VMworld Reveals: HCI Present and Futures (#HCI2733BU)

Duncan Epping · Sep 5, 2019 · 1 Comment

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 HCI / vSAN futures, which was session HCI2733BU. For those who want to see the session, you can find it here. This session was presented by Srinivasan Murari and Vijay Ramachandran. Please note that this is a summary of a session which is discussing the roadmap of VMware’s HCI offering, these features 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 VMware planning for the future of HCI? Some of the features discussed during this session were also discussed last year, I wrote a summary here for those interested.

Vijay kicked off the session with an overview of the current state of HCI and more specifically VMware vSAN and Cloud Foundation. Some of the use cases were discussed, and it was clear that today the majority of VMware HCI solutions are running business-critical apps on top. More and more customers are looking to adopt full stack HCI as they need an end-to-end story that includes compute, networking, storage, security and business continuity for all applications running on top of it. As such VMware’s HCI solution has been focussed on lifecycle management and automation of all aspects of the SDDC. This is also the reason why VMware is currently the market leader in this space with over 20k customers and a market share of over 41%.

VMworld Reveals: Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity enhancements! (#HCI2894BU and #HBI3109BU)

Duncan Epping · Sep 4, 2019 · 1 Comment

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 enhancements in the business continuity/disaster recovery space. There were 2 sessions where futures were discussed, namely HCI2894BU and HBI3109BU. Please note that this is a brief summary of those sessions, and these are discussing a Technical Preview, these features/products may never be released, and these previews do 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 can you expect for disaster recovery in the future?

The first session I watched was HCI2894BU, this was all about Site Recovery Manager. I think the most interesting part is the future support for Virtual Volumes (vVols) for Site Recovery Manager. It may sound like something simple, but it isn’t. When the version of SRM ships that supports vVols keep in mind that your vVol capable storage system also needs to support it. At day 1 HPe Nimble, HPe 3PAR and Pure Storage will support it and Dell EMC and NetApp are actively working on support. The requirements are that the storage system needs to be vVols 2.0 compliant and support VASA 3.0. Before they dove into the vVols implementation, some history was shared and the current implementation. I found it interesting to know that SRM has over 25.000 customers and has protected more than 3.000.000 workloads over the last decade.

VMworld Reveals: vMotion innovations

Duncan Epping · Sep 3, 2019 · 1 Comment

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 enhancements that will be introduced in the future to vMotion, the was session HBI1421BU. For those who want to see the session, you can find it here. This session was presented by Arunachalam Ramanathan and Sreekanth Setty. 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 can you expect for vMotion in the future.

The session starts with a brief history of vMotion and how we are capable today to vMotion VMs with 128 vCPUs and 6 TB of memory. The expectation is though that vSphere in the future will support 768 vCPUs and 24 TB of memory. Crazy configuration if you ask me, that is a proper Monster VM.

VMworld Reveals: DRS 2.0 (#HBI2880BU)

Duncan Epping · Sep 3, 2019 · 9 Comments

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

VMworld Reveals: VMware Cluster Memory (OCTO2746BU)

Duncan Epping · Sep 2, 2019 · 6 Comments

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.