Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Final lab results VMworld Europe 2010

· ·

I just received the final numbers on the VMworld Europe Labs. I am really excited that the vCloud Director Lab came in as first as I was one of the Captains for that Lab. Great improvement compared to the US where we came in as 4th. Other Labs that went up a couple of places are VMware vShield and of course PowerCLI!

We managed to hit both of our targets and I must say that the Labs were well organized and I was extremely impressed by the fact that all of it was hosted in the Cloud! Don’t let me keep you waiting much longer, here are the numbers:

Total Labs completed: 5,948
Total VMs deployed: 56,435

The Top 10 labs were:

  1. VMware vCloud Director Install & Config (646)
  2. VMware View 4.5 Install and Config (623)
  3. VMware vSphere Perf & Tuning (491)
  4. VMware vShield (364)
  5. VMware View 4.5 Advanced (341)
  6. VMware ESX 4.1 new features (326)
  7. VMware vSphere PowerCLI (290)
  8. VMware vSphere Troubleshooting (286)
  9. VMware ESXi Remote Management Utilities (275)
  10. VMware ThinApp 4.6 (242)

Thanks everyone for attending VMworld and making it a success and hope to see you next year!

VMware High Availability – Futures (part of BC7803)

· ·

First of all need me start by thanking everyone who attended our session at VMworld Copenhagen. First session filled up quick and 5 minutes before we were supposed to start they had to close the doors as the place was packed. I can tell you that is the best compliment you can get! I know a bunch of people took pictures of the session, if you did we would appreciate it if you could sent me a copy! (Eric Sloof shot a video, thank Eric!)

There is something that was discussed during the presentation and actually mentioned on the very last slide which I wanted to share with all of you and that is around some of the HA futures. Now I am not going to fully elaborate on these as I don’t want to get into any NDA related issues, but I will try to add a bit more detail as soon as I have the whole video of the session. (I need to know the boundaries.)

  • All New Architecture, a single lightweight HA agent process
  • Eliminate concept of “Primaries”
  • Storage heartbeating as backup communication channel
  • Automatic resolution of network partitions
  • VMs still protected during partitions, no “fighting” for VM control
  • Greater scalability, extensible
  • Ability to deal with any number of simultaneous host failures
  • New lightweight communication model
  • All state required to recover from any failure is persisted
  • Improved isolation actions (VMs left running and restarted as needed via storage subsystem monitoring)
  • No dependencies on DNS

All the people rounding up after the session with questions (Thanks Jannie Hanekom!) …

duncan epping vmworld 2010 copenhagen
And of course a big thanks to Eric Sloof for this picture:
duncan epping vmworld 2010 copenhagen

it’s a bloggers lab (vm)world

· ·

The labs are filling up, roughly 150 active labs at the moment and more people coming in to get their hands dirty.

I actually managed to spot a whole bunch of bloggers and took a picture to have evidence that these guys are not just here to look cute, but actually get their hands dirty as well. As stated before there are 30 different lab topics available, always something you haven’t looked into and can explore.

Here you go, meet the bloggers…

Gabe van Zanten (gabesvirtualworld.com)

Heino Skov (virtualtroll.com)

Joep Piscaer on the left(virtuallifestyle.nl and Gerben Kloosterman on the right (virtualarchitect.nl)

Maish Saidel-Keesing(Technodrone)

Arnim van Lieshout (van-lieshout.com)

VMworld Labs Europe – Open on Monday!!

· ·

Yes, we will be open on Monday from 13:00 till 18:00! Not only that, but the for the remaining days the labs will open up at 08:00. Some might wonder why the schedule changed, the reason for it is simple the amount of VMworld registrations was so overwhelming VMware wanted to offer everyone the opportunity to get the most out of VMworld. So if you are coming down to the Bella Center on Monday to register stick around and do some labs! There are enough topics to spent your whole Monday afternoon in the Bella Center. My personal favorites definitely are:

  • VMware View 4.5 Install and Configure
  • VMware vShield
  • VMware vCloud Director Install and Configure
  • VMware vCloud Director Networking
  • VMware vSphere Performance & Tuning

But besides these 5 there are about 25 other labs, so enough to get your hands dirty.

SIOC, tying up some loose ends

· ·

After my initial post about Storage IO Control I received a whole bunch of questions. Instead of replying via the commenting system I decided to add them to a blog post as it would be useful for everyone to read this. Now I figured this stuff out be reading the PARDA whitepaper 6 times and by going through the log files and CLI of my ESXi host, this is not cast in stone. If anyone has any additional question don’t hesitate to ask them and I’ll be happy to add them and try to answer them!

Here are the questions with the answers underneath in italic:

  1. Q: Why is SIOC not enabled by default?
    A: As datastores can be shared between clusters, clusters could be differently licensed and as such SIOC is not enabled by default.
  2. Q: If vCenter is only needed when enabling the feature, who will keep track of latencies when a datastore is shared between multiple hosts?
    A: Latency values are actually stored on the Datastore itself. From the PARDA academic paper, I figured two methods could be used for this either through network communication or as stated by using the Datastore. Notice the file “iormstat.sf” in green in the screenshot below, I guess that answers the question… the datastore itself is used to communicate the latency of a datastore. I also confirmed with Irfan that my assessment was true.
  3. Q: Where does datastore-wide disk scheduler run from?
    A: The datastore-wide disk scheduler is essentially SIOC or also known as the “PARDA Control Algorithm” and runs on each host sharing that datastore. PARDA consists of two key components which are “latency estimation” and “window size computation”. Latency estimation is used to detect if SIOC needs to throttle queues to ensure each VM gets its fair share. Window size computation is used to calculate what this queue depth should be for your host.
  4. Q: Is PARDA also responsible for throttling the VM?
    A: No, PARDA itself or better said the two major processes that form PARDA (latency estimation and window size computation) don’t control “host local” fairness, the Local scheduler (SFQ) is responsible for that.
  5. Q: Can we in any way control the I/O contention in vCD VM environment (say one VM running high I/O impacting another VM running on same host/datastore)
    A: I would highly recommend to enable this in vCloud Environments to prevent storage based DoS attacks (or just noisy neighbors) and to ensure IO fairness can be preserved. This is one of the reasons VMware developed this mechanism.
  6. Q: I can’t enable SIOC with an Enterprise licence – “License not available to perform the operation”. Is it Enterprise Plus only?
    A: SIOC requires Enterprise Plus
  7. Q: Can I verify what the Latency is?
    A: Yes you can, go to the Host – Performance Tab and select “Datastore”, “Real Time”, select the datastore and select “Storage I/O Control normalized latency”. Please note that the unit for measurement is microseconds!
  8. Q: This doesn’t appear to work in NFS?
    A: SIOC can only be enabled on VMFS volumes currently.

If you happen to be at VMworld next week, make sure to attend this session: TA8233 Prioritizing Storage Resource Allocation in ESX Based Virtual Environments Using Storage I/O Control!