Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

My VMworld US 2013 schedule…

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It seems that the dust has finally settled, it is clear what my VMworld schedule will look like. Well for now at least, as I will expect some “one on one” slots to be added, as part of the Expert track. If one of the sessions fills up there might also be a repeat, who knows… I will use this blogpost though to keep track of my agenda, for those who care:

I had the question various times if there will be a chance to meet up. Typically my schedule is packed with various customer meetings, however as mentioned there are the “one on one” slots that can be signed up for during VMworld. Also, feel free to come up to me when you see me walking in the hallway / after my session / at a social event. Don’t be afraid, I love to talk to readers and understand what keeps you guys up at night. (No, I am not as grumpy/grouchy in real life as I sometimes seem to be on twitter.) Talking about Social Events, which seems to become a bigger and bigger part of VMworld every year, these are the ones I am aiming to attend:

  • Saturday: vBeers, Cheiftain
  • Sunday: VMworld Welcome Reception
  • Monday: Nimble Storage, VMUG Reception
  • Tuesday: PernixData, CloudPhysics, VMware CTO Event, Lightspeed, Veeam
  • Wednesday: VMworld Party AT&T Park

Yes, busy times ahead… Now lets see if I can finalize that presentation.

PS: If you don’t prefer using the VMworld.com website, there is an app for Android and iOS. I just installed the iOS app, you never know when you need it right!

Startup News Flash part 1

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I am on PTO this week so have tried to avoid spending time behind my mac/iPhone/iPad, well tried I guess… It is difficult as most of you probably know and have realized. While on vacation a couple of interesting things happened, hence this Startup New Flash blog post. The primary focus of this article is Startup news / Flash-related news. Preferably in the storage/flash space. This can be flash caching, flash arrays, hybrid arrays, flash drives… you name it! I guess “new technologies from old companies” would even fit. Will try to make this a regular thing… Or at least use the same title when there is something flashy announced or worth calling out.

For those who have been living under a rock the last week, besides introducing a brand new logo, PernixData announced general availability of FVP 1.0. On Monday my RSS reader was filled with Pernix related articles, and I was almost at the point of muting “Pernix” on twitter. So why the excitement, what did they announce? Hopefully, most of you have read my article on Pernix, or have been following Frank’s series of articles. I guess everyone is aware that Pernix offers a hypervisor-based flash virtualization platform. Meaning that their solution is installed as a “vib” within ESXi, indeed not an appliance-based approach. But others are doing this as well, so what is so unique about it? Write-back caching… Clustered write-back caching that is, so guaranteeing consistency of your IO. In other words, when within FVP you enable “write-back” caching, you can select how many relicas of the IO you want. (Currently, it ranges from 0 to 2.) Pricing for the enterprise solution was also announced, $ 7500,- per host. The announcement mentions there will be a different SKU for SMB, so looking forward to hear the details on that. One thing which I didn’t know is that Pernix also has optimization for View environments, it contains a form of “dedupe” for the base images… Frank revealed this on the APAC podcast (episode 77) he was on, hosted by Mike Laverick. (Recommend listening to it.) All in all an exciting and unique 1.0 release… I guess you might wonder where I think they should focus on, for me that would be NFS support and potentially support for other hypervisors, but if I recall correctly Satyam or Frank mentioned that those are being worked on.

Diablo announced Memory Channel Storage (MCS). The next logical step if you ask me when it comes to reducing latency and increasing bandwidth. MCS basically brings flash closer to your CPU by leveraging the memory bus instead of PCIe/SAS/SATA. Interesting concept, something worth exploring. Especially considering you can present it as either normal memory (how about TBs of memory for a fraction of the price?) or as a block device. This means that you could potentially use Diablo as a target for a flash caching solution. One of the benefits many people listed is that this solution would be very useful in blade environments or hyperconverged due to the fact that it eliminates the need for a PCIe slot or a disk slot… I guess that is somewhat true, in many of those cases the number of memory slots will also be limited so it doesn’t really solve those types of constraints immediately. Nevertheless, an interesting solution which is worth exploring and definitely offers new opportunities.

Another interesting announcement came from a startup called Crossbar. Crossbar came out of stealthmode this week, and is working on RRAM. With 20x faster write performance at 20x lower power consumption and much higher capacity density compared to best-of-breed flash solutions you can understand why people are excited about Crossbar. The market opportunity is huge here, and various companies have been working on it… So far not many have been able to execute on it at scale, so congrats to Crossbar, and definitely a company and a solution to keep your eye on. I know I will, I have already added them to my twitter startup watch list.

Different tiers of storage in a single Storage DRS datastore cluster?

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This question around adding different tiers of storage in a single Storage DRS datastore cluster keeps popping up every once in a while. I can understand where it is coming from as one would think that VM Storage Profiles combined with Storage DRS would allow you to have all types of tiers in one cluster, but then balance within that “tier” within that pool.

Truth is that that does not work with vSphere 5.1 and lower unfortunately. Storage DRS and VM Storage Profiles (Profile Driven Storage) are not tightly integrated. Meaning that when you provision a virtual machine in to a datastore cluster and Storage DRS needs to rebalance the cluster at one point, it will consider ANY datastore within that datastore cluster as a possible placement destination. Yes I agree, it is not what you hoped for… it is – what it is. (feature request filed) Frank visualized this nicely in his article a while back:

So when you architect your datastore clusters, there are a couple of things you will need to keep in mind. These are the design rules at a minimum, that is if you ask me:

  • LUNs of the same storage tier
    • See above
  • More LUNs = more balancing options
    • Do note size matters, a single LUN will need to be able to fit your largest VM!
  • Preferably LUNs of the same array (so VAAI offload works properly)
    • VAAI XCOPY (used by SvMotion for instance) doesn’t work when going from Array-A to Array-B
  • When replication is used, LUNs that are part of the same consistency group
    • You will want to make sure that VMs that need to be consistent from a replication perspective are not moved to a LUN that is outside of the consistency group
  • Similar availability characteristics and performance characteristics
    • You don’t want potential performance or availability to degrade when a VM is moved

Hope this helps,

Vendors to check out at VMworld

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Cormac just released his article about storage vendors to check out at VMworld, right when I was typing up this article. Make sure to read that one as well as it contains some great suggestions… I was looking at the list of vendors who have a booth at VMworld, there are a whole bunch I am going to try to check out this round. Of course some of the obvious ones are my friends over at Tintri, Nutanix and Pure Storage but lets try to list a few lesser known vendors. These are not all storage vendors by the way, but a mix of various types of startups from the VMware ecosystem. I have added my own oneliner to it, so you know what to expect.

  • Actifio – Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery solution that seems to be gaining traction, maybe I should say “Copy Data Management” solution instead, as that is ultimately what it is they do.
  • CloudPhysics – Monitoring / Analytics, the power of many! Or as I stated a while back: Where most monitoring solutions stop CloudPhysics continues.
  • Cumulus Networks – Linux Network Operating System is how they describe themselves, decoupling software from hardware is another way of looking at it… interesting company!
  • Infinio – Downloadable NFS performance enhancer! AKA memory caching solutions for NFS based infrastructures, check the intro article I wrote a while back…
  • Maxta – Software Defined Storage solution, virtual appliance based and hypervisor agnostic… Not spoken with them, or seen their solution yet
  • Panzura – A name that keeps popping up more and more often, a global distributed cloud storage solution. Haven’t dug in to it yet, but when I get the chance at VMworld I will…
  • PernixData – Came out of stealth this year, and as you all know is working on a write back flash caching solution… One of the few offering a clustered write back solution within the hypervisor
  • Plexxi – Networking done in a different way, SDN I would say.
  • SolidFire – SolidFire is definitely one cool scale-out storage solution to watch out for, one of the few which actually has a good answer to the question: do you offer Quality of Service? More details about what it is they do here… Not on the show floor, but outside of the expo.

Just a couple of companies which I feel are interesting and worth talking with.