A while back I was asked if I could present at the VMware Technical Support Summit and last week I received the agenda. I forgot to blog about it so I figured I would share it with everyone. I was supposed to go to this event last year but I had a clash in my calendar unfortunately. At this event organized by our support team you will have the ability to sit in some extreme deep dive sessions. Below you can find the agenda, and also here’s the registration link if you are interested! Note that Joe Baguley will be doing a keynote, and Cormac Hogan and I will be doing a session on vSAN futures!
Management & Automation
Startup update: Runecast
A while ago I introduced Runecast on my blog. I have known these guys for a while and this week I had to pleasure to be briefed on their new release: Runecast 1.7. The big ticket item in this release for sure it the vSAN Support. You may ask yourself why you would need Runecast when you have things like the health check and the “online” health check, well it seems that Runecast’s implementation covers more detail. Anyway, what is Runecast? As a company they refer to themselves as the knowledge automation experts, and I think that is a fair statement.
Runecast has developed an appliance which can be connected to one or multiple vCenter Server instances. After linking these you can “scan” the environment and Runecast will tell you about the risks. Not just from a security perspective, but it will also assess logs, configuration and even best practices. Your whole environment will be assessed in a report will be provided in a simple HTML-5 interface, or in the Web Client or the vSphere H5 client even. I said “simple”, but the information provided and the detail is far from simple… When I say simple I refer to their user interface. It is slick, and very easy to use.
Since I discussed Runecast last they added some additional features, like for instance a VRO plugin, full rest API, improved log search, Web Client and H5 client plugins but more importantly for many government agencies: DISA STIG compliancy checks. Yes, Runecast can check your environment against DISA STIG and report on any potential issues. Nice right?
This new release, version 1.7, now brings vSAN support. It also includes a new dashboard widget, which provides faster insights in how your environment is behaving. For vSAN in particular they didn’t only include KB article checks, but also implemented all best practices from the Design and Sizing guide, Network Design guide and the Stretched Cluster white paper. And they even hinted about adding best practices which are listed in the Essential vSAN book Cormac and I wrote, how cool is that? What is also nice is that their appliance is supported with vSAN 5.x and 6.x, and requires no direct access to the internet. You can simply download the appliance and install, and then update with the latest dataset by downloading an ISO.
Oh and before I forget, of course they also provide all the guidance and info needed around Spectre/Meltdown. Where normally their trial is limited, they actually do provide ALL info needed for Spectre/Meltdown as they realized that this is very valuable to customers and felt they could not hold this back.
For the Runecast blog on the 1.7 release go here.
Don’t know why DRS is not balancing your cluster? DRS Dump Insight!
I was just reading up and noticed the DRS Dump Insight solution. It is a SaaS based DRS Dump Analyzer which gives you details around why your cluster is not balanced, or why certain recommendations are not made. Especially the “what if” scenarios are cool if you ask me. You can take a dump and then using the whatif feature check out what would happen to your cluster if for instance all affinity rules were dropped. Or what would happen if the DRS migration threshold is changed, or some advanced settings are used.
You can find some more info about it here, and the SaaS tool here. I hope this will make it in to the product soon in the form of a “health check”… Very useful and insightful! Oh, if you can’t access the website, try it in “Incognito Mode”. Seems there are some issues with the certificate.
New fling: DRS Lens
A cool new fling was just released: DRS Lens. As stated on the flings website:
DRS Lens provides a simple, yet powerful interface to highlight the value proposition of vSphere DRS. Providing answers to simple questions about DRS will help quell many of the common concerns that users may have. DRS Lens provides different dashboards in the form of tabs for each cluster being monitored.
It tracks things like VM Happiness, balance of the cluster itself, User and System initiated vMotions etc. It truly allow you to dig in to your cluster and it could be very useful during cross cluster rebalancing, or trying to figure out where an imbalance is coming from by correlating different vCenter tasks/events to resource contention / VM unhappiness situations. I hope to see this info in the HTML-5 UI at some point! If you are interested, download the fling, give it a try and provide feedback through the comments, the developers will read those and follow up! https://labs.vmware.com/flings/drs-lens
Cohesity announces 4.0 and Round C funding
Earlier this week I was on the phone with Rawlinson Rivera, my former VMware/vSAN colleague, and he told me all about the new stuff for Cohesity that was just announced. First of all, congrats with Round C funding. As we’ve all seen, lately it has been mayhem in the storage world. Landing a $90 million round is big. This round was co-led by investors GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Sequoia Capital. Both Cisco Investments and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) also participated in this round as strategic investors. I am not an analyst, and I am not going to pretend either, lets talk tech.
Besides the funding round, Cohesity also announced the 4.0 release of their hyper-converged secondary storage platform. Now, let it be clear, I am not a fan of the “hyper-converged” term used here. Why? Well I think this is a converged solution. They combined multiple secondary storage use cases and created a single appliance. Hyper-Converged stands for something in the industry, and usually it means the combination of a hypervisor, storage software and hardware. The hypervisor is missing here. (No I am not saying “hyper” in hyper-converged” stands for hypervisor.) Anyway, lets continue.
In 4.0 some really big functionality is introduced, lets list it out and then discuss each at a time:
- S3 Compatible Object Storage
- Quotas for File Services
- NAS Data Protection
- RBAC for Data Protection
- Folder and Tag based protection
- Erasure Coding
As of 4.0 you can now on the Cohesity platform create S3 Buckets, besides replicating to an S3 bucket you can now also present them! This is fully S3 compatible and can be created through their simple UI. Besides exposing their solution as S3 you can also apply all of their data protection logic to it, so you can have cloud archival / tiering /replication. But also enable encryption, data retention and create snapshots.
Cohesity already offered file services (NFS and SMB), and in this release they are expanding the functionality. The big request from customers was Quotas and that is introduced in 4.0. Along with what they call Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) capabilities, which refers to data retention in this case (write once, keep forever).
For the Data Protection platform they now offer NAS Data Protection. Basically they can connect to a NAS device and protect everything which is stored on that device by snapping the data and storing it on their platform. So if you have a NetApp filer for instance you can now protect that by offloading the data to the Cohesity platform. For the Data Protection solution they also intro Role Based Access. I think this was one of the big ticket items missing, and with 4.0 they now provide that as well. Last but not last “vCenter Integration”, which means that they can now auto-protect groups of VMs based on the folder they are in or the tag they have provided. Just imagine you have 5000 VMs, you don’t want to associate a backup scheme with each of these, you probably much rather do that for an X number of VMs with a similar SLA at a time. Give them a tag, and associate the tag with the protection scheme (see screenshot). Same for folders, easy.
Last but not least: Erasure Coding. This is not a “front-end” feature, but it is very useful to have. Especially in larger configurations it can safe a lot of precious disk space. Today they have “RAID-1” mechanism more or less, where each block is replicated / mirrored to another host in the cluster. This results in a 100% overhead, in other words: for every 100GB stored you need 200GB capacity. By introducing Erasure Coding they reduce that immediately to 33%. Or in other words, with a 3+1 scheme you get 50% more usable capacity and with a 5+2 (double protection) you get 43% more. Big savings, a lot of extra usable capacity.
Oh and before I forget, besides getting Cisco and HPE as investors you can now also install Cohesity on Cisco kit (there’s a list of approved configurations). HPE took it one step further even, they can sell you a configuration with Cohesity included and pre-installed. Smart move.
All in all, some great new functionality and some great enhancements of the current offering. Good work Cohesity, looking forward to see what is next for you guys.