Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

Project: Massive Array of Inexpensive Servers aka MAIS

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I was part of the voting committee for VMworld and one of the sessions which I voted for unfortunately did not make it. However with over 350 submissions there are always some excellent topics that don’t make it. I did feel it was worth sharing. So here’s the outline of the session and some additional info. All credits to Richard Stinton (VMware Cloud Architect, EMEA) and his Team for coming up with the concept and allowing me to publish this!

Remember Simon Gallagher’s vTARDIS project? Now for something different. This is the Massive Array of Inexpensive Servers or MAIS (pronounced MAZE). We’re going to build an array of 32 (or more) $150 servers and show the power of vSphere and vCloud Director. Using the new(ish) HP Proliant Microserver, we’re going to build a wall of vBricks!

So it wasn’t just a submission, but these guys actually started working on it. They managed to get their hands on 32 HP Microservers. That gives a total of 64 cpus, 256Gb RAM, 8Tb storage, all for $9,000. They loaded it up with the latest vSphere and vCloud Director versions and it ran great, unfortunately we will never see the results but I did want to share one more thing;

Is that cool or what?

Order of storage tiers… (via twitter @mike_laverick)

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@Mike_Laverick asked a question on twitter today about something that is stated in the Cloud Computing with vCloud Director book. His question was, and no he is not dyslectic he only had 140 characters 🙂

pg65. Order of storage tiers. Doesn’t that infer FC/SDD+VMFS is “race horse” and NFS “donkey”…???

Mike was referring to the following section in the book:

SLA Service Cost RTO Storage RAID Applications
Tier 0 Premium $$$$$ 20 min SSD, FC 1+0 Exchange, SQL
Tier 1 Enterprise $$$$ 1 hour FC 1+0, 5 Web servers, Sharepoint
Tier 2 Professional $$$ 2 hours iSCSI, NFS 3, 5, X Custom apps, QA
Tier 3 Basic $ 2 days NFS 3, 5, X Dev/Test

This basically states, as Mike elegantly translated, that FC/SSD is top performing storage while NFS is slow or should I say “donkey”. Mike’s comment is completely fair. I don’t agree with this table and actually did recommend changing it, somehow that got lost during the editing phase. In the first place we shouldn’t have mixed protocols with disks. Even an FC array will perform crap if you have SATA spindles backing your VMFS volumes. Secondly, there is no way you could compare these really as there are so many factors to take in to account ranging from cache to raid-level to wire speed. I guess it is still an example as clearly mentioned on page 64, nevertheless it is misleading. I would personally prefer to have listed it as follows:

SLA Service Cost RTO Protocol Disk RAID BC/DR
Tier 1 Enterprise $$$ 20 min FC 8GBps SSD 10 Sync replication
Tier 2 Professional $$ 1 hour NFS 10GBps FC 15k 6 Async Replication
Tier 3 Basic $ 1 day iSCSI 1GBps SATA 7k 5 Backup

Of course with the side note that performance is not solely dictated by the transport mechanism used, there is no reason why NFS couldn’t or shouldn’t be Tier 1 to be honest. Once again this is just an example. Thanks Mike for pointing it out,

VMworld Sessions announced, must see!

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The VMworld Sessions have been announced and as always I wanted to list a couple which I felt are worth calling out. In the past I’ve heard people complaining that sessions were not technical enough or not exciting. I have listed all sessions which I will add to my schedule as soon as I can as I know they will solid technical sessions and they are hosted by great presenters! Note that any sessions containing “futures” are not showing up yet. As soon as they will show up I will update this list.

**EDIT: 3/August, added 1 new session**

Must See!

  • BCO2479 – Understanding vSphere Stretched Clusters, Disaster Recovery, and Planned Workload Mobility – Chad Sakac (EMC) and Lee Dilworth (VMware)
  • BCO2874 – vSphere HA 5.0 and SMP Fault Tolerance – Keith Farkas (VMware Engineering) and Jim Chow (VMware Engineering)
  • CIM1264 – Private vCloud Architecture Technical Deepdive – David Hill (VMware)
  • CIM1302 – Active Directory considerations in a multi-tenant cloud infrastructure – Deji Akomolafe (VMware)
  • CIM1600 – vCloud Networking Finally Explained – Mike DiPetrillo (VMware)
  • CIM2452 – vCenter Operations Tech Deepdive – Kit Colbert (VMware Engineering)
  • EUC1547 – ThinApp, So You Think You Know Everything There Is? – Peter Bjork (VMware)
  • EUC2866 – View Troubleshooting – Matt Coppinger (VMware) and John Dodge (VMware)
  • TEX1928 – Implementation of Application Awareness within the Web Client – Tom Stephens (VMware)
  • VSP1700 – vSphere 5.0 Storage Features – Cormac Hogan (VMware)
  • VSP1883 – PowerCLI Best Practices – Alan Renouf (VMware) and Luc Dekens (Eurocontrol)
  • VSP1882 – Manage ESXi with PowerCLI – Alan Renouf (VMware) and Luc Dekens (Eurocontrol)
  • VSP1933 – Storage IO Control for NAS – Ajay Gulati (VMware Engineering)
  • VSP1999 – Esxtop for Advanced Users – Krishna Raja (VMware Performance Engineering)
  • VSP2376 – Performance and scalability enhancements in VMFS-5 – Mostafa Khalil (VMware)
  • VSP2447 – Understanding Virtualization Memory Management Concepts – Kit Colbert (VMware Engineering) and YP Chien (Kingston)
  • VSP3067 – Mythbusters Goes Virtual – Eric Sloof (NTPro) and Mattias Sundling (Quest Software)
  • VSP3205 – Technology Overview: vStorage APIs for VM and Application Granular Data Management – Satyam Vaghani (VMware Engineering) and vijay ramachandran (VMware) **NEW**
  • VSP3255 – Storage vMotion Deep Dive and Best Practices – Min Cai (VMware Engineering) and Ali Mashtizadeh (VMware Engineering)
  • VSP3116 – vSphere Resource Management Deep Dive – Frank Denneman (VMware) and Valentin Hamburger (VMware)
  • VSP3305 – Upgrading to ESXi – Kyle Gleed (VMware)
  • VSP1823 – Storage DRS – Manish Lohani (VMware Product Management)
  • VSP1926 – Getting Started in vSphere Design – Scott Lowe (EMC)
  • VSP2757 – A deepdive on vDS and Nexus 1Kv – Jason Nash
  • VSP3307 – Deployment Considerations for ESXi – Charu Chaubal (VMware) and David Day (VMware)

My Sessions:

  • VSP1682 – vSphere Cluster – Q&A, Frank Denneman and Duncan Epping
  • VSP1425 – Ask the Expert vBloggers with Chad Sakac, Scott Lowe, Frank Denneman and I. Moderated by Rick Scherer.
  • VSP1956 – The ESXi Quiz with John Troyer, Pablo Roesch and Duncan Epping **NEW**

List of VAAI capable storage arrays?

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I was browsing the VMTN community and noticed a great tip from my colleague Mostafa Khalil and I believe it is worth sharing with you. The original question was: “Does anybody have a list of which arrays support VAAI (or a certain subset of the VAAI features)?”. Mostafa updated the post a couple of days back with the following reponse which also shows the capabilities of the 2.0 version of the VMware HCL:

A new version of the Web HCL will provide search criteria specific to VAAI.

As of this date, the new interface is still in “preview” stage. You can access it by clicking the “2.0 preview” button at the top of the page which is at: http://www.vmware.com/go/hcl/

  • The criteria are grouped under Features Category, Features and Plugin’s.
  • Features Category: Choice of “All” or “VAAI-Block”
  • Features: Choice of “All”, Block Zero”, “Full Copy”, “HW Assisted Locking” and more.
  • Plugin’s: Choice of “All” and any of the listed plugins.

HCL.jpg

Unfortunately there appear to be some glitches when it comes to listing all the arrays correctly, but I am confident that it will be fixed soon… Thanks Mostafa for the great tip.