I just created a simple playlist up on youtube which has most (if not all) vSAN sessions on there. If you are interested in vSAN simply have a look at the playlist and pick what you want to watch.
6.6
Sharing the “Top 10 things to know about vSAN” slides…
I was asked by a few people to share the slides for our Top 10 vSAN session at VMworld. Instead of sending the slides around via email I figured I would simply throw it up on slideshare and share it here.
Watch VMworld session “Top 10 Things to Know about vSAN #STO1264BE” for free …
I didn’t know, but apparently our session was a featured session at VMworld Europe. For those interested in our VMworld: Top 10 vSAN session there’s a “mini player” below of our European VMworld session. I somehow can’t get it in a proper size but still wanted to share it. Easier probably for you is to go to this link and simply watch the video there as it is displayed in a proper way. Awesome to see our session up there, and congrats Cormac on having 3 sessions in the top list!
List all “thick” swap files on vSAN
As some may know, on vSAN by default the swap file is a fully reserved file. This means that if you have a VM with 8GB of memory, vSAN will reserve 16GB capacity in total for it. 16GB? Yes, 16GB as the FTT=1 policy is also applied to it. In vSAN 6.2 we introduced the ability to have swap files created “thin” or “unreserved” I should probably say. You can simply do these by setting an advanced setting on each host in your cluster. (SwapThickProvisionDisabled) Now when you have set this and power-off/power-on your VMs the swap file is recreated and the swap file will be thin. Jase McCarty wrote a script that will set the setting for you in each host of your cluster, but the problem of course is how do you know which VM has the “new unreserved” swap file and which VM still has the fully reserved swap file. This is what a customer asked me last week.
I was sitting next to William at a session and I asked him this question. William went at it and knocked out a Python script which lists all VMs in a cluster which have a fully reserved swap file. Very useful for those who are moving to “unreserved / sparse” swap. This way you can figure out which VMs still need a reboot and reclaim that (unused) disk capacity.
Note, the “sparse” / “unreserved” swap files are only intended for environments which do not overcommit on memory. If you do overcommit on memory please ensure you have disk capacity available, as you will need the disk capacity as soon as the hypervisor wants to place memory pages in the swap file. If there’s no disk capacity available it will result in the VM failing.
Thanks William for knocking out this script so fast…
#STO1490BU : vSAN Vision – The Future of HCI
I am not able to attend many sessions, but wanted to add this one to my schedule. This session was hosted by Lee Caswell (VP Products Storage and Availability VMware), Christos Karamanolis (CTO Storage and Availability VMware) and the VP for Technical Solutions for Fox Dean Perrine.
Lee Caswell kicked off talking about the customer adoption and spoke about some of the fundaments of hyper-convergence and storage management. I think the numbers speak for itself that Lee spoke about, an expected marked size of 10.7 billion USD f for HCI in 2021, growing 3x faster than traditional storage systems. Key reason for it being: simplification of ops/architecture. And that is the reason we just hit 10k customers.
vSAN had 2 major releases in the past year, with some “firsts” during the past 12 months. Like first in HCI to support Intel Optane NVMe SSDs and HPE Synergy support etc. Today Lenovo released a new integrated HCI system called ThinkAgile VX. ServeTheHome has a great article on it, make sure to read it. What is the benefit over a ReadyNode? Well for instance that all support is coming from Lenovo, it is “appliance style”.
Jeff Hunter was pulled up to on stage to demo vSAN and the power of vSAN in terms of performance and ease of use. Jeff moved a VM from NFS to vSAN and shows what the performance increase was. More importantly in my opinion was how easy it was to move the VM by leveraging Policy Based Management. (Change policy and the correct datastore is presented, vSAN in this case.)
Next is announcement around “licensing”, single socket solution, 3 servers including all licenses for less than 25k. Great price point of which hopefully many SMBs and Enterprises which need a ROBO/Edge solution can benefit from.
Dean Perrine is up next and is discussing what Fox is using vSAN for and why. They replaced their NetApp FlexPod environment with Cisco UCS C220 with vSAN. Main reason for replace the FlexPod was the need to reduce complexity, lower power consumption while increasing performance. Fox had problems around Database performance, and it was critical to support this. The environment is used to run Mission-critical video applications like their broadcasting system and channels like Fox Sport etc. In other words, events like the Superbowl are hosted on vSAN as an infrastructure. Currently running across multiple sites leveraging vSAN, NSX and SRM to provide resiliency and flexibility need to run important workloads like this in a highly resilient fashion.
Up next Christos Karamanolis, so it is going to get technical. First up discussing performance, most critical for enterprise customer is predictable performance. Christos shows a benchmark that the vSAN team ran, which was a Stock Brokerage (TPC-E like) workload. What is shown is consistent latency below a millisecond across tests and database sizes. As Christos emphasizes, very important for customers like Fox, as large latency spikes could easily disrupt broadcasting large events.
Christos next demoes the Performance Diagnostic feature that is part of vSAN 6.6.1. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch my demo on youtube. The feature in short analyses benchmarks and provides you tips and hints around how to improve your benchmark or your vSAN configuration from a policy, software or hardware point of view.
Next Christos discusses vSAN usage for VMware Cloud on AWS. What was interesting here, is what Christos mentioned around scaling: independently scale vSAN / Storage from Compute. He didn’t add much detail, so I cannot share much more than this, so I will leave it up to your imagination.
Storage for Cloud Native Apps is up last. What if you have Kubernetes or are using Docker? Can you leverage vSAN or something else? Meet Project Hatchway. Which is a combination of a Docker Volume Service and the vSphere Cloud Provider for Kubernetes. Drivers for storage, natively integrated for instance with Kubo. Leveraging Policy Based Management control/manage/monitor your persistent storage for you containarized workloads. There’s a ton of detail to be found on StorageHub here. Something else that will be introduced to optimize vSAN for workloads like Cassandra / MongoDB etc is the ability to have “storage affinity” for your workloads. In other words, data is co-located with the VM and we will not move the VM around is locality is key for these workloads. You can also imagine these workloads to be deployed with a low “failures to tolerate” level as availability is provided by the app.
And that was it. Great session, thanks for that. Looking forward to sitting in on some of the other “vision/futures” vSAN related sessions.