Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

VMware Virtual SAN launch and book pre-announcement!

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Today is the day, finally… the Virtual SAN (VSAN) launch. Many people have been waiting for this one. With 12.000 plus beta participants this was one of the biggest projects I have ever seen within VMware. It is truly impressive to see how the product has grown and what the team has done. Before I will provide you with some of the details of the announcement I want to share something else that all of you should look out for:

Cormac Hogan and I decided it was time for a book on Virtual SAN. Both of us have published many articles about VSAN the last 9 months and have been working with the product for over a year now so it only made sense. We have decided, and this wasn’t an easy decision for me, to go with VMware Press. When I say “not an easy decision” I don’t want to sound negative about using publisher, but it is just that I have had a great experience (and results) with self-publishing. It was time for a new experience though, try something different. As we speak we are working hard to get the final set of chapters in for review / editing and we are hoping to have the book available before VMworld. I am guessing that the rough cuts will be available through Safari in the upcoming weeks, if so I will let you know via a blog post.

Now lets get back to the topic of the day again, Virtual SAN Launch… So what was announced today?

  • General Availability of Virtual SAN 1.0 the week of the 10th of March
  • vSphere 5.5 Update 1 will support VSAN GA
  • Support for 32 hosts in a Virtual SAN cluster
  • Support for 3200 VMs in a Virtual SAN cluster
  • Full support for VMware Horizon / View
  • Elastic and Linear Scalability for both capacity and performance
  • VSAN is not a VSA. Performance is much better than any VSA!
  • 2 Million IOPS validated in a 32 host Virtual SAN cluster
  • ~ 4.5PB in a 32 host cluster
  • 13 different VSAN Ready Node configurations between Cisco IBM Fujitsu and Dell available at GA, more coming soon!

Once again, great work by the VSAN team. Version 1.0 just got release, and I can barely wait for the next release to become available!

Startup News Flash part 14

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Part 13 of the Startup News Flash… Hopefully not an unlucky one for the startups featured. Just a short one considering I am in Vietnam and away ‘from work’ for the last 2 weeks.

A3Cube is a startup which came out of stealth recently and announced as they call it a ‘brain inspired’ data plane encapsulated in a NIC designed to bridge supercomputing benefits to the enterprise. The core of their solution is called Ronnie Express. They aim is to eliminate the I/O performance gap between CPU power and data access performance for HPC, Big Data and data center applications. A3CUBE’s In-Memory Network technology allows direct shared non-coherent global memory across the entire network, enabling global communication based on shared memory segments and direct load/store operations between the nodes. Basically a server “interconnect” solutions for lrge scale. They took the word “scale” serious by the way and can go up to 64,000 nodes. For more details, I highly recommend to read this excellent article by Enrico.

Infinio just announced Infinio Accelerator 1.2. This new version of the Infinio Accelerator now supports vSphere 5.5. Useful to know for those who have a home lab, Infinio is running a limited-time offer of free non-expiring licenses for test labs. Hit their website to find out more.

Support your fav. virtualization bloggers, vote for the top blogs!

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I just woke up in an extremely warm Vietnam and noticed it is that time of the year again. I am hoping to end up somewhere at the top of the list again, but I realize like no one else that this is not a given. The competition is huge and some really stood out this year. There are three in particular that stood out in my opinion which for sure made my Top list: Cormac Hogan, William Lam and Derek Seaman. All three did something different than most bloggers do. They bring unique content, a unique perspective and showed dedication / perseverance. I am expecting all three to be in the top of the list for sure.

2013 was a crazy year… I joined a new team and am working on an exciting new product at VMware, which I unfortunately cannot talk about yet. We saw the beta release of Virtual SAN and that resulted in many many articles. I was fortunate enough to be selected to present at both VMworld EMEA and US, and presented at various VMUGs but the two which particularly stood out were Italy and Denmark as I had not been there before. The busiest blogging day of the year was August 27th with over 13k views.

I guess something exciting to mention is that I started working on a new book, of course somehow Eric Sloof managed to notice if first and scooped the news. Will take a while before it is released but the title will be: Essential Virtual SAN. The rough cuts should be online soon as well. Happy to be working with Cormac Hogan on this, I couldn’t think of anyone else who would be better fitted to write a book on the topic of VSAN with.

Something worth noting as well, the top referring sites: twitter, VMware VMTN Community, facebook, Eric Siebert’s VLP and blogs.vmware.com. In that order, and it makes you realize how important social media is today. Whether it is twitter or a community forum… it can drive a lot of traffic when used in the right way!

Thanks again to Eric Siebert who spends a MASSIVE amount of time going through the voting, filtering out discrepancies and making sure it all is done in a fair manner! Make sure to bookmark his website, add it to your RSS reader and follow him on twitter. So what are you waiting for, head on over and take the survey!

Vietnam trip, first couple of days…

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I have been in Vietnam a couple of days now and so far it has made a huge impression on me. (Many pictures here if you want an impression) To be honest I didn’t really know what to expect. I had never been to Asia before even, and never have been in contact in any shape or form with orphanages. Funny that before you go out you do have an expectation of what you will see, I guess everything revolves around perception. How you look at something and how it comes across.

The first couple of days were spent observing. Talking to the people of Orphan Impact to figure out what their challenges are delivering computer skill training in these orphanages in Vietnam. We visited two orphanages to see how these classes are delivered, and personally I spent time just observing the kids to see how they are consuming it. What struck me is the drive / the fun these kids had. We watched the change of a group and these kids were waiting at the door and as soon as the hour was over they literally ran in. What Orphan Impact does for these kids matters. As Tad of Orphan Impact said, it makes such a big difference for these kids that in one orphanage they have seen the runaway / elope literally drop down to 0 and that was attributed by the Orphanage director to the classes provided.

Another thing that stood out during these days was how these kids used the computers, what they were doing during the classes and what kind of material they used for their assignments. It is great to see that they are not just doing the exercises but also use the time for “social” purposes. Seeing those kids switch between their email / exercises / facebook was great. Seeing them use Google to look-up a picture of Messi to use that in their assignment was eye-opening. These kids were very resourceful in many ways.

Talking about resourcefulness, something that struck me walking around in Vietnam, the level of entrepreneurship throughout the country / city is extremely high. On every street corner and every street facing window you will see someone trying to sell something. Mini-startups in a sense you could say. I guess talking about perception, when you are on a holiday and you are being asked every minute if you want to buy something it can be annoying. It is good to realize that this is their way of surviving. Look at it from their perspective when you run in to a situation like this.

During our kick-off event multiple Vietnamese entrepreneurs were invited, and I know some may think that what we do won’t make a difference in the long run, I can tell you that it already did. During our kick-off event their was an introduction by the VMware team, Team4Tech and Orphan Impact, which as I have explained earlier is a US ran non profit organization that employs local (Vietnamese) people to teach these kids. One of the entrepreneurs said and I quote: seeing people from the US (and other parts of the world) coming to Vietnam to help our people makes me realize that I can do more myself for my own people. That by itself was worth the trip if you ask me.

That is it for now, just a short summary of what we’ve been up to far. The upcoming days will be spent discussing what their problems/challenges are, how we potentially can solve this.

For those interested, Kamau Wanguhu also published his thoughts… Day 0 and Day 1 are up so far.

*** I know many of my fellow technology lovers have a big heart. I would like to ask each and everyone of you who has enjoyed reading my articles to donate something to either Team4Tech or Orphan Impact. ***

Don’t create a Frankencluster just because you can…

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In the last couple of weeks I have had various discussions around creating imbalanced clusters. Imbalanced from either CPU, memory and even a storage point of view. This typically comes up in discussions where either someone wants to bring larger scale to their cluster and they want to add hosts with more resources of any of the before mentioned types. Or also when licensing costs need to be limited and people want to restrict certain VMs to run a specific set of hosts. Something that comes up often when people are starting to look at virtualizing Oracle. (Andrew Mitchell published this excellent article on the topic of Oracle Licensing and soft vs hard partitioning which is worth reading!)

Why am I not a fan of imbalanced clusters when it comes to compute or storage resources? Why am I not a fan of crippling your environment purposely to ensure your VMs will only run on a subset of vSphere hosts? The reason is simple, the problems I have seen and experienced and the inefficiency in certain scenarios. Lets look at some examples:

Lets assume I have 4 hosts with each 128GB of memory. I need more memory in my cluster and I add a host with 256GB of memory. Now you just went from 512Gb to 768GB which is a huge increase. However, this is only true when you don’t do any form of admission control and resource management. When you do proper resource management or admission control than you would need to make sure that all of your virtual machines can run in the case of a failure, and preferably run with equal performance before and after the failure has occured. If you added 256GB of memory and this is being used and that host containing 256GB goes down your virtual machines could potentially be impacted. They might not restart, and if they restart they may not get the same amount of resources as they received before the failure. This scenario also applies to CPU, if you create an imbalance .

Another one I encountered recently was presenting a LUN to a limited set of hosts, in this case a LUN was only presented to 2 hosts out of the 20 hosts in that cluster… Guess what, when those two hosts die… so do your VMs. Not optimal right when they are running an Oracle database for instance. On top of that I have seen people pitching a VSAN cluster of 16 nodes with only 3 hosts contributing storage. Yes you can do that, but again… when things go bad, they will go horribly bad. Just imagine 1 host fails, how will you rebuild your components that were impacted? What is the performance impact? Very difficult to predict how it will impact your workload, so just keep it simple. Sure there is a cost overhead associated with separating workloads and creating dedicated clusters, but it will be easier to manage and more predictable in failure scenarios.

I guess in summary: If you want predictability in terms of availability and recoverability of your virtual machines go for a balanced environment, don’t create a Frankencluster!