by Duncan Epping
I didn’t even realize this, but just found out that the session Lee Dilworth and I did at VMworld on the subject of vSphere Metro Storage Clusters can actually be viewed for free on youtube!
There are some more sessions up on youtube, so make sure you have a look around!
Installing vSphere Data Protection is just a couple of steps. I downloaded the vSphere Replication virtual appliance. Note there are three different versions available and depending on how large your environment is you will need to select a version. I selected the 0.5TB version as I have a limited amount of virtual machines. This is how you import it and configure it, but before you begin I recommend ensuring DNS records are created before deploying the appliance!
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:
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:
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:
Cormac also posted a nice article on this topic, make sure to read it!