Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

VMworld Reveals: DRS 2.0 (#HBI2880BU)

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At VMworld, various cool new technologies were previewed. In this series of articles, I will write about some of those previewed technologies. Unfortunately, I can’t cover them all as there are simply too many. This article is about DRS 2.0, which was session HBI2880BU. For those who want to see the session, you can find it here. This session was presented by Adarsh Jagadeeshwaran and Sai Inabattini. Please note that this is a summary of a session which is discussing a Technical Preview, this feature/product may never be released, and this preview does not represent a commitment of any kind, and this feature (or it’s functionality) is subject to change. Now let’s dive into it, what is DRS 2.0 all about?

The session started with an intro, DRS was first introduced in 2006. Since then datacenters, and workloads (cloud-native architectures), have changed a lot. DRS, however, has remained largely the same over the past 10 years. What we need is a resource management engine which is more workload-centric than it is cluster-centric, that is why we are planning on introducing DRS 2.0

What has changed? In general, the changes can be placed in 3 categories:

  • New cost-benefit model
  • Support for new resources and devices
  • Faster and scalable

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VMworld Reveals: VMware Cluster Memory (OCTO2746BU)

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At VMworld, various cool new technologies were previewed. In this series of articles, I will write about some of those previewed technologies. Unfortunately, I can’t cover them all as there are simply too many. This article is about VMware Cluster Memory, which was session OCTO2746BU. For those who want to see the session, you can find it here. I first learned about VMware Cluster Memory at our VMware internal R&D conference in May this year, and immediately got excited about it. Please note that this is a summary of a session which is discussing a Technical Preview, this feature/product may never be released, and this preview does not represent a commitment of any kind, and this feature (or it’s functionality) is subject to change. Now let’s dive into it, what is Cluster Memory?

Well, it is exactly what you would expect it to be. Providing the ability to create a pool of cross-host memory resources. Now in order to do this, the first problem that needs to be looked at is the network. As mentioned in the session, the ratio of network to memory latency has lowered significantly. In 1997 the ratio was 1000 roughly, right now it is below 10. Meaning that network latency has lowered from milliseconds to low microseconds. Today to reach these low microseconds latencies technologies like RDMA will need to be considered. This change is very important for the Cluster Memory feature being discussed. Also very important, is the fact that RDMA is affordable, and this means it will be coming to a data center near you soon. A huge difference compared to years ago.

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VMworld Session Summary: #HCI1207BU HCI Management: Current and Future

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I wasn’t able to sit in this session in person, but fortunately, the recording was out within a day. This session has been one of my favorite vSAN related sessions in the past couple of years, and it definitely is one of my favorite sessions this year. Again presented by Christian Dickmann and JunChi Zhang.

In this session, JunChi and Christian will go over some of VMware’s ideas around what HCI Management should look like in the future (HCI1207BU). Christian started by providing an overview of what HCI/vSAN is about today. Christian explained that the world of vSAN was relatively simple in the early years, but today the infrastructures where vSAN is being deployed, and the use-cases, are getting more complex. More and more customers are deploying in various locations and want to manage these solutions in a consistent and efficient way.

The topics which were covered in the session are Lifecycle Management, Intelligent Operations and Cloud Native Apps. JunChi started with Lifecycle Management. JunChi talked about what the vSAN team developed to make life easier when it comes to deploying vSphere. For instance, it is possible to specify in the vCenter Installer that vCenter needs to run on a new vSAN cluster and then the installer will create a single node vSAN cluster to ensure this is possible. Also, the Cluster Quickstart Guide was added, a great way to create and configure a vSphere cluster end to end. [Read more…] about VMworld Session Summary: #HCI1207BU HCI Management: Current and Future

Runecast Analyzer 3.0!

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This week I had a brief conversation with the folks from Runecast. I have been following them since day 1 and they have made a big impression on me from the start. During the conversation the Runecast folks shared with me that Runecast Analyzer 3.0 was going to be announced today and they gave a quick overview and demo of what would be announced and included in 3.0. They also quickly went over the functionality that was added the past year, some things which really were well adopted by customers were HIPAA and DISA-STIG compliance feature. Also Horizon support and security auto-remediation capabilities. Another thing that customers really appreciated were the upgradability simulations (beta feature), where Runecast validates your environment against the HCL.

Stan (Runecast CEO) also mentioned that this year Runecast signed up a customer with over 10k hosts, as you can imagine a lot of the work in the past 12 months was focused on scalability and performance at that level of scale. But that is not what today’s announcement is about, today Runecast is announcing 3.0. In 3.0 there are some great enhancements to the platform again. First of all, production-ready HCL Analysis for vSphere and vSAN. On top of that, the ESXi Upgrade Simulation is now GA, and the log analysis has been improved. Runecast is also introducing a new H5 Client plugin-in with new widgets and a dark theme! Just look at it below, you have got to love the dark theme!

But as I mentioned, there’s more to it than just the H5 Client Plugin, the HCL Analysis and the Upgrade Simulation are two key features if you ask me. During the demo, Stan showed me the below screen, and I think that by itself makes it worth testing out Runecast. It simply shows you in one overview if your environment is compliant to the HCL or not, and if it is not compliant, which combination of firmware and driver you should be using to make it compliant. In this example, the driver should be upgraded to 2.0.42. A very useful feature if you ask me. Note that this will work for both vSphere and vSAN and all components needed to run either of these.

Just as useful is the Upgrade Simulation by the way, are you considering upgrading? Make sure to run this first so you know if you will end up in a supported state or not?! And some of you may say that VMware has similar capabilities in their product, but the Runecast appliance doesn’t need to be connected to the internet at all times. You can regularly update the dataset and run these compliancy and upgrade checks (or any of the other checks) regularly offline. Especially for customers where internet access is challenging (dark sites) this is very helpful.

All in all, some very useful updates to an already very useful solution.

vSAN Deep Dive book available in traditional chinese

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It took a while, but it is my pleasure to announce that the publisher DrMaster just published the Traditional Chinese version of “VMware vSAN 6.7 U1 Deep Dive”. For those who would like to get a copy of the book in Traditional Chinese, there are a couple of ways to pick it up:

I would like to thank the folks at DrMaster for taking on the effort of translating and publishing it!