cloud

Announcing VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery! (VCDR)

Duncan Epping · Sep 30, 2020 · 2 Comments

Most of you probably saw the announcements around the acquisition of Datrium not too long ago. One of the major drivers for that acquisition was the Disaster Recovery solution which Datrium developed. This week at VMworld this service was announced as a new VMware disaster recovery option. The service is named VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery, and it provides the ability to replicate workloads from on-prem into cloud storage, and recover from cloud storage into VMware Cloud on AWS! The three key pillars of the service are ease of use, fast recovery, cloud economics.

The solution is extensively covered in three VMworld sessions (HCI2876, HCI2886, HCI2865). I have watched all three and will provide a short summary here. What capabilities does VMware Cloud DR (VCDR) provide and why is VMware heading into this space?

The why was well explained by Mark Chuang in HCI2876, customers are saying that:

“DR is very complex and expensive to manage, and I can’t add IT Headcount”
“Our data grows 10-15% every year, with physical DR it is hard to accommodate the growth in the datacenter to meet the needs”
“We only test full DR once a year because it is disruptive. Any time there is a major change, how can we know it still works? It is a huge issue!”

I guess that makes it clear why VMware is interested in this space, it is a huge problem for customers and the solution typically comes at a high cost. VMware has always been in the business of solving complex solutions in preferably a simple way, and that is exactly what VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery delivers, a simple solution at a relatively low cost.

So what does it bring from a feature/functionality stance?

it all starts with cloud economics, to which ease-of-use also contributes, in my opinion. VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery is super simple to configure and it replicates data to “cheap and deep” cloud storage. This ensures that the cost can be kept low, and note that all of the typical cost that comes with cloud storage (network etc) are all included in the service offering by VMware. The challenge however typically with cloud storage is that it is relatively slow when it comes to restoring, but this is where the “on-demand” capabilities come into play. VMware Cloud DR provides the ability to instantly power-on workloads through a live mount option, without the need to convert the stored data back to a VM format.

When configuring the VMware Cloud DR solutions you will need to install/configure a DRaaS Connector on-prem. This on-prem Connector connects you to the SaaS platform and will provide the required details to the SaaS Orchestrator, note that you can have multiple DRaaS connectors for resiliency and performance reasons. When the connection is configured you will then be able to create “Protection Groups” and “DR Plans”. Those who have worked with Site Recovery Manager will recognize the terms. For those who haven’t:

Protection Groups – These groups list the workloads which will be protected by VMware Cloud DR. Of course you can define the protection schedule, basically how many snapshots need to be shipped remote cloud storage per day/week/month.
DR Plans – These plans list workloads that would need to be failed over when the plan is triggered, and for instance, include the order in which the workloads need to be powered on. Also, if workloads need to get a different IP address in the cloud, then you can specify this here also.

Of course besides creating protection groups and DR plans you have the ability to test and failover the workloads in those plans, again, very similar to what Site Recovery Manager offers. Before I forget, you will have the option of course to select the snapshot you want to recover from. So you can go back to any point in time. What is unique here is that VMs are powered without (initially) moving data from cloud storage to your VMware Cloud on AWS. It basically mounts an NFS share from the SaaS platform and the scale-out file system ensures that the VMs can be instantly be powered on. After you have tested the recovery you can then decide to migrate the VMs to your SDDC, or you can of course also discard the workloads if that is something you desire. Last but not least, of course, you also have the ability to replicate back to on-prem, so that you can bring your workloads back whenever you have recovered your environment from the disaster that occurred and you are ready to run those workloads on-prem again.

Now there are many more details, but I am not going to share those in this post, I may do a couple of additional blogs at a future time. I hope the above gives a good overview of what the offering will provide. For more details, I would recommend watching the VMworld sessions on this topic (HCI2876, HCI2886, HCI2865). The last thing I want to share though is where the solution will be available, or at least what is being planned. As shown below, the offering should be available in multiple regions soon.

Joined GigaOm’s David S. Linthicum on a podcast about cloud, HCI and Edge.

Duncan Epping · Oct 14, 2019 · Leave a Comment

A while ago I had the pleasure to join David S. Linthicum from GigaOm on their Voices in Cloud Podcast. It is a 22 minute podcast where we discuss various VMware efforts in the cloud space, edge computing and of course HCI. You can find the episode here, where they also have the full transcript for those who prefer to read instead of listen to a guy with a Dutch accent. It was a fun experience for sure, I always enjoy joining podcast’s and talking tech… So if you run a podcast and are looking for a guest, don’t hesitate to reach out!

Of course you can also find Voices in Cloud on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, and other platforms.

How Virtual SAN enables IndonesianCloud to remain competitive!

Duncan Epping · Jun 2, 2015 ·

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.