Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

data protection

Startup intro: SaaS-based backup solution Clumio

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Last week I saw an update from one of the Clumio founders on twitter. It reminded me that I had promised to take a look at their product. This week I had a meeting set up with Clumio and we went over their product and how to configure it briefly. Clumio is a SaaS based backup solution that was founded in 2017 by former PernixData, Nutanix, EMC folks. The three founders are Poojan Kumar, Kaustubh Patil, and Woon Jung, and those three you may remember from PernixData. One thing to point out is that they had 3 rounds of funding (~190 million dollars) so far and they came out of stealth around VMworld 2019. Coincidentally they won the Gold award for Best of VMworld in the data protection category, and best of show for the entire show, not bad for a first VMworld. I guess that I have to point out that although I would classify them as backup/recovery today, they are adding new functionality weekly and “backup/recovery” is probably not a fair category, data protection is more appropriate and it would not surprise me if that evolves to data management and protection over time. If you are not a fan of reading, simply head over to my youtube video on Clumio, otherwise, just continue below.

So how does it work conceptually? Well they basically have a SaaS solution, but you will need to install an OVA (they call it a cloud connector) in your environment to connect to the SaaS platform for VMware on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS. When you connect AWS EBS they use a cloud formation template. This cloud connector is a 4 vCPU/8GB virtual machine that then needs the ability to connect to “the outside world” of course. The Cloud Connector is stateless and requires no updates. You can run this Cloud Connector appliance in multiple clusters, on-prem, or in VMware Cloud on AWS and once they are registered you will see those data sources in your portal.  This is nice as you can see all your data sources across public and private clouds in one single pane of glass. You will have the ability to define “backup schemes” by creating policies. These policies can of course then be associated with objects. These objects can be VMs, Clusters and even vCenter Server instances. This means that if you assign a policy to vCenter Server that every new VM created will inherit the policy automatically. You may wonder, where is your data stored? Your data is stored in S3 buckets that are part of the Clumio SaaS-based platform. Customers are isolated from each other, they will have their own dedicated S3 buckets, and these buckets are created and maintained by Clumio, you as a customer only interact with Clumio! [Read more…] about Startup intro: SaaS-based backup solution Clumio

HCI3041BU: Introducing Scalable File Storage on vSAN

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Another beta announcement last week for vSAN was around Native File Services. This was the topic of HCI3041BU, which was titled “Introducing Scalable File Storage on vSAN with Native File Services”. The full session can be found here, the summary is below for your convenience. The session was by Venkat Kolli (Product Manager) and engineers Rick Spillane and Wenguang Wang.

Venkat kicks of the session describing the different types of storage most of our customers have in their data center today, and also what kind of data lands on the different types of storage. Basically, it is divided into three main types: Block, File, and Object. Where I personally believe that “object” is at the point of becoming more common on-premises but for many is consumed as a cloud service. Looking at where the data growth is today, it is mainly in the “unstructured data” space.

Next Venkat discusses the management complexity of traditional file storage, not just management complexity but also scaling and forecasting. Which in most cases leads to increased cost. How can vSAN help with simplifying File Services and lowering cost by providing a framework which allows you to serve block, file and object. For now, we are discussing file-services however, but the vision is clear.

Rick is up next introducing File Services. vSAN File Services allows you to create file shares and provide file services to users/consumers through the same familiar interface you have available today in vSphere. On top of that, you get to leverage the power of policy-based management to provision file shares in a specific way. Which means that File Shares will work in stretched clusters, can be protected with vSAN Data Protection, can be striped/replicated etc. Most important piece of feedback during the design phase from customers was that they did not want a separate storage cluster to manage for file services, this needed to be an integral part of today’s offering.

The requirements and design principles for the vSAN Distributed File System were:

  • Elastic Scaling
    • Scale IOPs up/down
  • Single namespace across the cluster
  • Centrally managed, configured and monitored
  • Transparent failover
  • POSIX File Interface
  • Use vSAN services like data path, consensus mechanisms, and checksumming

Rick next explains a new platform that will (potentially) be included in vSAN, this is called the Storage Services Platform. What this provides is stateless containerized frontend servers which sit on top of the vSAN Distributed File System. This will be available for both VMware and partners, so even partners should be able to provide storage services through this platform. Data will sit in the VDFS volumes and then will be exposed through these services. These services, of course, are fully distributed and self-managing.

The Storage Services Platform is implemented in the form of a storage services control plane. This control plane will for instance monitor all front-end servers and node and help in the case of failures, but also will help to ensure availability during maintenance and upgrade. Also, when it comes to scalability the control plane monitors the instances and allows to scale up and down when needed.

Okay, that sounds great, but how do file shares get formed? File shares will be an aggregate of one or multiple vSAN Objects. The great thing about this is that it allows for elasticity in size and performance, plus policies can be associated with these objects. You can now simply create file shares through the UI, or leverage the API. The vSAN team made sure that you can access it and define them the way you prefer. On top of that, this platform will also be available to Kubernetes as part of our Cloud Native Storage Control Plane.

Next Rick briefly discussed data protection for file shares, he mentioned that the team has worked with various 3rd party vendors to allow for full backup and recovery, including file-level restore. What Rick also revealed, surprisingly enough, is that in the initial release we will have:

  • NFS v4.1 support
  • AD-based Authentication
  • Kerberos
  • Containerized application support

And in the release after that support for the following is planned:

  • SMB
  • vSAN DP Integration
  • OpenLDAP support

Next Wenguang came up on stage, and he demoed vSAN File Services. He showed how simple it is to enable File Services in the UI. Literally, a couple of steps, provide the networking details and also authentication mechanism. The next step will be to download an OVF, this contains the frontend service we spoke about earlier, for now, this is an NFS server, but this could be other services in the future. After the File Services have been enabled and the OVF is deployed you can start creating file shares. Again this is very straightforward, part of the familiar vSAN UI / HTML-5 interface, which is what I like most, if you know vSAN and/or vSphere you will be able to use vSAN File Services as well. I hope potential other services will be implemented in a similar easy manner.

The Q&A was interesting as well, as some questions around the potential SMB implementation were answered (SAMBA on Linux vs Microsoft vs Dell/EMC stack?) and for instance what block size is used for the file system (4K, like vSAN).

All in all a very exciting solution, and a great overview of what you can expect in the future for vSAN. Note that this is part of the beta, so if you are interested sign up!

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!

#vmworld #STO1770BU – Tech Preview of Integrated Data Protection for vSAN

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This session was hosted by Michael Ng and Shobhan Lakkapragada and is all about Data Protection in the world of vSAN. Note that this was also a tech preview and features may or may not ever make it in to a future release. The session started with Shobhan explaining the basics of vSAN and the current solutions that are available for vSAN data resiliency, I am not going to rehash that as I am going to assume that you have read most of my articles on those topics already.

Vision: Native Data Protection for vSAN. Provide the ability to specify in policy how many snapshots you would like per VM and how often, and what the retention should be. These snapshots will be stored locally. However, it will also be possible to specify in policy if data needs to moved outside of the primary datacenter. For instance, move data once every 4 hours to the DR site or the Archival Site, also referred to “local protection” and “remote protection”. Not just to vSAN by the way for “remote protection”, but also NFS, Data Domain and even S3 based storage. This is the overall vision of what we are trying to achieve with the native data protection feature.

First problem we will need to solve is snapshotting. The current vSphere/vSAN snapshotting mechanism will not scale to the extend it will need to scale. A new snapshotting mechanism is being worked on which will give far better performance and scale. The design goal is to support up to 100 snapshots per VM with a low (minimal) performance impact. The technology is developed on vSAN, but not tied to vSAN, this may be expanded to vSphere overall.

Michael now took over and started diving deeper in the functionality that we are aiming to provide. First of all “native local data protection”. This is where the snapshots which are created through a schedule in a policy are stored locally on the datastore. This is a “first line of defense” mechanism where we can recover VMs really fast by simply going to a previous snapshot. Snapshots can be created in an application consistent state, even leveraging VSS providers. What is critical if you ask me is that all of this uses the familiar SPBM policies. If you know how to create a policy then you can configure data protection!

In the demo Michael showed the H5 interface next for vSAN Data Protection. A policy is created with the new capabilities that are there as part of vSAN Data Protection. It is shown how you can can specify RPO, RTO, application consistency etc. The policy is created and next that policy is now attached to VMs. Next the snapshot catalog view was demoed. The H5 UI shows the catalog on a per VM basis, but of course there are various views. In this case the per VM view shows all the snapshots, whether they are locally stored or remotely, and it provides you the option to move back and forth in time. Very useful when you need to restore an older snapshot. When you click a snapshot you will then see all the details of that snapshot.

In the next demo Michael shows how to restore a snapshot, not the most spectacular demo, why not? Well because it is dead simple. First he simulates a data file corruption and then goes to the H5 UI, right clicks the VM and goes to the restore option. Next selects the snapshot he wants to restore and even restores it as “new VM”, which is a linked clone, but it can also be restored as a fully independent VM. In the case you want to restore fully independently a linked clone (sort of) will be created and in the back-end the instance will be migrated to being independently. So the recover is instantly and over time the task of making it independently will complete. During the recovery by the way, there’s even the option to have the VM recovered without networking, or you can customize the VM as well to avoid conflicts.

When the recovery finished Michael showed how the “corrupted file” was succesfully restored. Or actually I should say, the VM was restored to the ‘last known good state’, as this is not a file level restore but a VM level restore.

Besides snapshotting / restoring it is of course also possible to closely monitor the state of your protected VMs. Creating snapshots is important, but being to restore them is even more important. Custom health checks are being developed for vSAN Data Protection which shows you the current state of data protection in your environment. Is the service running, are VM snapshots created, are they crash consistent?

And with that the session ended. Very impressive demoes and interesting feature, I cannot wait to see this being released! Again, when the session is published, I will share the link. Thanks Michael and Shobhan.