Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

cloud

vCloud Suite equals a Software Defined Datacenter

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I was on the VMTN podcast this week with Frank Denneman and Rawlinson Rivera, hosted by John Troyer. One of the discussions we had was around the Software Defined Datacenter and the vCloud Suite. Often people make a direct connection between a Software Defined Datacenter and the vCloud Suite and I can understand why. I have heard some people comment that because some components are not fully integrated yet; the vCloud Suite does not allow you to build a full Software Defined Datacenter.

On the call I mentioned that a Software Defined Datacenter is not just about the vCloud Suite. Using the vCloud Suite does not magically provide you with a Software Defined Datacenter. I guess the same could be said for a cloud, using the vCloud Suite does not magically provide you with a cloud.

What a lot of people tend to forgot is that a cloud or an SDDC is not about the infrastructure or the individual components. (Lets from now on use SDDC instead of the full name or the word cloud) An SDDC is about how you are providing services to your customers. In this case, customers could be external / internal customers of course. An SDDC is about software defined services, about flexibility and agility. What does that mean? There are two points of view, the consumer of the platform and the platform administrator. Lets explain from both views what is means, or at least what I think it means…

  1. The consumer of the platform
    The consumer should be able to select a specific service level for their workload, or select a specific service for their workload. When they they select a service or service level the platform should sort things out for them fully automated, whether it is DR / Backup / Resources / Storage Tiering / Security… it should be automatically applied to the workload when either of those software defined service characteristics are selected and applied.
  2. The platform administrator
    The platform administrator should be able to define services and policies which can be consumed. These services or policies could be as simple as “enabling vSphere Replication” on a virtual machine, or as complex as deploying a 3 tier vApp including a full application stack and security services using vCloud Automation Center in combination with Application Director and vCloud Networking and Security.

In some cases that means you will need to deploy the full vCloud Suite and potentially more, in other cases it might mean you will deploy less but use 3rd party solutions to provide a fully automated solution stack and experience to your consumers . In the end it is about having the ability to define and offer services in a specific way and enabling your customers to consume these in a specific way.

Although the SDDC could be architected and build using the vCloud Suite, using the vCloud Suite does not automagically provide you with an SDDC. An SDDC is about your operating model and service offering, not about the components you are using.

Feel free to chip in,

vCloud Suite Poster

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One of the last things I worked on while I was part of Technical Marketing was a poster and a white paper. The paper is still being processed but the poster has been released this week. Many thanks to Alan Renouf who did a lot of work on this one.

Now that it is done it looks so incredibly simple. I can tell you though that it took quite a lot of iterations before we got to this diagram and I am very happy about the result. Once again, thanks to everyone who helped to get this one out of the door…

vCloud Suite Poster

If you are at Partner Exchange 2013 (PEX) make sure you pick up a poster to take back to your office, if you are not at PEX then please click here to get the PDF version.

Also, don’t forget to visit http://vmware.com/go/Posters for more fantastic VMware posters available to download.

Converged compute and storage solutions

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Lately I have been looking more and more in to converged compute and storage solutions, or “datacenter in a box” solutions as some like to call them. I am a big believer of this concept as some of you may have noticed. Those who have never heard of these solutions, an example of this would be Nutanix or Simplivity. I have written about both Nutanix and Simplivity in the past, and for a quick primer on those respective solutions I suggest to read those articles. In short, these solutions run a hypervisor with a software based storage solution that creates a shared storage platform from local disks. In others, no SAN/NAS required, or as stated… a full datacenter experience in just a couple of U’s.

One thing that stood out to me though in the last 6 months is that for instance Nutanix is often tied to VDI/View solutions, in a way I can understand why as it has been part of their core message / go-to-market strategy for a long time. In my opinion though there is no limit to where these solutions can grow and go. Managing storage, or better said your full virtualization infrastructure, should be as simple as creating or editing a virtual machine. One of the core principles mentioned during the vCloud Distributed Storage talk at VMworld, by the way vCloud Distributed Storage is a VMware software defined storage initiative.

Hopefully people are starting to realize that these so-called Software Defined Storage solutions will fit in most, if not all, scenarios out there today. I’ve been having several discussions with people about these solutions and wanted to give some examples of how it could fit in to your strategy.

Just a week ago I was having a discussion with a customer around disaster recovery. They wanted to add a secondary site and replicate their virtual machines to that site. The cost associated with a second storage array was holding them back. After an introduction to converged storage and compute solutions they realized they could step in to the world of disaster recovery slowly. They realized that these solutions allowed them to protect their Tier-1 applications and expand their DR protected estate when required. By using a converged storage and compute solutions they can avoid the high upfront cost and it allows them to scale out when needed (or when they are ready).

One of the service providers I talk to on a regular basis is planning on creating a new cloud service. Their current environment is reaching its limits and predicting how this new environment will grow in the upcoming 12 months is difficult due to the agile and dynamic nature of this service they are developing. The great thing though about a converged storage and compute solution is that they can scale out whenever needed, without a lot of hassle. Typically the only requirement is the availability of 10Gbps ports in your network. For the provider though the biggest benefit is probably that services are defined by software. They can up-level or expand their offerings when they please or when there is a demand.

These are just two simple examples of how a converged infrastructure solution could fit in to your software defined datacenter strategy. The mentioned vendors Nutanix and Simplivity are also just two examples out of various companies offering these. I know of multiple start-ups who are working on a similar products and of course there are the likes of Pivot3 who already offer turnkey converged solutions. As stated earlier, personally I am a big believer in these architectures and if you are looking to renew your datacenter or at the verge of a green-field deployment… I highly recommend researching these solutions.

Go Software Defined – Go Converged!

Stretched vCloud Director infrastructure

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A while back I wrote about design considerations when designing or building a stretched vCloud Director infrastructure. Since then I have been working on a document in collaboration with Lee Dilworth, and this document should be out soon hopefully. As various people have asked for the document I decided to throw it in to this blog post so that the details are already out there.

** Disclaimer: this article has not been reviewed by the technical marketing team yet, this is a preview of what will possibly be published. When the official document is published I will add a link to this article **

Introduction

VMware vCloud® Director™ 5.1 (vCloud Director) gives enterprise organizations the ability to build secure private clouds that dramatically increase datacenter efficiency and business agility. Coupled with VMware vSphere® (vSphere), vCloud Director delivers cloud computing for existing datacenters by pooling vSphere virtual resources and delivering them to users as catalog-based services. vCloud Director helps you build agile infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud environments that greatly accelerate the time-to-market for applications and responsiveness of IT organizations.

Resiliency is a key aspect of any infrastructure but is even more important in “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS) solutions. This solution overview was developed to provide additional insight and information in how to architect and implement a vCloud Director based solution on a vSphere Metro Storage Cluster infrastructure.

Architecture Introduction

This architecture consists of two major components. The first component is the geographically separated vSphere infrastructure based on stretched storage solution, here after referred to as the vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) infrastructure. The second component is vCloud Director.

Note –  Before we dive in to the details of the solution we would like to call out the fact that vCloud Director is not site aware. If incorrectly configured availability could be negatively impacted in certain failure scenarios.

[Read more…] about Stretched vCloud Director infrastructure

Thinking about a stretched vCloud Director deployment

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Lately I have been thinking about what it would take to deploy a stretched vCloud Director (vCD) infrastructure. “The problem” with a vCloud Director infrastructure is that there are so many moving components, this makes it difficult to figure out how to protect each component. Let me point out that I do not have all the definitive answers to this yet, I am writing this article to get a better understanding of the problem myself. If you do not agree with my reasoning please feel free to comment, as I need YOUR help defining the recommended practices around vCD on a stretched infrastructure.

I listed the components I used in my lab:

  • vCenter Server Management
  • vCenter Server Cloud Resources
  • vCloud Director Cells
  • vShield Manager
  • Database Server

That would be 5 moving components, but in reality we are talking more around 8. The thing here is that vCenter Server also has multiple components:

  • Single Sign On
  • Inventory Service
  • Web Client
  • vCenter Server

How do I protect these 8 components? The first 5 listed will be individual VMs and vCloud Director itself will be multiple cells even. What would this look like?

As you can see there are multiple vCenter Servers, one manages the Management Cluster and its components. While the other manages the “Cloud Resource Cluster”. Lets start listing all the components and discuss what the options are and if we can protect them in a special way or not.

vCenter Server (cloud resources and management)

vCenter Server can be protected through various methods. There is vCenter Heartbeat and of course we have vSphere HA (including VM Monitoring). First of all it is key to realize that neither of these solutions are fully “non-disruptive”. Both vSphere HA and vCenter Heartbeat will cause a slight disruption. vSphere HA will simply restart your VM when a host has failed, and vSphere HA – VM Monitoring can restart the Guest OS when the VM has failed. vCenter Heartbeat is a more intelligent solution, it can detect outages using a heartbeat mechanism and respond to that.

I guess the question is availability vs operational simplicity. How important is vCenter Server availability in your environment? Setting up vSphere HA and VM Monitoring is a matter of seconds. Installing and configuring vCenter Heartbeat is probably hours… And think about upgrade processes etc. I personally prefer not using vCenter Heartbeat but going for vSphere HA and VM Monitoring in this scenario, how about you?

What about these vCenter services like SSO / Inventory Service / Web Client etc. Although in a way, from a scalability/performance perspective, it might make sense to split things out… It also makes your environment more vulnerable to failures. What if 1 VM in your “vCenter service chain” is down. That might render your whole solution unusable. I would personally prefer to have vCenter Server, Inventory Service and the Web Client to be installed in a single VM. I can imagine that for SSO you would like to split it out, so that when you have multiple vCenter Server instances you can link them to the same SSO instance.

As mentioned SSO potentially could be deployed in an HA fashion. HA with regards to SSO is an active/standby solution, but I have been told there are other ways of deploying it and more info would be released soon.

Recommended Practice: I am a big fan of keeping things simple. Keep vCenter and at a minimum the Inventory Service together, and potentially the Web Client. Although Heartbeat has the potential of decreasing vCenter Server downtime, in many cloud environments SLAs are around vCloud workload availability and not about vCenter itself. One component that I would recommended to configure in a HA fashion is SSO. Without SSO you cannot login, this is critical for operations.

vCloud Director

Hopefully all of you are aware that vCloud Director can easily scale by deploying new “cells” as we call it. A cell is simply said a virtual machine running the vCD software. These cells are all connected to the same database and can handle load. Not only can they handle load, but they can also continue where another stopped. So from an Availability perspective this is ideal. I already depicted this in the diagram above by the way.

Recommended Practice: Deploy multiple vCloud Director cells in your management cluster. Ensure that at a minimum two cells reside on each of the “sites” of your stretched cluster. In order to achieve this vSphere DRS VM-Host affinity groups should be used!

vShield Manager

vShield Manager is one of the difficult components. It is a single virtual machine. You can protect it using vSphere HA but that is about it as the VM has multiple vCPUs which rules out FT. So what would make sense in this case? I would try to ensure that the vShield Manager is in the same site as vCenter Server. In the case there is a network failure between sites, at least the vShield Manager and vCenter Server can communicate when needed.

Recommended Practice: The vShield Manager virtual appliance resides in the same site as the vCenter Server, in other words it is a recommended practice to have both be part of the same vSphere DRS VM-Host affinity group. It is also recommended to leverage vSphere HA – VM Monitoring to allow for automatic restarts to occur in the case of a host or guest failure.

Database

This is the challenging one… As of vCloud Director 5.1 it is supported to cluster your database. So you could potentially cluster the vCD database. However this Database Server will host more than just vCD, it will probably also host the vCenter Server database and potentially other bits and pieces like Chargeback / Orchestrator etc. Not all of these support a clustered database solution today unfortunately. It is difficult defining a recommended practice in this case. Although Database Clustering will theoretically increase availability it will also complicate operations. From an operational perspective the difficult part is how to manage site isolations. Just imagine the network between Site-A and Site-B is down but all components are still running. What will you do with the database?

This is definitely one I am not sure about what to do with…

Summary

As you can see this is not a fully worked out set of recommended practices guide yet, there is still stuff to be figured out and I am going through the exercise as we speak. If you have an opinion about this, and I am sure many do, don’t hesitate to leave a comment!