Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Storage

INF-STO2192 – Tech Preview of VMware Distributed Storage

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I could visit just one session on Tuesday so I decided I would attend a session which is on a topic that I love “Software Defined Storage”, aka vCloud Distributed Storage. This session was hosted by Christos Karamanolis and Kiran Madnani. Christos is one of the lead engineers on the project and Kiran is the product manager, both VMware employees.

Before I lay down what their session was about, note that this was a technology preview. No commitments have been made when or even IF this will ever be released… but as the demo looked so promising I figured it was worth sharing.

[Edit: Cormac Hogan published the demo, worth watching!]

Kiran started out with explaining the journey to Software Defined Storage. Awesome features he mentioned were Storage vMotion, Storage DRS, SIOC, Profile Driven Storage, vSphere Replication and more. Kieran made a statement which I can only agree with….

The world is changing, compute resource keep growing, data keeps on growing!

[Read more…] about INF-STO2192 – Tech Preview of VMware Distributed Storage

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!

The first rule of #NotSupported is…..

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You might have seen Alan Renouf’s blog post on this… for the very first time we will have #notsupported sessions at VMworld. This is the brainchild of Randy Keener aka @vmrandy.

These lightning sessions (15 minute max) are all about the fun stuff you can do with vSphere / vCloud / SRM, note that almost everything discussed at these sessions is totally unsupported… but nevertheless very cool to try out or mess around with right. What can you expect?

  • Nested ESXi to the extreme!
  • (ab)using the Site Recovery Manager storage replication adaptors (SRA)
  • Affinity Rules on Site Recovery Manager shadow VMs..

Where is it?

Check out the Community Lounge at VMworld, the sessions will be hosted from 1pm – 3pm each day, for a schedule of the sessions visit this link below – make sure you add them to your calendars as you wont want to miss them, believe me! – More information will be added with the run up to VMworld. For those who can’t wait… here is the list for all the sessions: #NotSupported Session List