Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

beta

HCI2164BU – HCI Management, current and futures

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This session by Christian Dickmann and Junchi Zhang is usually one of my favorites in the HCI track, mainly because they show a lot of demos and in many cases show you what ends up being part of the product in 6-12 months. The session revolved all around management, or as they called it in the session “providing a holistic HCI experience”.

After a short intro Christian showed a demo around what we currently have around the installation of the vCenter Server Appliance and how we can deploy that to a vSAN Datastore, followed by the Quickstart functionality. I posted a demo of Quickstart earlier this week, let me post it here as well so you have an idea of what it is/does.

In the next demo, Christian showed how you can upgrade the firmware of a disk controller using Update Manager. Pretty cool, but afaik still limited to a single disk controller, hopefully, more will follow soon. But more importantly, after that demo ended he started talking about “Guided SDDC Update & Patching”, and this is where it got extremely interesting. We all know that it isn’t easy to upgrade a full stack, and what Christian was describing would be doing exactly that. Do you have Horizon? Sure, we will upgrade that as well when we do vCenter / ESXi / vSAN etc. Do you have NSX as part of your infra? Sure, that is also something we will take into account and upgrade it when required. This would also include firmware upgrades for NICs, disk controllers etc.

Next Christian showed the Support Insight feature, which is enabled through the Customer Experience Improvement Program. His demo then showed how to create a support request right from the H5 Client. The process shows that the solution understands the situation and files the ticket. Then it shows what the support team sees. It allows the support team to quickly analyze the environment, and more importantly inform the customer about the solution. No need to upload log bundles or anything like that, that all happens automatically. That’s not where it stop, you will be informed in the H5 client about the solution as well. Cool right?

Next Junchi was up and he discussed Capacity Management first. As he mentioned it appears to be difficult for people to understand the capacity graphs provided by vSAN. Junchi proposes a new model where it is clear instantly what the usable space is and by what current capacity is being consumed. Not just on a cluster level, but also at a VM level. This should also include what-if scenarios for usage projection. Junchi then quickly demoed the tools available that help with sizing and scaling.

Next Native File Services was briefly discussed, Data Protection and Cloud Native Storage. What does the management of these services look like? The file services demo that Junchi showed was really slick. Fill out IP details and Domain details and have File Services running in a minute or two natively on vSAN. Only thing you would need to do is create file shares and give folks access to the file shares. Also, monitoring will go through the familiar screens like the health check etc.

Last but not least Junchi discusses the integration with vRealize Automation on-premises and SaaS-based, a very cool demo showing how Cloud Assembly (but also vRA) will be able to leverage storage policies and new applications are provided using blueprints which have these policies associated with them.

That was it, if you like to know more, watch the session online, or attend it in EMEA!

HCI1603BU – Tech Preview of Native vSAN Data Protection

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The second session I watched was HCI1603BU Tech Preview of Native vSAN Data Protection by Michael Ng. I already discussed vSAN Data Protection last year, but considering the vSAN Beta is coming up soon that includes this functionality I felt it was worth covering again. Note that the beta will be a private beta, so if you are interested please sign up, you may be one of the customers getting selected for the beta.

Michael started out with an explanation about what an SSDC brings to customers, and how a digital foundation is crucial for any organization that wants to be competitive in the market. vSAN, of course, is a big part of the digital foundation, and for almost every customer data protection and data recovery is crucial. Michael went over the various vSAN use cases and also the availability and recoverability mechanisms before introducing Native vSAN Data Protection.

Now it is time for the vSAN Native Data Protection introduction. Michael first explains that we will potentially have a solution in the future where we can simply create snapshots locally through specifying the number of local snapshots you want in policy. On top of that, in the future, we will potentially provide the option to specify the snapshots (plus a full copy) will need to be offloaded to secondary storage. Secondary storage could be NFS, S3 Object Storage (both on-premises and in the cloud). Also, it should be possible to replicate VMs and snapshots to a DR location through policies.

What I think is very compelling is the fact that the native protection comes as part of vSAN/vSphere, there’s no need to install an appliance or additional software. vSAN Data Protection will be baked into the platform. Easy to enable and easy to consume through policy. The first focus is vSAN Local Data Protection.

vSAN Local Data Protection will provide Crash and Application-consistent snapshots at an RPO of 5 minutes and with a low RTO. On top of that, it will be possible to instant clone the snapshot. Meaning that you can restore the snapshot as an “instant clone”, this could be interesting when you want to test a certain patch or upgrade for instance. You can even specify during the recovery that the NIC doesn’t need to be connected. Application consistency is achieved by leveraging VSS providers on Windows and on Linux the VMware Tools pre- and post-scripts are being used.

What enables vSAN Data Protection is a new snapshotting technology. This new technology provides a lot better performance than traditional vSphere (or vSAN) snapshots. It also provides for better scale, meaning that you can go way above the 32 limit we currently have.

Next Michael demoed vSAN Data Protection, which is something I have done on various occasions if you are interested in what it looks like just watch the session. If I have time I may record a demo myself just so it is easier to share with you.

What I personally hadn’t seen yet were the additional performance views added. Very useful as it allows you to quickly check what the impact is of snapshots on general performance. Is there an impact? Do I need to change my policy?

Last but not least various questions were asked, most interesting parts was the following:

  • “file level restore” is on the roadmap but the first feature they will tackle is offloading to secondary storage.
  • “consistency groups” is something that is being planned for, especially useful when you have applications or services spanning VMs.
  • Integration with vRealize Automation, some of it is planned for the first release, everything is SPBM based which already have APIs. Being planned for is “self-service restore”
  • 100 snapshots per VM is tested for the first release

Good session, worth watching!

Taking VSAN to the next level, join the VSAN beta!

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In 2013 VSAN saw the day of light, the beta was released. Now 3 years later you have the opportunity to once again sign up and help improve our product. Over the last couple of years we have seen many new features introduced, so you may wonder what is left. There will be various enhancements in this release, but we are in particular looking for feedback on the following 3 features:

  • Software data-at-rest encryption
  • Local Protection for Stretched Clusters, for two-layer protection of stretched clusters: across sites and locally
  • New operational management enhancements (Health checks from vCenter, monitoring networking stats, and more)

I think most of these speak for itself, with regards to the Local Protection for Stretched Clusters, it basically allows you to protect your data within a site and across sites at the same time in a stretched cluster. In other words: RAID-1 across site and then RAID-1, 5 or 6 within a site. Something I am very excited about personally.

I don’t know how many people will be accepted for the beta, but if I find out I will report back. Sign up now: vmware.com/go/virtual-san-beta. PS: remember, these capabilities are still under development, are subject to change without notice and there is no guarantee of future availability.

vSphere Beta coming soon….

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If you are one of those guys (or girls of course) who likes to stay on top of his (or her) game, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to test the upcoming vSphere Beta? I know I got excited about all the cool new functionality that is introduced in it. I can’t share any details unfortunately it is a private beta and those details can only be shared under NDA… However, the Beta is open for everyone to register. So if you have a home-lab, a lab at work, you want to test stuff nested… Make sure to sign up here: VMware vSphere Beta Interest Capture.

Note that the vSphere Beta Program leverages a private Beta community to download software and share information. It will provide you the ability to discuss features, functionality and potential issues you see with Engineers and Product Managers but also with your peers. Testing is free-form and there is even the option to test it in a VMware hosted environment, easy right? Best however would be to test it in your labs the way you use the product in production…

Dedupe and Checksumming in VSAN beta, what about Compression? Yup!

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I was talking to our engineering team a couple of weeks ago with regards to our upcoming beta. During a demo I noticed that in our UI it said “Space Efficiency” instead of deduplication. After some discussions it became clear to me why that is… It isn’t “just” deduplication which will be in the upcoming beta for Virtual SAN, but the engineering team managed to also get compression in there. Huge accomplishment if you ask me and I hope this will make the official next release.

So where does compression fit? Compression happens after deduplication and we expect to store 2KB for every unique 4KB block. Combine this with “RAID5/6” over the network, aka “erasure coding” and with deduplication and thin provisioning and I bet you will see significant space savings! Great new functionality (if and when released), which will especially make the all-flash configuration a no-brainer if you ask me. Especially with flash prices still dropping and the price being almost on the same level as SAS drives these days it will make this a very compelling solution.