Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

beta

Virtual SAN beta coming up with dedupe and erasure coding!

· ·

Something I am personally very excited about is the fact that there is a beta coming up soon for an upcoming release of Virtual SAN. This beta is all about space efficiency and in particular will contain two new great features which I am sure all of you will appreciate testing:

  • Erasure Coding
  • Deduplication

My guess is that many people will get excited about dedupe, but personally I am also very excited about erasure coding. As it stands with VSAN today when you deploy a 50GB VM and have failures to tolerate defined as 1 you will need to have ~100GB of capacity available. With Erasure Coding the required capacity will be significantly lower. What you will be able to configure is a 3+1 or a 4+2 configuration, not unlike RAID-5 and RAID-6. This means that from a capacity stance you will need 1.3x the space of a given disk when 3+1 is used or 1.5x the space when 4+2 is used. Significant improvement over 2x when using FTT=1 in todays GA release. Do note of course that in order to achieve 3+1 or 4+2 you will need more hosts then you would normally need with FTT=1 as we will need to guarantee availability.

Dedupe is the second feature that you can test with the upcoming beta. I don’t think I really need to explain what it is. I think it is great we may have this functionality as part of VSAN at some point in the future. Deduplication will be applied on a “per disk group” basis. Of course the results of deduplication will vary, but with the various workloads we have tested we have seen up to 8x improvements in usable capacity. Again, this will highly depend on your use case and may end up being lower or higher.

And before I forget, there is another nice feature in the beta which is end-to-end checksums (not just on the device). This will protect you not only against driver and firmware bugs, anywhere on the stack,  but also bit rot on the storage devices. And yes, it will have scrubber constantly running in the background. The goal is to protect against bit rot, network problems, software and firmware issues. The checksum will use CRC32c, which utilizes special CPU instructions thanks to Intel, for the best performance. These software checksums will complement the hardware-based checksums available today. This will be enabled by default and of course will be compatible with the current and future data services. 

If you are interested in being considered for the beta (and apologies in advance that we will not be able to accommodate all requests), then you can summit your information at www.vmware.com/go/vsan6beta.  

Go VSAN

New Beta Program option: VMware Hosted Beta

· ·

Many of you probably have participated in one of the many beta programs VMware has offered in the last couple of years. I personally have participated in various beta programs when I was a customer / partner and I always loved going through the various exercises. The challenging part for me always was finding the time to setup the environment.

Recently VMware started offering a new way to participate in the evaluation and feedback of VMware’s developing products. The VMware Beta Program is now offering a Hosted Beta; providing registered users access to pre-build online Lab environments with guided workflows to get a closer look at the latest and greatest VMware technologies without the need to build-out infrastructure onsite.

This hosted technology is based on the same technologies used for the Hands-On Labs (HOL) at VMworld, providing a fully built environment to explore intricate product features while requiring nothing more than an HTML5 compliant browser and the latest View Client.

In my opinion this is a great opportunity to test-drive products and provide VMware with your feedback on the features still under development. On top of that this will allow you to spend 1-2 hour blocks to get acquainted with new technology, without the need to be on-site. You can do this at the office, or at home with just a connection to the internet.

If you are interested and want to learn more about the VMware Beta Program you can go here: http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/beta

If you are interested in joining the VMware Beta Program you can either work with your VMware account team or submit a participation request form found here: http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/betainterest

VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor-Manager 1.1 is out, sign up for it!

· ·

VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.1 is a minor release with the following new capabilities:

  • Migration of virtual machines from Hyper-V to ESX or ESXi hosts.
  • Support for the latest Microsoft Hyper-V3 hypervisor (as well as the earlier versions).
  • Increased scalability with regards to the number of supported third-party hosts to 50 (from 20 in MHM 1.0).
  • Ability to provide custom certificates for the MHM server from the installer wizard.
  • Multiple objects selection in the UI and a number of other usability improvements.
  • Plus a number of server and client-side bug fixes.

If you have some Hyper-V hosts in your environment that you want to manage, or need to migrate from Hyper-V to vSphere, then make sure to download this nice vCenter add-on. It is in Beta, and I am certain the engineering team will appreciate all the feedback you can give.