Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

VMware Press announced

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The cat is finally out of the bag, VMware Press was just officially announced.

Indianapolis, IN – May 19, 2011 – Pearson, the world’s leading learning company, and VMware, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced VMware Press, a newly created technical imprint that will serve as VMware’s official publishing entity. The newly formed press will provide a suite of virtualization technology and certification products in multiple languages and formats.

Three books have been announced and I can honestly say that I am especially looking forward to Mostafa’s book on Storage Design. Mostafa is, in my opinion, THE storage guru within VMware and I confident this will be a must read. Mike Laverick doesn’t need an introduction and everyone has hopefully read at least one of his books. The third book is kind of a surprise to me, Cody “mr brown bag” Bunch tackling vSphere automation with Orchestrator!

Storage Design and Implementation in VMware vSphere 5.x Storage Design and Implementation in VMware vSphere 5.x
by Mostafa Khalil • Technology Deep Dive • Fall 2011 

In this technology deep dive book, expert architect Mostafa Khalil teaches everything an administrator or architect needs to know about design, management and storage maintenance in the vSphere 5.0 virtual environment, including detailed procedures and guidelines, architectural design elements, best practices, common configuration details, and more.
Administering VMWare SRM 5.x Administering VMware SRM 5.x
by Mike Laverick • Technology Hands-On • Fall 2011 

In this practical and technical guide to installing and configuring VMware’s Site Recovery Manager 5.0, expert Mike Laverick takes readers through set-ups for multiple vendors, disaster recovery, common pitfalls and errors, while along the way explaining why things happen, and how to fix them.
Automating Day-to-Day Administration of VMware vSphere 5.x Automating Day-to-Day Administration of VMware vSphere 5.x
by Cody Bunch • Technology Hands-On • Fall 2011 

This hands-on technical guide to automating vSphere with Orchestrator teaches administrators how to save time and resources by automating their virtual infrastructure. Automation expert Cody Bunch teaches valuable practices and tool use through a combination of real world automation examples and case studies.

I feel this is a huge step forward and hope that each of these books will be best sellers on VMware Press. I am confident many more great books will be published, and as mentioned on the VMware Press website, if you have a good idea contact them…

What if you were to design your own server…

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Lately I have been thinking about the future of servers and more specifically the design around servers. Servers are more and more heading towards these massive beasts with all sorts of options that many might not need, but end up paying for as they are already bolted on. On the other hand you have these massive blade chassis that will allow for 10 / 14 blades, whatever your vendor decides is a nice form factor. While thinking about that I wondered why we have the 1U and 2U servers stuffed with options and the possibility to add disks when all we actually want, in many cases, is to run ESXi as a hypervisor. Even if we want to have local disks do we really need a 2U server?

After doing some research on the internet I bumped into something which I thought was a cool concept. Although it isn’t was I envisioned, it is close enough to share with you. I haven’t seen these types of servers used for virtualization so far and I wonder why that is. There are multiple vendors with offerings like these but I wanted to point out the following two as they offer more than others in my opinion and are VMware Certified. These servers are traditionally used in HPC environments (High-performance computing), but if you look at what they offer they could be suitable for virtualization as well. They are very dense but don’t bring along the requirement to buy a full chassis if you just need 3 or 4 servers. Of course you cannot directly compare them to blade servers and chassis, but think about the possibilities for a second and I will expand on that as well in a second.

Now in this case, the Super Micro 2U Twin2 has 4 nodes. Each node has a set of 6 SAS drives to its disposal and can hold up to 192GB or RAM. On top of that it can hold 2 Intel Nehalem/Westmere CPUs and has an Infiniband 20Gbps on board. This by itself is a very cool concept, but what if we would simplify it? These servers typically have:

  • Expansion slots
  • Sata / sas controllers
    • Disks
    • CD/DVD
  • Multiple 1GbE links
  • IPMI Lan port

But do we really need all of that? Wouldn’t a fully stripped down server make more sense for a virtualized environment? Do we really need a Sata/SAS controller? Do we need a CD/DVD Drive? Do we need multiple 1Gbe links plus 20GbE Infiniband and on top of that an IPMI Lan port? What if someone would come out with a server that wasn’t geared towards HPC but to virtualization. Yes we have seen many vendors taking their traditional servers and positioning them as Virtualization Ready but are they? So what would I like to see?

Well for starters I kinda like the form factor above, but I would like to see one without those disks. In most environments there will be shared storage available so there is no need for local disks. It would be nice if they had an on-board dual SD slot, allowing for ESXi to be installed locally. So what if someone could crank out, maybe someone already did if so let me know, a configuration like this:

  • 2U “Chassis”
  • Max 4 nodes
  • Each node supporting max 2 sockets
  • Each node supporting 192GB (probably overkill)
  • Single 10GbE CNA
  • Single IPMI LAN port
  • SAS/SATA controllers

But what if we could go even more crazy like that, kinda like what Dell developed with their C5125 Microservers, what if you could host 12 Server nodes in 3u? Would that be something that you would be interested in? Yes, you might be limited to a single processor but without the requirement for a disk and lets say 96GB of memory max it should be possible. Yes I understand their would be implications to a design like that, but that is not the point right now.

I don’t design hardware or servers, but it seems to me that many options have been explored for all kinds of workloads but we haven’t reached the full potential for virtualization. Out in the field we see many people creating home labs with barebone casings, we see people running very stripped down configurations but when you walk into a random datacenter you see DL380’s, Dell R710s etc fully stocked with all bells and whistles while half of these features are not used. Wouldn’t dense and virtualization purpose built servers be nice? Seamicro created a nice solution with 512 servers in a 10 Us, but the CPUs are not powerful enough unfortunately for our purpose. Still I feel there are opportunities out their to really innovate, to lower the cost, lower the chances of failure and to ease management and maintenance!

Which server vendor out there is going to take the next step?

Exchange and VMware HA…

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I guess many people have been waiting on official statements around this. Although this was posted a couple of days ago I wanted to make sure everyone has seen it as it could be crucial for your Design / Environment.

Source
As of today, the following support scenarios are being updated, for Exchange 2010 SP1, and later:

  • The Unified Messaging server role is supported in a virtualized environment.
  • Combining Exchange 2010 high availability solutions (database availability groups (DAGs)) with hypervisor-based clustering, high availability, or migration solutions that will move or automatically failover mailbox servers that are members of a DAG between clustered root servers, is now supported.

In other words, enabling VMware HA and VMware DRS is perfectly supported for your Exchange 2010 SP1 environment allowing for greater flexibility! Make sure you reconsider some of the design / implementation decisions you made in the past when these constraints still applied. Also, if you are re-evaluating your mail solution… check out Zimbra. I’ve been using it for over 6 months and couldn’t be happier. I used to be a huge Exchange/Outlook fan and expected that I would not be able to adjust to another platform, but Zimbra is in my opinion on par with Exchange and those little extras like the zimlets just make your life easier. (Integrating with applications, websites, social networks… you name it)

VMworld Public Voting

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As Mr Sloof already revealed VMworld Public Voting started today… I have submitted multiple sessions, some which are directly job related and others which are more community focused. As I was part of the voting committee for the Technology and Architecture track I know how many great sessions were submitted and how difficult it will be to get your session approved. (almost 400 submissions for that track alone and less than 40 slots) There are two particular sessions which I will need YOUR help with and I hope you guys are willing to vote on these. These are not the typical powerpoint slide sessions, yes you can get a lot out of those but after seeing slide 8326th of the day you tend to get a bit bored. This is your chance to change VMworld and vote for something different:

  • TA 1956 – The ESXi Quiz Show
    Join us for our very first ESXi Quiz Show where teams of vExperts and VMware engineers will match expertise on technical facts, trivia related to all VMware ESXi and related products. You as the audience will get 40% of the vote. We will cover topics around ESXi migration, storage, networking security, and VMware products. As an attendee of this session you will get to see the experts battle each other. For the very first time at VMworld you get to decide who leaves the stage as a winner and who does not.
  • TA 1682 – vSphere Clustering Q&A
    Frank Denneman and Duncan Epping will answer any question with regards to vSphere Clustering in this session. You as the audience will have the chance to validate your own environment and design decisions with the Subject Matter Experts on HA, DRS and Storage DRS. Topics could include for instance misunderstandings around Admission Control Policies, the impact of limits and reservations on your environment, the benefits of using Resource Pools, Anti-Affinity Rules Gotchas, DPM and of course anything regarding Storage DRS. This is your chance to ask what you’ve always wanted to know!

http://www.vmworld.com/cfp.jspa

The vSphere Clustering Q&A is obvious I guess. Frank and I did this session at the Dutch VMUG and the place was packed and it a cool very informative session with many great questions some which literally had our heads spinning.

The Quiz Show is kind of my baby. I came up with the Quiz Show before VMworld 2010 but as I was working on the VMworld Labs it slipped my mind and I was too late to enter it in to the system. This year however I contacted my friends Pablo Roesch and John Troyer and we had a couple of conference calls about this one… I promise you, if we can pull this one off it is going to R O C K. vExperts battling VMware employees on virtualization knowledge! Just imagine who could reach the finals, who could get eliminated during the pre-rounds… Wouldn’t it be cool if Chad Sakac and Vaughn Stewart make it in to the finals, or how could would it be when Eric Sloof gets eliminated during the pre-qualifying rounds? Yes, it is going to be EPIC, the battle of the year…

There’s another community session, and this not only has multiple top bloggers but also 4 VCDX’s : TA 1425 Ask the Expert vBloggers (Chad Sakac, Scott Lowe, Rick Scherer, Frank Denneman and I). Vote!

Good read: VMware vSphere 4.1 Networking Performance

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I just noticed that a new whitepaper was released and as the scoopmeister Eric Sloof hasn’t blogged about it yet I figured, he’s probably sleeping, I would blog about it. I just read the paper and it is a very good read and interesting to know that a single VM can actually saturate the bandwidth of a 10Gbps NIC. Also note the VM to Native comparisons!

Source: VMware vSphere 4.1 Networking Performance

Download:
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/Performance-Networking-vSphere4-1-WP.pdf

Description

This paper demonstrates that vSphere 4.1 is capable of meeting the performance demands of today’s thoughput-intensive networking applications. The paper presents the results of experiments that used standard benchmarks to measure the networking performance of different operating systems in various configurations. These experiments examine the performance of VMs by looking at VMs that are communicating with external hosts and are communicating among each other, demonstrate how varying the number of vCPUs and vNICs per VM influences performance, and show how the scalability results of overcommitting the number of physical cores on a system by adding four 1-vCPU VMs for every core.