Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

BC-DR

vCloud Suite 5.1 available

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No I didn’t set my alarm clock like Eric Sloof, just to be one of the first to post it… hence the reason this is “late”. But I got some more lined up for you though in the upcoming days. Now that the vCloud Suite 5.1 is available. Make sure to start your download engines and prep to upgrade. Before you start downloading, make sure to hit the launch page. I created a nice short URL for it

VMware NOW – Get the Latest Info on VMware Product Launches:
http://vmwa.re/vcloudnow

Download links:

What’s new docs:

 

INF-BCO2807 – vSphere HA and Datastore Access Outages tech preview

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All of you know by now that I have a love for availability related topics… Hence the reasons I needed to write something about INF-BCO2807. The session titled “vSphere HA and Datastore Access Outages – Current- Capabilities Deep-Dive and Tech Preview”, presented by Keith Farkas and Smriti Desai, discussed possible future HA enhancements that will solve component failures. Those of you who read my whitepaper on stretched clusters can immediately see why this would be a nice enhancement!

Once again a big fat disclaimer, VMware gives absolutely no guarantees when or even if this will be released.

This session was all about inaccessible data stores. During our talk Lee Dilworth and I explained the difference between a Permanent Device Loss (PDL) and an All Paths Down (APD) condition. In short, PDL is a “scsi sense code” issued by the storage system (or an iSCSI “login reject” for that matter). This scsi sense code allows vSphere (both the kernel and HA) to respond and act upon it. In the case of an APD vSphere cannot respond… the LUN is gone on that host and we don’t know why, so what do we do? Well with 5.1 and prior we do nothing. This results in zombied virtual machines, and that is not the state you want your virtual machines to be in right?

So how is VMware planning to solve this? It is planning to enhance HA with what was referred to as “Component Protection”. Component Protection allows responses per virtual machine when an APD or PDL has been detected. This is not based on guest I/Os failing, but on the vSphere platform declaring that the device is in a PDL or APD condition.

When an APD scenario is detected HA will be smart enough to understand which hosts can restart virtual machines, as in some cases multiple hosts might be impacted. Of course it will also only kill your virtual machine and restart it when it knows capacity is available for it.

I don’t know about you, but I would rather see this implemented today than tomorrow!? APD is not common, but also not rare… and when disaster strikes, it strikes hard!

I don’t think this session is scheduled for VMworld Europe, so make sure to watch the recording as soon as it is available as it is well worth your time. Keith and Smriti gave an excellent deepdive on the current vSphere HA and a nice look in to the future!

Demo time – vCloud Director 5.1 disaster recovery demo

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When I was playing with the new vCloud Director 5.1 and Site Recovery Manager 5.1 I figured I would record a demo of the DR solution that Chris Colotti and I developed. The demo is fairly straight forward and hopefully helps you in the process of building a resilient cloud infrastructure. In this demo I have included:

  • vSphere 5.1
    • vSphere Replication
  • vCloud Director 5.1
  • Site Recovery Manager 5.1

VMware vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive available at VMworld!

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Frank and I had been talking about this for a couple of months, but without mentioning what it was we were working on. The last couple of months we’ve spent our spare time on updating the 5.0 Clustering Deepdive to 5.1.

Although this “just” an update to 5.1, we’ve added a section about stretched clustering to the book and the Storage DRS section has been completely overhauled.  Several new paragraphs were added to the vSphere HA section and we had to do some minor tweaks to the vSphere DRS section. On top of we added a great foreword by Raghu Raghuram!

In the upcoming week the book will be available on Amazon (paper – kindle) and in the Apple iBooks store. As we needed to be careful with publishing it at a certain time/date in some cases it might take a couple of days before it shows up in your “local” online bookstore. If you really can’t wait, it is available now on Createspace.

Again, we have kept the prices low… The e-book will sell for only $ 7.49 (note a surcharge might be added based on location) and the paper copies sells for $ 24.95. It is a bargain if I say so myself. Note that even the paper copy will be available directly from European Amazon stores and so will the ebook.

For those at VMworld, there are copies available at the VMworld store on Tuesday, or maybe even Monday afternoon. Note that there is a limited amount available… if you want a copy I would recommend picking it up soon! If you see Frank or myself walking around and would love to have your book signed, don’t hesitate it is our pleasure! We had the honor of presenting the book to Carl Eschenbach yesterday, I can tell you Carl was thrilled and so are we… P i c k i t u p!

Introducing SimpliVity, a new storage / compute platform

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Around VMworld many new companies are “born”… well most of them have been around for a while, but fact is that they go public around VMworld. With SimpliVity it is no different. SimpliVity is a new storage company, although “storage” might be understating what they actually do.

I had an intro to SimpliVity last week, and yesterday SimpliVity publicly announced their product the OmniCube. The OmniCube is a 2U unit which combines Compute and Storage resources in a single node combining SATA and SSD drives.

Yes I can hear you thinking aahhhh another Nutanix-alike solution… well not really and I will explain why in the upcoming paragraphs. I guess the biggest difference from a physical perspective is that this is not a multi-node 2U unit like Nutanix is. This is a single node 2U unit, it can hold a max of 768GB of memory but comes with 128GB by default. It holds two 6 core 2.5Ghz intel procs and 2 x 10Gbe and 2 x 1Gbe. From a storage perspective it comes with 4 x 200GB SSD and 8 x 3TB SATA drives. With deduplication and compression, usable capacity is around 20TB. This was calculated using conservative estimates for deduplication (1.5:1) and compression (1.5:1). Depending on the use case this is more than likely a lot higher. Yes the OmniCube is a beast.

But SimpliVity / OmniCube is not about hardware, SimpliVity in my opinion is really about the solution. SimpliVity took a VM centric approach, or should we say VM aware (Not unlike Tintri). All operations / policies are on a per VM basis. So if you want to enable replication, this will be on a per VM basis. Not just replication but they have added a whole bunch of other cool features like:

  • Global management
  • Snapshots
  • Deduplication / Compression (global!)
  • Cloud Integration

The cool thing of course that these features can be combined. Having your snapshots deduplicated will have an impact on the amount of data stored. Only replicating deduplicated and compressed blocks will lower your bandwidth requirements… and that especially comes in handy when you are replicating / storing data in a cloud environment as the dedupe / compression is on a global basis.

Combine all of that with a tight VMware vSphere integration and I believe we have a very interesting solution on our hands. Now I know some of you are skeptical about these new companies popping up, and I can also be skeptical but a quick search on linkedin reveals where these guys are coming from… and with most of their engineers having a strong storage and virtualization background you know they will be on top of their game.

Simplivity has a booth at VMworld, for anyone interested in new compute/storage architectures definitely recommended to stop by, or register for their session:

SPO3287 – Everybody Wants to Rule the World. 5 Steps to Successfully Building and Ruling a Virtual Infrastructure Empire

Cormac also posted a nice article on this topic, make sure to read it!