Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

dell

Dell FX2 platform certified for VSAN with storage blades!

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A couple of weeks ago the Dell FX2 disk controller was added to the Virtual SAN Compatibility Guide and shortly after the Ready Node configurations were added. For those who haven’t looked at the Dell FX2 platform, it is (in my opinion)  hyper-converged on steroids. Not only can it provide you with 4 compute nodes in 2U it also packs a 10GbE switch and can hold two storage blades with each 16 disks in it. What? Yes indeed, that is a lot of horse power in a single system.

I am working with a customer right now who is designing a new cluster configuration leveraging the Dell FX2 platform. In this case they are planning on 16 hosts in total. In their case after assessing their current workloads they are going with the FC430 E5-2670 v3 series with 12 cores (dual processor). Each host will have 256GB of memory and uses SD to boot from.

From a storage perspective they are looking to use the FD332 storage blades. Two per FX2 chassis, fully maxed out with 32 drives in total, which is 8 drives per host. All-flash by the way, leveraging 1.6TB devices for the capacity tier and 400GB devices for the write cache. Yes that is 38.4TB raw capacity per FX2 chassis, times 4… ~153TB.Not a coincidence that the configuration is very similar to the “AF-6 Series – Dell FX2 Platform”, they prefer to use a certified and tested solution instead of picking their own components, which makes sense if you ask me.

One of the key reasons for them to go with all-flash is the beta which is coming up. They want to get their hands dirty with functionality like deduplication, checksumming and RAID-5/6 (aka erasure coding) as soon as possible. All 4 chassis will run in one site first for testing purposes for now and they are considering after the initial tests to deploy them across two sites in a stretched configuration. They asked me what the big benefit was of RAID-5 or RAID-6 over the network (aka erasure coding) and it definitely is the lower raw capacity requirements it will lead to. If you look at the current FTT=1 implementation it means that a 20GB disk requires an additional 20GB for availability reasons, which means 40GB in total. With an RAID-5 implementation instead of RAID-1 this 20GB disk would only require 26.6GB of disk space, that is a savings of almost 14GB immediately. And that is before any type of space efficiency (dedupe) is enabled. Anyway, back to the FX2.

So far only “all-flash” has made it to VSAN Ready Node list, and of course components are also listed as in the disk controller “FD332-PERC” (single and dual ROC) and I’ve seen the 1.8″ flash devices also on the list. Waiting to see what one of these boxes would cost in an all-flash configuration, and hoping to also see a hybrid configuration soon. I’m a fan of the Dell FX2 systems, that is for sure.

Horizon View and All-Flash VSAN

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I typically don’t do these short posts which simply point to a white paper, but I really liked this paper on the topic of VMware Horizon View and All-Flash VSAN. In the paper it is demonstrated how to build an all-flash VSAN cluster using Dell servers, SanDisk flash and Brocade switches. Definitely recommended read if you are looking to deploy Horizon View anytime soon.

VMware Horizon View and All Flash Virtual SAN Reference Architecture
This Reference Architecture demonstrates how enterprises can build a cost-effective VDI infrastructure using VMware All Flash Virtual SAN combined with the fast storage IO performance offered by SSDs. The combination of Virtual SAN and all flash storage can significantly improve ROI without compromising on the high availability and scalability that customers demand.

VMware / ecosystem / industry news flash… part 4

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VMware / ecosystem / industry news flash time again. Took me a while to get a bunch of them, so some of the news is a bit older then normal.

  • Dell and SuperMicro to offer an EVO:RAIL bundle with Nexenta for file services on top of VSAN!
    Smart move by Nexenta, first 3rd party vendor to add value to the EVO:RAIL package and straight away they partner with both Dell and SuperMicro. I expect we will start seeing more of these types of partnerships. There are various other vendors who have shown interest in layering services on top of EVO:RAIL so it is going to be interesting to see what is next!
  • Tintri just announced a new storage system called the T800. This device can hold up to 3500 VMs in just 4U and provides 100TB of effective capacity. With up to 140K IOPS this device also delivers good performance at a starting price of 74K USD. But more then the hardware, I love the simplicity that Tintri brings. Probably one of the most user/admin friendly systems I have seen so far, and coincidentally they also announced Tintri OS 3.1 this week which brings:
    • Long awaited integration with Site Recovery Manager. Great to see that they pulled this one off, it something which I know people have been waiting for.
    • Encryption for the T800 series
    • Tintri Automation Toolkit which allows for end-to-end automation from the VM directly to storage through both PowerShell and REST APIs!
  • Dell releases the PowerEdge FX. I was briefed a long time ago on these systems and I liked it a lot as it provides a great modular mini datacenter solution. I can see people using these for Virtual SAN deployments as it allows for a lot of flexibility and capacity in just 2U. What I love about these systems is that they have networking included, that sounds like true hyper-converged to me! A great review here by StorageReview.com which I recommend reading. Definitely something I’ll be looking in to for my lab, how nice would it be: 4 x FC430 for compute + 2 x FD332 for storage capacity!

That it is for now…

Dell Firmware updates

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I was experiencing some issues with one of my Dell R610 servers. (Fans never spin down.) After doing some research I noticed people suggested it was due to bad firmware of iDRAC Express. So I figured why not update it, should be a simple process and something I should be able to do in a couple of minutes. After scavenging the Dell website for hours I literally found nothing useful. Yes I found a Windows update package but it won’t run, it craps out with an “this update package is not compatible…” error. So I figured why not try to download a bootable ISO that contains all the firmware for a Dell R610…. I was astonished that I couldn’t find it.

After another hour I figured out I needed to download the Dell Server Update Utility. I downloaded that and figured I could just boot it and update the firmware, well not quite yet. It appears you need to also download a Repository Manager. A what? I don’t want to manage a repository, I expect my hardware vendor to manage it and just offer an ISO which contains all firmware I could possibly need. But anyway, I decided to download the repository manager and just see what I could get done. So I created a repository for the R610 and figured it would be nice to have the Server Update Utility combined with the Patches. So I clicked export and figured it would start exporting, well not quite yet… Dell Repository Manager told me I needed to have a plugin, what the heck give me the plugin… 190MB for a plugin to create an ISO? Are you serious?? I needed to upgrade the system so I downloaded it. After waiting for a couple of minutes I finally managed to start exporting the ISO.

While I was waiting I figured I would boot up my second R610 and try to use the Unified Server Configurator that someone pointed out on twitter. This server was experiencing no issues so update would be fairly simple. I needed to enable System Services through iDRAC before I could use USC though, funny as USC doesn’t seem to use the iDrac network configuration etc. Why not make it part of the normal Bios? But anyway, I booted into USC by pressing F10 when the Dell logo popped up and configured the network. (Click Settings on the left and Network Settings on the right) Next go to “Platform Update” and click “Launch Platform Update”, select the FTP option and you are good to go… After a couple of minutes it asks you if you want to apply the updates, so you click “apply” and wait for a while… (progress bar anyone?) after waiting and waiting it came back with a nice error that my selected repository was corrupt. Yes indeed corrupt, but wasn’t I using the Dell ftp server? Same player shoot again, reboot, same procedure, apply, and waiting… waiting… waiting… I don’t know what I am waiting for, no progress bar or status updates it seems to have just frozen up. After 1.5hrs I gave up and pulled the power cable.

Lets get back to the server that had the issues… It didn’t allow me to use USC as iDRAC fails during boot and I need to enter the iDRAC bios to enable it. So as said I exported the ISO and burned it. It took a while but I finally succeeded. Now for some weird reason this DVD is not bootable, no you need to run it within Linux/Windows first. So I decided to install Windows, but only to find out that the iDRAC firmware update was not included. Weird as I did make sure to select every single component out there, but that is not enough apparently or is it because iDRAC is disabled and if that is the case, why not just tell me that?

Anyway, I had enough for today… after some random tweets about upgrading Dell firmware a Dell representative contacted me. Lets hope he can figure out what is happening and why, I will keep you up to date. If not, well then I will need to buy a couple of HP Servers instead I guess, or just use a whitebox as I don’t need all those components like iDRAC anyway. Before anyone asks, yes I was slightly frustrated when I wrote this.