• VMware vCloud Director Appliance:
  username = root
  password = Default0
• VMware vCloud Director Appliance/Oracle Database 11g R2 XE instance:
  username = vcloud
  password = VCloud

Session 1262 (Wednesday 2/12 @ 12:30pm): DR of the Cloud and to the Cloud

This session will look at DR and the cloud. Two different DR scenarios will be presented in depth – DR of the cloud and DR to the cloud. DR to the cloud is how end consumers fail over resources to a cloud provider. DR of the cloud is how you fail over cloud resources from one site to another. This session will go in depth on the consumer and provider side of the architecture. We’ll look at how to replicate the data, what applications are primary targets, how to size environments, how to maintain multi-tenancy, and what to avoid when architecting these solutions. This session is a must for anyone considering tier 1 applications for the cloud.

Presenters: Chris Colotti and Duncan Epping

Don’t forget to add it to your schedule, it is going to be a really cool session!

• vCloud Director virtual appliance download (You will need to register for the eval)
• VMware vCloud Director Evaluator’s Guide

If you haven’t done anything with vCloud Director before the following articles might also be worth reading, note that these are 1.0 based articles but most of the content is still valid today.

• vCloud Director Intro
• vCloud Director Demo
• vCloud Director networking part 1, 2, 3a and 3b
• vCloud Director Allocation Models

Paul Maritz is taking the stage… Taking the next step in towards the more automated world.

We need to make infrastructure become something that people can depend on and focus on what is important to their business. Navigating your way forward offering a more dynamic infrastructure that will support your existing applications. Using a more flexible infrastructure, allowing people to take resources and aggregate to larger pools reducing operational costs by automating the use of these resources. More and more use of social media and use of mobile devices to connect anytime anywhere and most importantly securely.

Today we will be talking about  a more efficient infrastructure with exists of three stages IT Production, Business Production and IT as a Service. In 2009, the VI 3 era, 30% of the workloads were virtualized…. in 2010 with vSphere 4 we reached 40% and it is expected that in 2011 we will hit 50% virtualized with the majority on vSphere.

Accelerating and Amplifying business agility with vSphere 5! Not only vSphere 5 but the worlds first Cloud Infrastructure suite! In addition to vSphere 5 today we announce vSphere Site Recovery Manager 5 (Business Continuity), vCloud Director 1.5 (Policy, Reporting, Self-Service), vCenter Operations 1.0.1 (Monitoring and Management), vShield 5 (Security and Edge functionality).

VMware vCloud = Hybrid. Your private cloud experience needs to be similar to public cloud experience. VMware allows this through the vCloud offering and vCloud Service Providers. Trusted vCloud partners like Colt, Bluelock, Singtel, Verizon, NYSE Euronext, Softbank and CSC are some of the enablers for this.

Steve Herrod up on stage… I expect it is about to get more technical

Why do these new products matter and how do they fit together. Accelerating the adoption by increasing scalability. ESX 1.0 capable of 5000 IOps, ESX 2.0 ~ 7000 IOps, VI 3 100.000 IOps, vSphere 4 300.000 IOps and vSphere 5.0 1.000.000 IOps. Besides performance availability is key. Both HA and FT have been enhanced and of course SRM 5.0 has been released. Added to SRM 5.0 is vSphere Replication. vSphere Replication allows you to use the network to replicate between sites and different arrays. It will allow you to replicate more workloads with a lower costs. SRM is about datacenter mobility, not only for an outage but also pro-actively moving datacenters after an acquisition.

What does cloud computing really mean? Being able to order what you need and what without knowing what happens behind the scenes. IT will behind the scenes validate if they meet the consumers requirements. vCloud Director is all about Simple Self-Service. Deploy virtual machines but more importantly create new vApps and offer these in your own “app store”. The IT Cloud of the producer is all about offering agility. Virtualization enables automation in a way unheard in a physical environment.

Typically multiple tiers are offered within a cloud environment. The VMware Cloud Infrastructure enable you to do so. Intelligent Policy based Management is key with vCloud Director 1.5. Linked Clones is a very important feature to provision virtual machines “aggressively” within the system. It allows for fast provisiong and save up to 60% of storage.

Profile-Driven Storage and Storage DRS are part of vSphere 5.0. It enables you to map different arrays in to logical entities by a concept called a “datastore cluster” and link these to a profile. Virtual machines will be tagged with a profile and this allows you to validate compliancy. Storage DRS does for storage what DRS does for compute resources. Storage and Network IO Control ensures each virtual machine receives what it is entitled to.

For the SMB market a brand new shared storage appliance is introduced today: vSphere Storage Appliance 1.0. It takes vanilla servers and use local drives and present it as shared storage. It will bring agility and availability through shared storage to the SMB.

Auto-Deploy, PXE booting your ESXi hypervisor in to memory! It allows to spin-up more hosts within minutes instead of hours. Adding capacity has never been this simple?

vSphere 5 offers comprehensive security and isolation capabilities through vShield 5.0. vShield App 5 allows you to select regulations to protect sensitive data. It also enables you to get additional auditing in place.

The Cloud Infrastructure represents more than a million engineering hours, more than 100 additional capabilities, more than two million QA hours, more than 2000 partner certifications to enable this.

Rick Jackson up next discussing licensing.

Industry has traditionally licensed on physical constraints. It makes it difficult to create a cloud environment. Customers need to be able to upgrade to new hardware without having physical boundaries. No more “Cores per Proc” limits, no more “Physical RAM per host license”… vSphere introducing vRAM entitlement. Virtual RAM is the amount of virtual memory configured for a powered on virtual machine. vSphere 5 used pooled vRAM across the entire environment.

Packaging has been simplified and moving from 6 down to 5 packages. vSphere Advanced has been eliminated, all customers currently using Advanced are entitled to vSphere Enterprise.

Join us at VMworld for more details around the new product releases. 10AM virtual show, be there for more technical in-depth details!

pg65. Order of storage tiers. Doesn’t that infer FC/SDD+VMFS is “race horse” and NFS “donkey”…???

Mike was referring to the following section in the book:

This basically states, as Mike elegantly translated, that FC/SSD is top performing storage while NFS is slow or should I say “donkey”. Mike’s comment is completely fair. I don’t agree with this table and actually did recommend changing it, somehow that got lost during the editing phase. In the first place we shouldn’t have mixed protocols with disks. Even an FC array will perform crap if you have SATA spindles backing your VMFS volumes. Secondly, there is no way you could compare these really as there are so many factors to take in to account ranging from cache to raid-level to wire speed. I guess it is still an example as clearly mentioned on page 64, nevertheless it is misleading. I would personally prefer to have listed it as follows:

Of course with the side note that performance is not solely dictated by the transport mechanism used, there is no reason why NFS couldn’t or shouldn’t be Tier 1 to be honest. Once again this is just an example. Thanks Mike for pointing it out,

So if you want to win a copy, comment on this post and let me know what cloud computing means to you… that is all you need to do. I will contact 2 randomly picked winners on the 8th of June and announce their names in this article.

Randomly picked winners (thanks to my daughter for assisting me in randomly picking ): Adam, Mark

I was part of a team of 6 guys who worked on this new book that was just published in the Short Topics series by Sage/Usenix. I guess you could say it is a follow up of “Foundation for Cloud Computing with VMware vSphere 4″. This book deals with VMware vCloud Director and touches each of the components of vCloud Director. Although it is a short topic series with only 136 pages there is in-depth information to be found on the various aspects of vCloud environments. I guess for me personally the most exciting part is the fact that no one less than VMware CEO Paul Maritz wrote the foreword! That is a great honor!

I want to especially thank Ben Lin and John Arrasjid for bringing this together. I know they’ve spend countless of hours in the evening editing the book. Of course I also want to thank my fellow co-authors: Michael Haines, Steve Kaplan and Raman Veeramraju. It was a pleasure working with you guys. I also want to thank Usenix/Sage for this opportunity. I want to point out that none of the authors receives or has received royalties. (Except for complementary copies of the book which we will give away for free at various events!) Usenix / Sage is a great organization which organizes many great events to which hopefully the revenue of this book will contribute.

Book #24, Cloud Computing with VMware vCloud Director, by John Arrasjid, Duncan Epping, Steve Kaplan Ben Lin, Michael Haines and Raman Veeramraju. This Short Topics book provides use cases, design considerations, and technology guidance to answer your questions about cloud computing. The primary intended audience is those interested in learning about VMware cloud computing products and solutions, but content on third-party technologies is also included where appropriate. Without diving overly deeply into specific design patterns, it provides insight into the tools to fit your design criteria and it explains the concepts used by vCloud ranging from Organization Virtual Datacenters to External Networks. The book includes a 17″x38″ poster with a deepdive on vCloud Director networking.

• Authors: John Arrasjid, Duncan Epping, Steve Kaplan, Ben Lin, Michael Haines and Raman Veeramraju
• Paperback: 136 pages
• Publisher: Sage/Usenix (May, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-13: 978-1-931971-83-6

Buy it here on Amazon (Paper | ebook coming soon)

Storage IO Control Best Practices:

• Enable Storage IO Control on all datastores
• Avoid external access for SIOC enabled datastores
  • To avoid any interference SIOC will stop throttling, more info here.
• When multiple datastores share the same set of spindles ensure all have SIOC enabled with comparable settings and all have sioc enabled.
• Change latency threshold based on used storage media type:
  • For FC storage the recommended latency threshold is  20 – 30 MS
  • For SAS storage the recommended latency threshold is  20 – 30 MS
  • For SATA storage the recommended latency threshold is 30 – 50 MS
  • For SSD storage the recommended latency threshold is 15 – 20 MS
• Define a limit per VM for IOPS to avoid a single VM flooding the array
  • For instance limit the amount of IOPS per VM to a 1000

• VMware View 4.5 Install and Configure
• VMware vShield
• VMware vCloud Director Install and Configure
• VMware vCloud Director Networking
• VMware vSphere Performance & Tuning

But besides these 5 there are about 25 other labs, so enough to get your hands dirty.