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by Duncan Epping

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VMware Partner Exchange 2012 – Las Vegas

Duncan Epping · Dec 9, 2011 ·

A couple of weeks back I received the news that one of the sessions I submitted was accepted for VMware Partner Exchange 2012. PEX is held in Las Vegas from the 13th til the 16th of February. There’s an excellent program again. Make sure to check the full list here. If you haven’t signed up yet, do it quick as the early bird discount has been extended with a couple of weeks, it will save you $ 400,-.

This is the session that I submitted:

Session 1359: Architecting a Cloud Infrastructure
Abstract: This session will discuss the various design considerations when architecting the foundation for every solid cloud environment: vSphere 5.0. We will start with sizing and scaling and end with some operational guidance. Different examples will be used to show the impact design considerations can have on the availability of your services.

Presenters: Duncan Epping and David Hill

Just added:

Session 1262 (Wednesday 2/12 @ 12:30pm): DR of the Cloud and to the Cloud

This session will look at DR and the cloud. Two different DR scenarios will be presented in depth – DR of the cloud and DR to the cloud. DR to the cloud is how end consumers fail over resources to a cloud provider. DR of the cloud is how you fail over cloud resources from one site to another. This session will go in depth on the consumer and provider side of the architecture. We’ll look at how to replicate the data, what applications are primary targets, how to size environments, how to maintain multi-tenancy, and what to avoid when architecting these solutions. This session is a must for anyone considering tier 1 applications for the cloud.

Presenters: Chris Colotti and Duncan Epping

I glanced over the list of sessions at PEX and I definitely highly recommend adding the following to your schedule. I tried to keep the list limited by forcing my self to only list 15, too many great sessions at PEX.

  • Emad Benjamin – (1187) Virtualizing Latency Sensitive Workloads and vFabric GemFire
  • Thomas Kraus – (1206) vCloud Director 1.5 solution integration
  • Cormac Hogan – (1231) vSphere Storage Appliance Deep Dive
  • Rob Randell – (1248) Using vShield and vCenter Configuration Manager to Achieve Better Than Physical Security for Business Critical Applications
  • Mike DiPetrillo – (1260) Multi-Site Cloud Deployment How-To
  • Clive Wenman – (1265) SRM 5.0 & vSphere Replication – Understanding the Use cases and Implementation Options
  • Chris Colotti – (1269) Upgrading the vCloud Solution Stack in an End to End Environment
  • Kamau Wanguhu – (1276) vCloud Director Networking and where VXLAN fits in
  • Carter Shanklin – (1316) Using Elastic Memory for Java to pool application server memory, improve consolidation ratios, and increase app server reliability.
  • Kyle Gleed – (1328) Upgrading to vSphere 5.0
  • Grant Suzuki – (1349) VMware vShield App and Data Security Deep Dive
  • Ken Werneburg – (1363) SRM 5 Demo – New Features in Action and Q&A
  • Tom Stephens – (1374) The Last Mile in HA: Application Availability
  • Justin King – (1388) Up and Running with vSphere vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA)
  • Alex Fontana – (1466) Design, Deploy and Optimize Exchange 2010 on vSphere

See you in Las Vegas!

Doing a vCloud Director Proof of Concept?

Duncan Epping · Nov 18, 2011 ·

I think this will make you happy. VMware just released the vCloud Director virtual appliance. That means no more installing Red Hat, Oracle and vCloud Director. Just download the appliance and deploy it. On top of there is a great vCloud Cloud Director Evaluators Guide which will help you to evaluate the product.

  • vCloud Director virtual appliance download (You will need to register for the eval)
  • VMware vCloud Director Evaluator’s Guide

If you haven’t done anything with vCloud Director before the following articles might also be worth reading, note that these are 1.0 based articles but most of the content is still valid today.

  • vCloud Director Intro
  • vCloud Director Demo
  • vCloud Director networking part 1, 2, 3a and 3b
  • vCloud Director Allocation Models

vShield App and layering your design

Duncan Epping · Nov 10, 2011 ·

I started diving in to vShield App and one thing that I like about vShield App is that it allows you to use different types of objects to apply your policies to. Never really put too much thought in to it, but considering the world is more and more changing to policy based management this fits right in. I just wanted to share something that I was working on, any feedback / thoughts are welcome…

The VMware Cloud Infrastructure aims to reduce operational overhead and lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by simplifying management tasks and abstracting complex processes. The focus of this architecture, as indicated by our customer requirements, is resource aggregation and isolation through the use of pools for each of the crucial pillars: network, storage and compute. Each of the three pillars will be carved in to multiple units of consumption with priority allocated based on their service level agreement. This will be achieved by leveraging core functionality offered by vSphere 5.0. Subsequently vShield App will be used to isolate each of the different type of workloads. As a hypervisor-based application-aware firewall solution, vShield App allows defining policies to logical, dynamic application boundaries (security groups) instead of physical boundaries.

This resource and security layering method will allow for a fast and safe deployment of new workloads.

Each of the different types of resources are carved up in to different groups for each of the respective workload types. A virtual machine, or vApp, will be deployed in one of the three different compute and security groups after which a specific networking group will be selected and a storage tier. Compute, Security and Network  group types are currently defined based on the different type of workloads this virtual infrastructure will host. In the future additional blocks may be added based on the requirements of the internal customers and the different types of workloads being deployed…

Nutanix Complete Cluster

Duncan Epping · Aug 18, 2011 ·

I was just reading up and noticed an article about Nutanix. Nutanix is a “new” company which just came out of stealth mode and offers a datacenter in a box type of solution. With that meaning that they have a solution which provides shared storage and compute resources in a single 2u chassis. This 2u chassis can hold up to 4 compute nodes and each of these nodes can have 2 CPUs, up to 192GB of memory, 320 GB of PCIe SSD, 300 GB SATA SSD and 5 TB of SATA HDDs. Now the cool thing about it is that each of the nodes “local” storage can be served up as shared storage to all of the nodes enabling you to use HA/DRS etc. I guess you could indeed describe Nutanix’s solution as the “Complete Cluster” solution and as Nutanix says it is unique and many analysts and bloggers have been really enthusiastic about this… but is it really that special?

What Nutanix actually uses for their building block is an HPC form factor case like the one I discussed in May of this year. I wouldn’t call that revolutionary as Dell, Super Micro, HP (and others) sell these as well but market it differently (in my opinion a missed opportunity). What does make Nutanix somewhat unique is that they package it as a complete solution including a Virtual Storage Appliance they’ve created. It is not just a VSA but it appears to be a smart device which is capable of taking advantage of the SSD drives available and uses that as a shared cache distributed amongst each of the hosts and it uses multiple tiers of storage; SSD and SATA. It kind of reminds me of what Tintri does only this is a virtual appliance that is capable of leveraging multiple nodes. (I guess HP could offer something similar in a heartbeat if they bundle their VSA with the DL170e) Still I strongly believe that this is a promising concept and hope these guys are at VMworld so I can take a peak and discuss the technology behind this a bit more in-depth as I have a few questions from a design perspective…

  • No 10Gbe redundancy? (according to the datasheet just a single port)
  • Only 2 nics for VM traffic, vMotion, Management? (Why not just 2 10Gbe nic ports?)
  • What about when the VMware cluster boundaries are reached? (Currently 32 nodes)
  • Out band management ports? (could be useful to have console access)
  • How about campus cluster scenarios, any constraints?
  • …..

Lets see if I can get these answered over the next couple of days or at VMworld.

Live Blog: Raising The Bar, Part V

Duncan Epping · Jul 12, 2011 ·

I am live at the Launch event in San Francisco with many other bloggers, journalists and analysts. It is the 12th of July, almost 09:00 PDT and Paul Maritz is about come up on stage to talk about the Cloud Infrastructure launch. This article will be update live during the event as we go.

Paul Maritz is taking the stage… Taking the next step in towards the more automated world.

We need to make infrastructure become something that people can depend on and focus on what is important to their business. Navigating your way forward offering a more dynamic infrastructure that will support your existing applications. Using a more flexible infrastructure, allowing people to take resources and aggregate to larger pools reducing operational costs by automating the use of these resources. More and more use of social media and use of mobile devices to connect anytime anywhere and most importantly securely.

Today we will be talking about  a more efficient infrastructure with exists of three stages IT Production, Business Production and IT as a Service. In 2009, the VI 3 era, 30% of the workloads were virtualized…. in 2010 with vSphere 4 we reached 40% and it is expected that in 2011 we will hit 50% virtualized with the majority on vSphere.

Accelerating and Amplifying business agility with vSphere 5! Not only vSphere 5 but the worlds first Cloud Infrastructure suite! In addition to vSphere 5 today we announce vSphere Site Recovery Manager 5 (Business Continuity), vCloud Director 1.5 (Policy, Reporting, Self-Service), vCenter Operations 1.0.1 (Monitoring and Management), vShield 5 (Security and Edge functionality).

VMware vCloud = Hybrid. Your private cloud experience needs to be similar to public cloud experience. VMware allows this through the vCloud offering and vCloud Service Providers. Trusted vCloud partners like Colt, Bluelock, Singtel, Verizon, NYSE Euronext, Softbank and CSC are some of the enablers for this.

Steve Herrod up on stage… I expect it is about to get more technical

Why do these new products matter and how do they fit together. Accelerating the adoption by increasing scalability. ESX 1.0 capable of 5000 IOps, ESX 2.0 ~ 7000 IOps, VI 3 100.000 IOps, vSphere 4 300.000 IOps and vSphere 5.0 1.000.000 IOps. Besides performance availability is key. Both HA and FT have been enhanced and of course SRM 5.0 has been released. Added to SRM 5.0 is vSphere Replication. vSphere Replication allows you to use the network to replicate between sites and different arrays. It will allow you to replicate more workloads with a lower costs. SRM is about datacenter mobility, not only for an outage but also pro-actively moving datacenters after an acquisition.

What does cloud computing really mean? Being able to order what you need and what without knowing what happens behind the scenes. IT will behind the scenes validate if they meet the consumers requirements. vCloud Director is all about Simple Self-Service. Deploy virtual machines but more importantly create new vApps and offer these in your own “app store”. The IT Cloud of the producer is all about offering agility. Virtualization enables automation in a way unheard in a physical environment.

Typically multiple tiers are offered within a cloud environment. The VMware Cloud Infrastructure enable you to do so. Intelligent Policy based Management is key with vCloud Director 1.5. Linked Clones is a very important feature to provision virtual machines “aggressively” within the system. It allows for fast provisiong and save up to 60% of storage.

Profile-Driven Storage and Storage DRS are part of vSphere 5.0. It enables you to map different arrays in to logical entities by a concept called a “datastore cluster” and link these to a profile. Virtual machines will be tagged with a profile and this allows you to validate compliancy. Storage DRS does for storage what DRS does for compute resources. Storage and Network IO Control ensures each virtual machine receives what it is entitled to.

For the SMB market a brand new shared storage appliance is introduced today: vSphere Storage Appliance 1.0. It takes vanilla servers and use local drives and present it as shared storage. It will bring agility and availability through shared storage to the SMB.

Auto-Deploy, PXE booting your ESXi hypervisor in to memory! It allows to spin-up more hosts within minutes instead of hours. Adding capacity has never been this simple?

vSphere 5 offers comprehensive security and isolation capabilities through vShield 5.0. vShield App 5 allows you to select regulations to protect sensitive data. It also enables you to get additional auditing in place.

The Cloud Infrastructure represents more than a million engineering hours, more than 100 additional capabilities, more than two million QA hours, more than 2000 partner certifications to enable this.

Rick Jackson up next discussing licensing.

Industry has traditionally licensed on physical constraints. It makes it difficult to create a cloud environment. Customers need to be able to upgrade to new hardware without having physical boundaries. No more “Cores per Proc” limits, no more “Physical RAM per host license”… vSphere introducing vRAM entitlement. Virtual RAM is the amount of virtual memory configured for a powered on virtual machine. vSphere 5 used pooled vRAM across the entire environment.

Packaging has been simplified and moving from 6 down to 5 packages. vSphere Advanced has been eliminated, all customers currently using Advanced are entitled to vSphere Enterprise.

Join us at VMworld for more details around the new product releases. 10AM virtual show, be there for more technical in-depth details!

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About the Author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist and Distinguished Engineering Architect at Broadcom. Besides writing on Yellow-Bricks, Duncan is the co-author of the vSAN Deep Dive and the vSphere Clustering Deep Dive book series. Duncan is also the host of the Unexplored Territory Podcast.

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