recommended reads

What a crazy week, VMworld. Many announcements by many different vendors and of course a kazillion blog posts. I picked a few which stood out to me and which are worth reading.

• VMworld VMare Code hackathon to hit Barcelona 2016 by Alan Renouf
  The US version of the hackathon was a big success, and I expect nothing less in EMEA to be honest. Read Alan’s article to get a feeling / idea around what it was like and make sure to sign up if you have a good idea, or want to join an existing team!
• VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 All NVMe Flash Array with Intel® SSD P3520 Sets New Record
  I just like reading these types of posts, what can a config like this lead to. Sometimes people say ‘well how realistic is the config?’ I actually have a customer deploying this exact configuration today.
• Dell Technologies = Facemeltingly Awesome, but shall we talk frankly? by Chad Sakac
  A lengthy post on the Dell/EMC merger by Chad. He is in the middle of it and I always enjoy reading his thoughts.
• VMware PowerCLI for Mac OS X, Linux & More? Yes, please! by William Lam
  Quick post on something very interesting, availability of PowerCLI on other operating systems then Microsoft. Leave a comment on his post if you are interested…
• VMware ESXi Claimrules Unleashed by Guido Hagemann
  Want to know what a claimrule is all about? Guido broke it down in a nice way. Some good stuff in there.
• Have got a couple of spare hours and want to watch some VMworld sessions, William Lam dumped everything in a long list, makes your life easier!
• Julian Wood’s VMworld Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4 series.
  One of the best “personal takes” on VMworld US if you ask me. I know how much work it is to keep articles like these up to date. Some interesting thoughts, and I like how Julian included the parties, receptions but also a chat he had with PernixData’s Satyam Vaghani.
• VSAN Availability series part 1, part 2 and part 3 by Jeff Hunter
  If you want to know more about VSAN and the availability aspects, this is a great series to read…

VMworld is around the corner so I wanted to get this out today, mainly as it will give you something to read during a long flight, plus I am certain that there will be plenty of news next week and the week after. For those not going to VMworld I will try to share as much as I can through twitter, so follow me on there if you are not yet.

• Tech Companies Abuse NPS And Hope Customers Don’t Notice by Justin Warren
  Great article about NPS scores and what they are worth / what they are about and how much you should really care. It seems to be one of those metrics that keeps popping up over and over again and I agree it has been abused a lot lately. Good to see Justin stepping up and breaking it down for us, thanks!
• Oracle, I’m sad about you, disappointed in you, and frustrated with you by Chad Sakac
  I think almost everyone will agree with the sentiment of this post. The situation around Oracle licensing in a virtualized world (non-Oracle virt solutions) has been sad for years. I fully agree with Chad, enough is enough, yet I somehow have the feeling Oracle doesn’t care and I cannot see anything changing anytime soon. But who knows, maybe Larry will surprise us.
• Intel overhyping flash-killer XPoint? Shocked, we’re totally shocked by The Register
  This one is pretty interesting. I have seen various sessions by Intel as well on 3D XPoint flash, the funny thing is that the first couple of sessions they spoke about 1000x and in later sessions that was 10x. The Flash Summit by Micron apparently emphasized this. The media latency is low, the interface however is still relatively high, also explained by Intel at Storage Field Day in this video. So not really a shocker, there’s still a lot of benefit to 3D XPoint, 10x faster is not bad, and knowing the changes coming in the software stack I can ensure you that the latency will go down.
  • Look at these 6 new devices by Intel…
  • And price wise > What about NVMe 3D NAND for 0.50 USD per GB?
• HCIBench new Home
  Not a blog, but a new home for HCIBench, now available through the Flings program. So if you want to do some benchmarking, you now know where to go.
• NUMA Deep Dive Part 5: ESXi VMkernel NUMA Constructs by Frank Denneman
  By now his blog should be bookmarked and you should be regularly checking it to see if a new part has been published. Well if not, here it is… Part 5 of the NUMA Deep Dive series! I am going to read this one during my long flight tomorrow to Las Vegas!

What most of you don’t know is that I was on a holiday for 3.5 weeks in China (beautiful country!)and just got back, hence the delay, I did not bring a laptop and tried to avoid doing any work (enforced by my kids). I had a huge backlog of articles to read so I figured I would start with creating this list based on those articles. I may (and probably will) have missed some gems, do share them with me in the comments.

• New Leading IOmark-VM-HC results for Intel server with NVMe with VSAN
  Talking about a compelling story, all-flash with NVMe definitely delivers the goods! What interested me the most: NVMe storage delivered 3 times better performance and nearly 3 times better price-performance than the previous leading results
• VSAN upgrading from 6.1 to 6.2 Hybrid to All-Flash – PART 2 by Anthony Spiteri
  When there is a Part 2 there also is a Part 1 so read that first. Great two part series that explains how to go from 6.1 hybrid to 6.2 all-flash VSAN. I think this is one of those advantages of a solution which is not tied to hardware. If there is a change of requirement and you want to upgrade to all-flash you can simply do that. No need to replace the full cluster or replace hosts, simply swap out HDDs with SSDs and follow the steps described by Anthony.
• Bandwidth reduction for erasure coded storage by Robin Harris
  Interesting post about erasure coding and bandwidth reduction. It is a follow up to an earlier post, also read the comments and the mentioned paper!
• Announcing Open Hardware Management Services by T. Sridhar
  SDDC doesn’t stop at the virtualization layer. It will need a way to manage the hardware as well, and the SDDC team within VMware just announced their open initiative around it. Working closely with partners like Intel to ensure deep integration. Great to see that this is being open-sourced and hoping we will see many partners contribute!
• VMware Validated Design for Software-Defined Data Center 2.0 Poster by Ryan Johnson
  Not an article or a video, but a poster, and a great one if you ask me. A lot of detail in there around SDDC validated designs, and it just looks nice and crisp. Can I get a printed copy please? Thanks!
• Big news for VSAN and VVol customers by Infinio
  Small article, but interesting as the first VSAN and VVol certified VAIO filter (caching solution by Infinio) was announced. Can’t wait for replication filters to show up as well on this list.
• VSAN 6.2 All Flash Review by Storage Review
  Personally I am a bit surprised about the outcome, especially as I’ve seen numbers that differ a lot from what is shown by Storage Review (where all-flash performance much better than hybrid), not sure why this is to be honest, still a very thorough and in-depth review which is worth reading.
• Sweating Springpath fails to defuse SimpliVity’s patent bomb by The Register
  Not sure what to think here to be honest… It is a strange situation with Cisco sitting in the middle.

And as a bonus, nothing to do with virtualization, but I read this one during my holiday and found it interesting as I could relate to it very much. I stopped drinking a long time ago for a couple of years and can definitely agree with these “findings”.

It has been a while since I have done this. In the early days of the VMware VMTN Blog I would post a weekly update on which articles where my recommended reads for the week. I stopped doing that simply because I was just too busy with other things. But after the post of last week pointing to an old article and some new articles worth reading I figured I would pick up again where I left a couple of years ago. Note that this will not be a weekly thing, it may take 1 or 2 week or even longer before the new edition pops up. It just depends on how much happens and what I find interesting to share. This list is also pretty much in random order…

• Introduction 2016 NUMA Deep Dive Series by Frank Denneman. It is just the introduction, but I want to point you to it so you know what is coming and knowing Frank this is going to be a great read. So bookmark it if you are interested in NUMA!
• Infinio Accelerator 3.0 – now supercharged with VAIO by Eric Siebert. Great to see more vendors hopping on the VAIO bandwagon. Not a big fan of the name “VAIO” (vSphere APIs for IO Filtering), but basically it offers a framework that allows you to run certain dataservice (like caching and replication) inside the hypervisor, instead of as an appliance on top. Definitely a more efficient way of doing things. Welcome Infinio!
• The Birth of Faster Storage by Tom Fenton, where NVMe and NVMe Fabrics are being discussed, interesting technology and something to keep your eye on the upcoming years.
• Nutanix buying PernixData by Anthony Spiteri. Another report of “troubles” in startup land. The news broke out just before the weekend and all throughout the weekend it kept twitter and the blogosphere busy. I am not going to comment on it as it is just a rumour at the moment, nevertheless interesting to read, Enrico also has a good article on it.
• Atlantis retreats to core VDI software and appliance market by The Register. Interesting to see how one of the startups in the storage/caching/HCI space is changing strategy and primarily focussing on end user computing from now on. I guess it represents a change in Silicon Valley where more and more startups not only need to show growth, but also profits in order to get additional funding.