Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

VMware EMEA Online Technology Forum 15th of April

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On the 15th of April there is an awesome online event planned called the “Online Technology Forum“. During this day you will hear all about what is new with vSphere 6.0. What can you expect:

Sign up now to this free online event where you will be able to engage in a live Q&A with VMware technical experts, including Joe Baguley, CTO, EMEA; Duncan Epping, Chief Technologist; and Mike Laverick, Senior Cloud Infrastructure Evangelist.

Join your peers at technology updates and a number of self-paced hands-on labs on the technologies driving IT efficiency and business advantage:

  • vSphere 6 – the Foundation for the Hybrid Cloud
  • Virtual SAN 6 and Virtual Volumes – What’s New?
  • Introducing VMware Integrated OpenStack
  • Enabling Micro-Segmentation with NSX
  • Introducing Hyper-Convergence with EVO:RAIL
  • App Volumes – Revolutionising Application Delivery

Full agenda can be found here. Note that these sessions are recorded, HOWEVER, there are live Q&As (one with Joe Baguley, Mike Laverick and I after the first two sessions. Another one at the end of the event with Joe Baguley, Mike Laverick, Richard Munro, Spencer Pitts, Jeremy Van Doorn, Yuval Tenenbaum and I.) All speakers (and other experts) will be handling questions via the chat windows though out the sessions, so make sure to register and dial in on the 15th of April.

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.