Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Various

Site Recovery Manager survey… please help us out!

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I just received an email from the the Site Recovery Manager Product Management team. They created a new survey, and I was hoping each of you who is using, or will be purchasing SRM soon, could take the time to complete it. These types of surveys are very useful for Product Management when it comes to setting priorities for new features and identify gaps etc. Thanks!

We are conducting a survey about VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to learn more about how people use our products. The survey will help us identify where we can improve the product to meet your needs and we would really appreciate getting your feedback.

The link to the survey is below, it typically takes less than 10 minutes to complete. http://www.surveymethods.com/EndUser.aspx?ECC8A4BDEDA6B9BAE7

Thanks!

VMworld 2012 – INF-VSP1504 – Ask the Expert vBloggers

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It’s that time of year again, and for the 5th year we will be running the Ask the Expert vBloggers at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco!  This is really a great session with the top bloggers answering questions live from the audience. Yes this is your one chance to see Chad Sakac, Frank Denneman, Rick Scherer, Scott Lowe and myself up on the same stage. Last year was a blast, and we had one of the best rated sessions of VMworld, I am sure it will be a blast again this year!  If you haven’t registered already, I strongly suggest you lock in your ticket to VMworld by clicking here.

Once you register, be sure to add INF-VSP1504 – Ask the Expert vBloggers to your agenda!

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CloudPhysics, not so much stealth mode start-up anymore…

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<disclaimer: I am a technical advisor for CloudPhysics>

cloud physics logoToday at the New England VMUG CloudPhysics has their first official “public appearance”. Yes some of you have heard the name a couple of times before and some of you might even know who the brains are behind this new start-up… for those who don’t let me give a brief introduction.

CloudPhysics was recently founded by John Blumenthal and Irfan Ahmad. Some of you might recognize their names as they used to work at VMware, John was a Product Manager for storage and Irfan was the person who was responsible for awesome features like Storage DRS and Storage IO Control. Together with several other brilliant people, including no one less than Carl “TPS / DRS” Waldspurger acting as an advisor and consultant, they founded a new company.

So what is CloudPhysics about? CloudPhysics is about big data, about centralized data, about analytics, about modeling data. CloudPhysics is essentially about helping you! How? Well let me try to explain that without revealing too much.

We’ve all monitored and managed environments, some of you are responsible for 3 hosts and some might be responsible for 80 hosts in different sites and in different companies. We all face several challenges and in many cases these are similar… How do you find common themes? How do you validate best practices are applied on all levels in your environment? How do you validate if your practices are actually used by others, and do you benefit from them? How do you know if you sized correctly? How do I solve specific problems? Would I benefit from a different storage platform or SSD? All of these are questions or problems you probably face daily and that is where CloudPhysics aims to come in to play.

CloudPhysics will enable you to find common best practices and problems in your environment. CloudPhysics will provide you guidance, this could be custom but also generic through for instance a link to a VMware KB article. They will enable you to compare and explore performance results. Find patterns in your environment… See trends and provide you with meaningful statistics about your environment. Sounds amazing right and probably something you wouldn’t mind testing today… The CloudPhysics product will come as a virtual appliance. The data gathered will go up to the cloud and all of the analysis will happen outside of your environment, of course with various degrees of anonymity.

CloudPhysics is constructing an analytics platform for vSphere for the application of collective intelligence to individual, local vSphere environments and users.  At the same time the platform is intended to service the needs of consulting companies, customers and the blogging community by providing APIs to enable unique exploration and discovery within the dynamic, changing dataset CloudPhysics continuously generates. Access to this dataset enables them to transform qualitative discussions into quantitative views of vSphere design and operation. CloudPhysics is not seeking to build a community; rather, it exists to empower the engineer and architect in all of us, particularly the commentators and critics essential to the industry.

For those who can’t wait, sign up at www.cloudphysics.com now for announcements and news on the beta. I am excited about CloudPhysics and I hope you all are as well.

VMworld Content Catalog live, here are my recommendations!

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First of all, some shameless self-promotion. Make sure to add the following to sessions to your schedule builder:

Traditionally I always do a list of sessions, when the content catalog goes live, that I recommend attending. I tried to make a top 10, and then I figured that would never work. I ended up with 3o sessions. This list is in completely random order and I am sure I missed out on a few really cool and deepdive sessions but here are the ones I recommend. Note that I tend to recommend technical sessions, if you are looking for high level overviews you probably can skip most of these. If you are like me and love to see technical deep subject matter experts… add them!

  1. INF-SEC1840 – vSphere Hardening to Achieve Regulatory Compliance: Better, Faster, Stronger with Charu Chaubal, Davi Ottenheimer, Ben Thomas and James Sullivan
  2. APP-CAP2956 – Inside the Hadoop Machine with Richard McDougall
  3. TEX2158 – Scalable Virtual Networks with VMware’ VXLAN – Customer Deployment Scenarios with T Sridhar and Ravindra Neelakant
  4. INF-SEC1282 – Automating Security and Compliance with Disaster Recovery Using VCM, vCOps, vShield, VIN and SRM with Michael Webster and Shubha Bheemarao
  5. APP-BCA1516 – Virtualizing SQL High Availability with Jeff Szastak and Michael Corey
  6. INF-BCO2155 – vCloud DR for Oxford University Computing Services – Real World Example with Aidan Dalgleish and Gary Blake
  7. INF-VSP2164 – Automation of vCloud Director Disaster Recovery with Alan Renouf and Aidan Dalgleish
  8. EUC2620 – PCoIP – Tuning, Tactics, and Tools with Chuck Hirstius, Banit Agrawal and Lawrence Spracklen
  9. INF-VSP2448 – Automating Bare Metal to the Cloud and Beyond with Alan Renouf, Jake Robinson and Eric Williams
  10. OPS-CSM1167 – Architecting for vCloud Allocation Models with Frank Denneman and Chris Colotti
  11. EUC1357 – Dispelling the Myths of Desktops as a Service (DaaS) with VMware View with Andre Leibovi and David Stafford
  12. OPS-CIM1775 – VMware vCenter Operations Customers Come Forward to “Tell Their Story” with Ben Scheerer
  13. INF-SEC1840 – vSphere Hardening to Achieve Regulatory Compliance: Better, Faster, Stronger with Charu Chaubal, David Ottenheimer, James Sullivan and Ben Thomas
  14. EUC2021 – A View of Hertz: Real World Lessons Learned Designing, Deploying and Managing View in Hertz with Graham Gordon and Simon Long
  15. INF-BCO2982 – Stretched Clusters & SRM; How and When to Choose One, the Other, or Both with Chad Sakac and Vaughn Steward
  16. INF-VSP1353 – vCenter 5.1: A Technical Deep Dive with Justin King, Ameet Jani and Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee
  17. INF-VSP1365 – Understanding VMware ESXi Security with Kyle Gleed and Yatin Patil
  18. INF-VSP1423 – esxtop for Advanced Users with Krishna Raj Raja
  19. INF-BCO1505 – vSphere Replication: Technical Walk-through with Ken Werneburg and Aleksey Pershin
  20. INF-VSP1168 – Architecting a Cloud Infrastructure with David Hill, Chris Colotti and Aidan Dalgleish
  21. INF-NET2162 – VXLAN Deep Dive with Arun Goel and Kenneth Duda
  22. EUC2005 – Troubleshooting View: Looking under the Hood with John Dodge and Matt Coppinger
  23. INF-VSP1683 – vSphere Cluster Resource Pools Best Practices with Frank Denneman and Rawlinson Riverra
  24. INF-NET2207 – vSphere Distributed Switch – Technical Deep Dive with Jason Nash
  25. INF-VSP1196 – vCloud Director Networking Deep Dive with Kamau Wanguhu
  26. INF-VSP3221 – VM Scare? Heterogeneous Virtualization’s Impact with Chris Wolf
  27. INF-VSP1475 – vSphere 5 Design Discussions with Scott Lowe and Forbes Guthrie
  28. INF-VSP3046 – Cloud Infrastructure Suite: From Management Application to Integrated Applications and Extensible Platform with Ben Verghese
  29. INF-STO1545 – Architecting Storage DRS Datastore Clusters with Frank Denneman and Valentin Hamburger
  30. OPS-CIM1564 – Troubleshooting Using vCenter Operations Manager with Kit Colbert and Praveen Kannan

HA Admission Control the basics – Part 2/2

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In part one I described what HA Admission Control is and in part two I will explain what your options are when admission control is enabled. Currently there are three admission control policies:

  1. Host failures cluster  tolerates
  2. Percentage of cluster resources reserved as failover spare capacity
  3. Specify a failover host

Each of these work in a slightly different way. And lets start with “Specify a failover host” as it is the most simple one to explain. This admission control policy allows you to set aside 1 host that will only be used in case a fail-over needs to occur. This means that even if your cluster is overloaded DRS will not use it. In my opinion there aren’t many usecases for it, and unless you have very specific requirements I would avoid using it.

The most difficult one to explain is “Host failures cluster tolerates” but I am going to try to keep it simple. This admission control policy takes the worst case scenario in to account, and only the worst case scenario, and it does this by using “slots”. A slot is comprised of two components:

  1. Memory
  2. CPU

For memory it will take the largest reservation on any powered-on virtual machine in your cluster plus the memory overhead for this virtual machine. So if you have one virtual machine that has 24GB memory provisioned and 10GB out of that is reserved than the slot size for memory is ~10GB (reservation + memory overhead).

For CPU it will take the largest reservation on any powered-on virtual machine in your cluster, or it will use a default of 32MHz (5.0, pre 5.0 it was 256MHz) for the CPU slot size. If you have a virtual machine with 8 vCPUs assigned and a 2GHz reservation then the slot size will be 2GHz for CPU.

HA admission control will look at the total amount of resources and see how many “memory slots” there are by dividing the total amount of memory by the “memory slot size”. It will do the same for CPU. It will calculate this for each host. From the total amount of available memory and CPU slots it will take the worst case scenario again, so if you have 80 memory slots and 120 CPU slots then you can power on 80 VMs… well almost, cause the number of slots of the largest hosts is also subtracted. Meaning that if you have 5 hosts and each of those have 10 slots for memory and CPU instead of having 50 slots available in total you will end up with 40.

Simple right? So remember: reservations –> slot size –> worst case. Yes, a single large reservation could severely impact this algorithm!

So now what? Well this is where the third admission control policy comes in to play… “Percentage of cluster resources reserved as failover spare capacity”. This is not a difficult one to explain, but again misunderstood by many. First of all HA will add up all available resources to see how much it has available. It will now subtract the amount of resource specified for both memory and CPU. Then HA will calculate how much resources are currently reserved for both memory and CPU for powered-on virtual machines. For CPU, those virtual machines that do not have a reservation larger than 32Mhz a default of 32Mhz will be used. For memory a default of 0MB+memory overhead will be used if there is no reservation set. If a reservation is set for memory it will use the reservation+memory overhead.

That is it. Percentage based looks at “powered-on virtual machines” and its reservation or uses the above mentioned defaults. Nothing more than that. No. it doesn’t look at resource usage / consumption / active etc. It looks at reserved resources. Remember that!

What do I recommend? I always recommend using the percentage based admission control policy as it is the most flexible policy. It will do admission control on a per virtual machine reservation basis without the risk of skewing the numbers.

If you have any questions around this please don’t hesitate.