’s New in vSphere 5.0
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.0: VMware vCenter
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.0: Platform Whitepaper
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.0: Performance Whitepaper
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.0: Storage Whitepaper
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.0: Networking Whitepaper
• What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.0: Availability Whitepaper
• What’s New in VMware Data Recovery 2.0 Technical Whitepaper
• VMware vSphere Storage Appliance Technical Whitepaper
• What’s New in VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5 Technical Whitepaper
• What’s New in VMware vCloud Director 1.5 Technical Whitepaper

By the way, did you know there were over 140 new features in vSphere 5.0? Check out my article on the VMware vSphere Blog for a full list and for a nice contest / challenge!

Changelog:
edit 1 – added links to VSA, Zones and Data Recovery)
edit 2 -  added eval guide links
edit 3 – added different management tools etc
edit 4 – added a list with compatible and updated products

I’ve seen multiple people mentioning this feature and saw William posting a hack on how to fool vSphere (feature is part of vSphere 5 to be clear) into thinking it has access to SSD disks while this might not be the case. One thing I noticed is that there seems to be a misunderstanding of what this swap to host cache actually is / does and that is probably due to the fact that some tend to call it swap to SSD. Yes it is true, ultimately your VM would be swapping to SSD but it is not just a swap file on SSD or better said it is NOT a regular virtual machine swap file on SSD.

When I logged in to my environment first thing I noticed was that my SSD backed datastore was not tagged as SSD. First thing I wanted to do was tag it as SSD, as mentioned William already described this in his article and it is well documented in our own documentation as well so I followed it. This is what I did to get it working:

• Check the NAA ID in the vSphere UI
• Opened up an SSH session to my ESXi host
• Validate which SATP claimed the device:
  esxcli storage nmp device list
  In my case: VMW_SATP_ALUA_CX
• Verify it is currently not recognized as SSD by typing the following command:
  esxcli storage core device list -d naa.60060160916128003edc4c4e4654e011
  should say: “Is SSD : False”
• Set “Is SSD” to true:
  esxcli storage nmp satp rule add -s VMW_SATP_ALUA_CX  –device naa.60060160916128003edc4c4e4654e011  –option=enable_ssd
• I reloaded claim rules and ran them using the following commands:
  esxcli storage core claimrule load
  esxcli storage core claimrule run
• Validate it is set to true:
  esxcli storage core device list -d naa.60060160916128003edc4c4e4654e011
• Now the device should be listed as SSD

Next would be to enable the feature… When you go to your host and click on the “Configuration Tab” there should be a section called “Host Cache Configuration” on the left. When you’ve correctly tagged your SSD it should look like this:

Please note that I already had a VM running on the device and hence the reason it is showing some of the space as being in use on this device, normally I would recommend using a drive dedicated for swap. Next step would be enabling the feature and you can do that by opening the pop-up window (right click your datastore and select “Properties”). This is what I did:

• Tick “Allocate space for host cache”
• Select “Custom size”
• Set the size to 25GB
• Click “OK”

Now there is no science to this value as I just wanted to enable it and test the feature. What happened when we enabled it? We allocated space on this LUN so something must have been done with it? I opened up the datastore browser and I noticed a new folder was created on this particular VMFS volume:

Not only did it create a folder structure but it also created 25 x 1GB .vswp files. Now before we go any further, please note that this is a per host setting. Each host will need to have its own Host Cache assigned so it probably makes more sense to use a local SSD drive instead of a SAN volume. Some of you might say but what about resiliency? Well if your host fails the VMs will need to restart anyway so that data is no longer relevant, in terms of disk resiliency you should definitely consider a RAID-1 configuration. Generally speaking SAN volumes are much more expensive than local volumes and using local volumes also removes the latency caused by the storage network. Compared to the latency of a SSD (less than 100 μs), network latency can be significant. So lets recap that in a nice design principal:

Basic design principle
Using “Swap to host cache” will severely reduce the performance impact of VMkernel swapping. It is recommended to use a local SSD drive to elimate any network latency and to optimize for performance.

How does it work? Well fairly straight forward actually. When there is severe memory pressure and the hypervisor needs to swap memory pages to disk it will swap to the .vswp files on the SSD drive instead. Each of these, in my case, 25 files are shared amongst the VMs running on this host. Now you will probably wonder how you know if the host is using this Host Cache or not, that can of course simply be validated by looking at the performance statistics within vCenter. It contains a couple of new metrics of which “Swap in from host cache” and “Swap out to host cache” (and the “rate”…) metrics are most important to monitor. (Yes, esxtop has metrics as well to monitor it namely LLSWR/s  and LLSWW/s)

What if you want to resize your Host Cache and it is already in use? Well simply said the Host Cache is optimized to allow for this scenario. If the Host Cache is completely filled memory pages will need to be copied to the regular .vswp file. This could mean that the process takes longer than expected and of course it is not a recommended practice as it will decrease performance for your VMs as these pages more than likely at some point will need to be swapped in. Resizing however can be done on the fly, no need to vMotion away your VMs. Just adjust the slider and wait for the process to complete. If you decide to complete remove all host cache for what ever reason than all relevant data will be migrated to the regular .vswp.

What if the Host Cache is full? Normally it shouldn’t even reach that state, but when you run out of space in the host cache pages will be migrated from your host cache to your regular vswap file and it is first in first out in this case, which should be the right policy for most workloads. Now chances of course of having memory pressure to the extend where you fill up a local SSD are small, but it is good to realize what the impact is. If you are going down the path of local SSD drives with Host Cache enabled and will be overcommitting it might be good to do the math and ensure that you have enough cache available to keep these pages in cache rather than on rotating media. I prefer to keep it simple though and would probably recommend to equal the size of your hosts memory. In the case of a host with 128GB RAM that would be a 128GB SSD. Yes this might be overkill, but the price difference between 64GB and 128GB is probably neglect-able.

Basic design principle
Monitor swap usage. Although “Swap to host cache” will reduce the impact of VMkernel swapping it will not eliminate it. Take your expected consolidation ratio into account including your HA (N-X) strategy and size accordingly. Or keep it simple and just use the same size as physical memory.

One interesting use case could be to place all regular swap files on very cheap shared storage (RAID5 of SATA drives) or even local SATA storage using the “VM swapfile location” (aka. Host local swap) feature. Then install a host cache for any host these VMs can be migrated to. This should give you the performance of a SSD while maintaining most of the cost saving of the cheap storage. Please note that the host cache is a per-host feature. Hence in the time of a vMotion all data from the cache will need to be transferred to the destination host. This will impact the time a vMotion takes. Unless your vMotions are time critical, this should not be an issue though. I have been told that VMware will publish a KB article with advise how to buy the right SSDs for this feature.

Summarizing, Swap to SSD is what people have been calling this feature and that is not what it is. This is a mechanism that caches memory pages to SSD and should be referred to as “Swap to host cache”. Depending on how you do the math all memory pages can be swapped to and from SSD. If there is insufficient space available memory pages will move over to the regular .vswp file. Use local SSD drives to avoid any latency associated with your storage network and to minimize costs.

First of all, and this is probably the most heard complaint, is that the upcoming Tintri VMstore devices will be available in a dual controller configuration which makes it more interesting to many of you probably. Especially the more up-time sensitive environments will appreciate this, and who isn’t sensitive about up-time these days? Especially in a virtualized environment where many workloads share a single device this improvement is more than welcome! The second thing which I really liked is how they enhanced their dashboard. Now this seems like a minor thing but I can ensure you that it will make your life a lot easier. Let me dump a screenshot first and then discuss what you are looking at.

The screenshot shows the per VM latency statistics… Now what is exciting about that? Well if you look at the bottom you will see the different colors and each of those represent a specific type of latency. Lets assume your VM experiences 40ms of latency and your customer starts complaining. The main thing to figure out is what causes this slow down. (Or in many cases, who can I blame?) Is your network saturated? Is the host swamped? Is it your storage device? In order to identify these types of problems you would need a monitor tool and most likely multiple tools to pinpoint the issue. Tintri decided to hook in to vCenter and just pull down the various metrics and use this to create the nice graph that you see in the screenshot. This allows you to quickly pinpoint the issue from a single pane of glass. And yes you can also expect this as a new tab within vCenter.

Another great feature which Tintri offers is the ability to realign your VMDKs. Tintri does this, unlike most solutions out there, from the “inside”. With that meaning that their solution is incorporated into their appliance and not a separate tool which needs to run against each and every VM. Smart solution which can and will safe you a lot of time.

It’s all great and amazing isn’t it? Or are there any caveats? One thing I still feel needs to be addressed is replication. With this next release it is not available yet but is that a problem now that SRM offers vSphere Replication? I guess that relieves some of the immediate pressure but I would still like to see a native Tintri’s solution providing a-sync and sync replication. Yes it will take time but I would expect though that Tintri is working on this. I tried to persuade them to make a statement yesterday they unfortunately couldn’t say anything with regards to a timeline / roadmap.

Definitely a booth I will be checking out at VMworld.

So now here is your chance to be part of this great session!  Do you have a question that you’d like the experts to answer? Simply fill out the form below and your question will be added to the queue! We expect you will have great questions during the session but just in case the room goes silent we would like to have a couple of questions to get us started… although I don’t doubt for a second that during the introduction Chad aka “Chat” Sakac will get started right away

See you in Vegas, make sure to attend this session as panel sessions like these don’t happen often!

1. Live Blog: Raising The Bar, Part V
2. 5 is the magic number
3. Hot of the press: vSphere 5.0 Clustering Technical Deepdive
4. vSphere 5.0: Storage DRS introduction
5. vSphere 5.0: What has changed for VMFS?
6. vSphere 5.0: Storage vMotion and the Mirror Driver
7. Punch Zeros
8. Storage DRS interoperability
9. vSphere 5.0: UNMAP (vaai feature)
10. vSphere 5.0: ESXCLI
11. ESXi 5: Suppressing the local/remote shell warning
12. Testing VM Monitoring with vSphere 5.0
13. What’s new?
14. vSphere 5:0 vMotion Enhancements
15. vSphere 5.0: vMotion enhancement, tiny but very welcome!
16. ESXi 5.0 and Scripted Installs
17. vSphere 5.0: Storage initiatives
18. Scale Up/Out and impact of vRAM?!? (part 2)
19. HA Architecture Series – FDM (1/5)
20. HA Architecture Series – Primary nodes? (2/5)
21. HA Architecture Series – Datastore Heartbeating (3/5)
22. HA Architecture Series – Restarting VMs (4/5)
23. HA Architecture Series – Advanced Settings (5/5)
24. VMFS-5 LUN  Sizing
25. vSphere 5.0 HA: Changes in admission control
26. vSphere 5 – Metro vMotion
27. SDRS and Auto-Tiering solutions – The Injector

Once again if there it something you feel I should be covering let me know and I’ll try to dig in to it. Preferably something that none of the other blogs have published of course.

After months of hard work the moment is finally there, the release of our new book: vSphere 5.0 Clustering Technical Deepdive! When we started working, or better said, planning an update of the book we never realized the amount of work required. Be aware that this is not a minor update. This book covers HA (full rewrite as HA has been rewritten for 5.0), DRS (mostly rewritten to focus on resource management) and Storage DRS (new!). Besides these three major pillars we also decided to add what we call supporting deepdives. The supporting deepdives added are: vMotion, Storage vMotion, Storage I/O Control and EVC. This resulted in roughly 50% more content (totaling 348 pages) than the previous book, also worth noting that every single diagram has been recreated and are they cool or what?

Before I will give you the full details I want to thanks a couple of people who have helped us tremendously and without whom this publication would not have been possible. First of all I would like to thank my co-author Frank “Mr Visio” Denneman for all his hard work. Frank and I would also like to thank our VMware management team for supporting us on this project. Doug “VEEAM” Hazelman thanks for writing the foreword! A special thanks goes out to our technical reviewers and editors: Doug Baer, Keith Farkas and Elisha Ziskind (HA Engineering), Anne Holler, Irfan Ahmad and Rajesekar Shanmugam (DRS and SDRS Engineering), Puneet Zaroo (VMkernel scheduling), Ali Mashtizadeh and Gabriel Tarasuk-Levin (vMotion and Storage vMotion Engineering), Doug Fawley and Divya Ranganathan (EVC Engineering). Thanks for keeping us honest and contributing to this book.

As promised in the multiple discussions we had around our 4.1 HA/DRS book we wanted to make sure to offer multiple options straight away. While Frank finalized the printed copy I worked on formatting the ebook. Besides the black&white printed version we are also offering a full color version of the book and a Kindle version. The black&white sells for $ 29.95, the full color for $ 49.95 and the Kindle for an ultra cheap price: $ 9.95. Needless to say that we recommend the Kindle version. It is cheap, full color and portable or should we say virtual… who doesn’t love virtual? On a sidenote, we weren’t planning on doing a black and white release but due to the extremely high production costs of the full color print we decided to offer it as an extra service. Before I give the full description here are the direct links to where you can buy the book. (Please note that Amazon hasn’t listed our book yet, seems like an indexing issue, should be resolved soon hopefully For those who cannot wait to order the printed copy check-out Createspace or Comcol.

Amazon:
eBook (Kindle) – $ 9.99 (price might vary based on location as amazon charges extra for delivery)
Black & White Paper – $ 29.95
Full Color Paper – $ 49.95

Createspace:
Black & White Paper – 29.95
Full Color Paper – 49.95

For the EMEA folks comcol.nl offered to distribute it again, paper black & white can be found here, and full color here.

VMware vSphere 5.0 Clustering Technical Deepdive zooms in on three key components of every VMware based infrastructure and is by no means a “how to” guide. It covers the basic steps needed to create a vSphere HA and DRS cluster and to implement Storage DRS. Even more important, it explains the concepts and mechanisms behind HA, DRS and Storage DRS which will enable you to make well educated decisions. This book will take you in to the trenches of HA, DRS and Storage DRS and will give you the tools to understand and implement e.g. HA admission control policies, DRS resource pools, Datastore Clusters and resource allocation settings. On top of that each section contains basic design principles that can be used for designing, implementing or improving VMware infrastructures and fundamental supporting features like vMotion, Storage I/O Control and much more are described in detail for the very first time.

This book is also the ultimate guide to be prepared for any HA, DRS or Storage DRS related question or case study that might be presented during VMware VCDX, VCP and or VCAP exams.

Coverage includes:
- HA node types
- HA isolation detection and response
- HA admission control
- VM Monitoring
- HA and DRS integration
- DRS imbalance algorithm
- Resource Pools
- Impact of reservations and limits
- CPU Resource Scheduling
- Memory Scheduler
- DPM
- Datastore Clusters
- Storage DRS algorithm
- Influencing SDRS recommendations

Be prepared to dive deep!

Pick it up, leave a comment and of course feel free to make those great mugshots again and ping them over via Facebook or our Twitter accounts! For those looking to buy in bulk (> 20) contact clusteringdeepdive@gmail.com.

We have observed some of our customers have not virtualized the clustered workloads and thus we want to understand their reasons for not doing so. Also, for the clustered workloads that have been virtualized we want to learn of some of the factors that are preventing our customers from replacing the existing clustering software with VMware HA. Thus, we seek some information about your clustered setup to better understand some of your challenges. This would help us improve VMware HA in areas important to you. Kindly take a few minutes to complete this survey.

http://tinyurl.com/3pca8wn