Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

ForceAffinePowerOn what is it?

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I’ve seen a lot of confusion around the ForceAffinePowerOn setting, and even the VMware documentation is incorrect around what this feature is / does. First and foremost: ForceAffinePowerOn is an advanced DRS setting (Yes I filed a doc bug for it). I’ve seen many people stating it is an HA setting, but it is not. You need to configure this in the advanced settings section of your DRS configuration.

Secondly, ForceAffinePowerOn can be used to ensure VM to VM affinity rules are respected when powering on a VM. ForceAffinePowerOn has absolutely nothing to do with VM to VM anti-affinity rules, it only applies to “affinity”.

Lets be crystal clear:

  • When ForceAffinePowerOn is set to 0, it means that VM to VM affinity can be dropped if necessary to power on a VM.
  • When ForceAffinePowerOn is set to 1, it means that VM to VM affinity should not be dropped and power-on should fail if the rule cannot be respected.

I hope that helps!

All-flash VSAN configuration example

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I was talking to a customer this week who was looking to deploy various 4 node VSAN configurations. They needed a solution which would provide them performance and wanted to minimize the moving components due to the location and environmental aspects of the deployment, all-flash VSAN is definitely a great choice for this scenario. I looked at various server vendors and based on their requirements (and budget) provided them a nice configuration (in my opinion) which comes in for slightly less than $ 45K.

What I found interesting is the price of the SSDs, especially the “capacity tier” as the price is very close to SAS 10K RPM. I selected the Intel S3500 as the capacity tier as it was one of the cheapest listed that is part of the VMware VSAN HCL, will be good to track GB/$ for new entries on the HCL that will be coming soon, so far S3500 seems to be the sweet spot. Also seems that from a price point perspective the 800GB devices are most cost effective at the moment. The 3500 seems to perform well as demonstrated in this paper by VMware on VSAN scaling / performance.

This is what the bill of materials looked like, and I can’t wait to see it deployed:

  • Supermicro SuperServer 2028TP-HC0TR – 2U TwinPro2
  • Each node comes with:
    • 2 x Eight-Core Intel Xeon Processor E5-2630 v3 2.40GHz 20MB Cache (85W)
    • 256 GB in 8 DIMMs at 2133 MHz (32GB DIMMs)
    • 2 x 10GbE NIC port
    • 1 x 4
    • Dual 10-Gigabit Ethernet
    • LSI 3008 12G SAS

That is a total of 16TB of flash based storage capacity, 1TB of memory and 64 cores in mere 2U. The above price is based on a simple online configurator and does not include any licenses, a very compelling solution if you ask me.

DRS rules still active when DRS disabled?

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I just received a question around DRS rules and why they are still active when DRS is disabled. I was under the impression this was something I already blogged about, but I cannot find it. I know some others did, but they reported this behaviour as a bug… which it isn’t actually.

Below is a screenshot of the VM/Host Rules screen for vSphere 6.0, it allows you to create rules for clusters… Now note I said “clusters” not DRS in specific. In 6.0 the wording in the UI has changed to align with the functionality vSphere offers. These are not DRS rules, but rather cluster rules. Whether you use HA or DRS, these rules can be used when either of the two is configured.

Note that not all types of rules will automatically be respected by vSphere HA. One thing which you can now also do in the UI is specify if HA should ignore or respect rules, very useful if you ask me and makes life a bit easier:

Cloud native inhabitants

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When ever I hear the term “cloud native” I think about my kids. It may sounds a bit strange as many of you will think about “apps” probably first when “cloud native” is dropped. Cloud native to me is not about an application, but about a problem which has been solved and a solution which is offered in a specific way. A week or so ago someone made a comment on twitter around how “Generation X” will adopt cloud faster than the current generation of IT admins…

Some even say that “Generation X” is more tech savvy, just look at how a 3 year old handles an iPad, they are growing up with technology. To be blunt… that has nothing to do with the technical skills of the 3 year old kid, but is more about the intuitive user interface that took years to develop. It comes natural to them as that is what they are exposed to from day 1. They see there mom or dad swiping a screen daily, mimicking them doesn’t require deep technical understanding of how an iPad works, they move their finger from right to left… but I digress.

My kids don’t know what a video tape is and even a CD to play music is so 2008, which for them is a lifetime, my kids are cloud native inhabitants. They use Netflix to watch TV, they use Spotify to listen to music, they use Facebook to communicate with friends, they use Youtube / Gmail and many other services running somewhere in the cloud. They are native inhabitants of the cloud. They won’t adopt cloud technology faster, for them it is a natural choice as it is what they are exposed to day in day out.

Startup intro: Rubrik. Backup and recovery redefined

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Some of you may have seen the article by The Register last week about this new startup called Rubrik. Rubrik just announced what they are working on and announced their funding at the same time:

Rubrik, Inc. today announced that it has received $10 million in Series A funding and launched its Early Access Program for the Rubrik Converged Data Management platform. Rubrik offers live data access for recovery and application development by fusing enterprise data management with web-scale IT, and eliminating backup software. This marks the end of a decade-long innovation drought in backup and recovery, the backbone of IT. Within minutes, businesses can manage the explosion of data across private and public clouds.

The Register made a comment, which I want to briefly touch on. They mentioned it was odd that a venture capitalist is now the CEO for a startup and how it normally is the person with the technical vision who heads up the company. I can’t agree more with The Register. For those who don’t know Rubrik and their CEO, the choice for Bipul Sinha may come as a surprise it may seem a bit odd. Then there are some who may say that it is a logical choice considering they are funded by Lightspeed… Truth of the matter is that Bipul Sinha is the person with the technical vision. I had the pleasure to see his vision evolve from a couple of scribbles on the whiteboard to what Rubrik is right now.

I still recall having a conversation with Bipul talking about the state of the “backup industry”, and I recall we agreed the different components of a datacenter had evolved over time but that the backup industry was still very much stuck in the old world. (We agreed backup and recovery solutions suck in most cases…) Back when we had this discussion there was nothing yet, no team, no name, just a vision. Knowing what is coming in the near future and knowing their vision I do think this quote from the press release embraces best what Rubrik is working on and it will do:

Today we are excited to announce the first act in our product journey. We have built a powerful time machine that delivers live data and seamless scale in a hybrid cloud environment. Businesses can now break the shackles of legacy and modernize their data infrastructure, unleashing significant cost savings and management efficiencies.

Of course Rubrik would not be possible without a very strong team of founding members. Arvind Jain, Arvind Nithrakashyap and Soham Mazumdar are probably the strongest co-founders one can wish. The engineering team has deep experience in building distributed systems, such as Google File System, Google Search, YouTube, Facebook Data Infrastructure, Amazon Infrastructure, and Data Domain File System. Expectations just raised a couple of notches right?!

I agree that even the statement above is still a bit fluffy so lets add some more details, what are they working on? Rubrik is working on a solution which combines backup software and a backup storage appliance in to a single solution and initially will target VMware environments. They are building (and I hate using this word) a hyperconverged backup solution and it will scale from 3 to 1000s of nodes. Note that this solution will be up and running in 15 minutes and includes the option to age out data to the public cloud. What impressed me most is that Rubrik can discover your datacenter without any agents, it scales-out in a fully automated fashion and will be capable of deduplicating / compressing data but also offer the ability to mount data instantly. All of this through a slick UI or you can leverage the REST APIs , fully programmable end-to-end.

I just went over “instant mount” quickly, but I want to point out that this is not just for “restoring VMs”. Considering the REST APIs you can also imagine that this would be a perfect solution to enable test/dev environments or running Tier 2/3 workloads. How valuable is it to have instant copies of your production data available and test your new code against production without any interruption to your current environment? To throw a buzzword in there: perfectly fit for a devops world and continuous development.

That is about all I can say for now unfortunately… For those who agree that backup/recovery has not evolved and are interested in a backup solution for tomorrow, there is an early access program and I urge you to sign up to learn more but also help shaping the product! The solution is targeting environments of 200 VMs and upwards, make sure you meet those requirements. Read more here and/or follow them on twitter (or Bipul).

Good luck Rubrik, I am sure this is going to be a great journey!