3 weeks ago I announced the availability of the ebook of “Essential Virtual SAN”. Today I have the pleasure to inform you that the paper copy has also hit the streets and is being shipped by Amazon as of today. So for those who were waiting with ordering until the paper version was available… Go here, and order it today, and have it in house by tomorrow! The book covers the architecture of Virtual SAN, operational and architectural gotchas and sizing guidance, design examples and much more. Just pick it up,
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Must attend VMworld sessions 2014
Every year I do this post on the must attend VMworld sessions, and I just realized I had not done this for 2014 yet. So here it is, the list of sessions I feel are most definitely worth attending. I tend to focus on sessions which I know will have solid technical info and great presenters. Many of which over the years I have either seen presenting myself and respect very much. I tried to limit the list to 20 this year (edit: 21, 22), so of course it could be that your session (or your fav session) is missing, unfortunately I cannot list all as that would defeat the purpose.
Here we go:
- STO3008-SPO – Decoupled Storage: Practical Examples of Leveraging Server Flash in a Virtualized Datacenter by Satyam Vaghani and Frank Denneman. What more do I need to say? Both rock stars!
- STO1279 – Virtual SAN Architecture Deep Dive Christian and Christos were the leads on VSAN, who can tell you better than they can??
- SDDC1176 – Ask the Expert vBloggers featuring Chad Sakac, Scott Lowe, William Lam, myself and moderated by Rick Scherer. This session has been a hit for the last years and will be one you cannot miss!
- STO2996-SPO – The vExpert Storage Game Show featuring Vaughn Steward, Cormac Hogan, Rawlinson Rivera and many others… It will be educational and entertaining for sure! Not the standard “death by powerpoint” session. If you do want “DBP”, this is not for you!
- STP3266 – Web-Scale Converged Infrastructure for Enterprise. Josh Odgers talking web scale for Enterprise organizations, are you still using legacy apps? Then this is a must attend.
- SDDC2492 – How the New Software-defined Paradigms Will Impact Your vSphere Design Forbes Guthrie and Scott Lowe talking vSphere Design, you bet you will learn something here!
- HBC2068 – vCloud Hybrid Service Networking Technical Deep Dive Want to know more about vCHS networking, I am sure David Hill is going to dive deep!
- NET2747 – VMware NSX: Software Defined Networking in the Real World Chris Wahl and Jason Nash talking networking, what is there not to like?
- BCO1893 – Site Recovery Manager and vCloud Automation Center: Self-service DR Protection for the Software-Defined Data Center My co-presenter Lee Dilworth for the previous 2 VMworlds, he knows what he is talking about! Co-hosting a DR session with one of the BC/DR PMs, Ben Meadowcroft. This will be good.
- NET1674 – Advanced Topics & Future Directions in Network Virtualization with NSX I have seen Bruce Davie present multiple times, always a pleasure and educational!
- STO2496 – vSphere Storage Best Practices: Next-Gen Storage Technologies Chad and Vaughn in one session… this will be good!
- BCO2629 – Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication: What’s New Technical Deep Dive Jeff Hunter and Ken Werneburg are the DR experts at VMware Tech Marketing, so worth attending for sure!
- HBC2638 – Ten Vital Best Practices for Effective Hybrid Cloud Security by Russel Callen and Matthew Probst… These guys are the vCHS architects, you can bet this will be useful!
- STO3162 – Software Defined Storage: Satisfy the Requirements of Your Application at the Granularity of a Virtual Disk with Virtual Volumes (VVols) Cormac Hogan talking VVOLs with Rochna from Nimble, this is one I would like to see!
- STO2480 – Software Defined Storage – The VCDX Way Part II : The Empire Strikes Back The title by itself is enough to attend this one… (Wade Holmes and Rolo Rivera)
- SDDC3281 – A DevOps Story: Unlocking the Power of Docker with the VMware platform and its ecosystem. You may not know these guys, but I do… Aaron and George are rock stars, and Docker seems to be the new buzzword. Find out what it is about!
- VAPP2979 – Advanced SQL Server on vSphere Techniques and Best Practices Scott and Jeff are the experts when it comes to virtualizing SQL, what more can I say?!
- STO2197 – Storage DRS: Deep Dive and Best Practices Mustafa Uysal is the lead on SDRS/SIOC, I am sure this session will contain some gems!
- HBC1534 – Recovery as a Service (RaaS) with vCloud Hybrid Service David Hill and Chris Colotti talking, always a pleasure to attend!
- MGT1876 – Troubleshooting With vCenter Operations Manager (Live Demo) Wondering why your VM is slow? Sam McBride and Praveen Kannan will show you live…
- INF1601 – Taking Reporting and Command Line Automation to the Next Level with PowerCLI with Alan Renouf and Luc Dekens, all I would like to know is if PowerCLI-man is going to be there or not?
- MGT1923 – vCloud Automation Center 6 and Storage Policy-Based Management Framework Integration with Rawlinson Rivera and Chen Wei… They are doing things with VCAC and SPBM which has never been seen before!
As stated, some of your fav sessions may be missing… feel free to leave a suggestion so that others know which sessions they should attend.
Good Read: Virtual SAN data locality white paper
I was reading the Virtual SAN Data Locality white paper. I think it is a well written paper, and really enjoyed it. I figured I would share the link with all of you and provide a short summary. (http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2014/07/Understanding-Data-Locality-in-VMware-Virtual-SAN-Ver1.0.pdf)
The paper starts with an explanation of what data locality is (also referred to as “locality of reference”), and explains the different types of latency experienced in Server SAN solutions (network, SSD). It then explains how Virtual SAN caching works, how locality of reference is implemented within VSAN and also how VSAN does not move data around because of the high cost compared to the benefit for VSAN. It also demonstrates how VSAN delivers consistent performance, even without a local read cache. The key word here is consistent performance, something that is not in the case for all Server SAN solutions. In some cases, a significant performance degradation is experienced minutes long after a workload has been migrated. As hopefully all of you know vSphere DRS runs every 5 minutes by default, which means that migrations can and will happen various times a day in most environments. (Seen environments where 30 migrations a day was not uncommon.) The paper then explains where and when data locality can be beneficial, primarily when RAM is used and with specific use cases (like View) and then explains how CBRC aka View Accelerator (in RAM deduplicated read cache) could be used for this purpose. (Does not explain how other Server SAN solutions leverage RAM for local read caching in-depth, but sure those vendors will have more detailed posts on that, which are worth reading!)
Couple of real gems in this paper, which I will probably read a couple of times in the upcoming days!
Essential Virtual SAN book available as of today! (ebook first)
Yes, the day has finally come… Our pet project, the Essential Virtual SAN book is finally out! Cormac and I decided to take the “e-book first” route which enables us to have it out weeks before the printed copy. Before doing the thank you’s and provide you with some details on what the book is about, I want to thank my co-author Cormac! It was a great pleasure working with you on this project Cormac, thanks for asking me to be part of this exciting book!
We want to thank our technical editors Paudie O’Riordan and Christos Karamanolis, whom spent countless of hours reading and editing our raw materials. We would like to thank the VMware Virtual SAN engineering team for the countless of hours discussing the ins and outs of Virtual SAN. Especially Christian Dickmann and (again) Christos Karamanolis, it would not have been possible without your help! We also want to acknowledge William Lam, Wade Holmes, Rawlinson Rivera, Simon Todd, Alan Renouf, and Jad El-Zein for their help and contributions to the book. Last but not least we want to thank the Pearson team for their flexibility and agility and getting things done, and our management (Phil Weiss, Adam Zimman, and Mornay van der Walt) for supporting us on this journey.!
Cormac and I are also very pleased to say that we have two awesome forewords by no one less than VMware CTO Ben Fathi and SVP of Storage and Availability at VMware Charles Fan! Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule, we very much appreciate it.
What does the book cover?
Understand and implement VMware Virtual SAN: the heart of tomorrow’s Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC)
VMware’s breakthrough Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC) initiative can help you virtualize your entire datacenter: compute, storage, networks, and associated services. Central to SDDC is VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN): a fully distributed storage architecture seamlessly integrated into the hypervisor and capable of scaling to meet any enterprise storage requirement.
Now, the leaders of VMware’s wildly popular Virtual SAN previews have written the first authoritative guide to this pivotal technology. You’ll learn what Virtual SAN is, exactly what it offers, how to implement it, and how to maximize its value.
Writing for administrators, consultants, and architects, Cormac Hogan and Duncan Epping show how Virtual SAN implements both object-based storage and a policy platform that simplifies VM storage placement. You’ll learn how Virtual SAN and vSphere work together to dramatically improve resiliency, scale-out storage functionality, and control over QoS.
Both an up-to-the-minute reference and hands-on tutorial, Essential Virtual SAN uses realistic examples to demonstrate Virtual SAN’s most powerful capabilities. You’ll learn how to plan, architect, and deploy Virtual SAN successfully, avoid gotchas, and troubleshoot problems once you’re up and running.
Coverage includes
- Understanding the key goals and concepts of Software-Defined Storage and Virtual SAN technology
- Meeting physical and virtual requirements for safe Virtual SAN implementation
- Installing and configuring Virtual SAN for your unique environment
- Using Storage Policy Based Management to control availability, performance, and reliability
- Simplifying deployment with VM Storage Policies
- Discovering key Virtual SAN architectural details: caching I/O, VASA, witnesses, pass-through RAID, and more
- Ensuring efficient day-to-day Virtual SAN management and maintenance
- Interoperating with other VMware features and products
- Designing and sizing Virtual SAN clusters
- Troubleshooting, monitoring, and performance optimization
ASIN: B00LODTZSA
ISBN-10: 013385499X
ISBN-13: 978-0133854992
You can buy it via Amazon.com for Kindle, and it will also be available shortly via Pearson.com for any other ebook format!
Quick pointer to new Virtual SAN Ready Node configs
Just a quick pointer to the new document that holds all Virtual SAN Ready Node configurations: Virtual SAN Ready Node.pdf. In this document various new configurations are described and a couple of old ready node configurations appear to have been removed. I expect these new configurations to be added in the upcoming weeks.
Another very useful document recently released on the topic of Virtual SAN hardware is the following: Virtual SAN Hardware Quick Reference Guide. It describes for both Server and VDI workloads different profiles and give examples around how you should configure your hardware to meet certain requirements.