Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vcloud

Order of storage tiers… (via twitter @mike_laverick)

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@Mike_Laverick asked a question on twitter today about something that is stated in the Cloud Computing with vCloud Director book. His question was, and no he is not dyslectic he only had 140 characters 🙂

pg65. Order of storage tiers. Doesn’t that infer FC/SDD+VMFS is “race horse” and NFS “donkey”…???

Mike was referring to the following section in the book:

SLA Service Cost RTO Storage RAID Applications
Tier 0 Premium $$$$$ 20 min SSD, FC 1+0 Exchange, SQL
Tier 1 Enterprise $$$$ 1 hour FC 1+0, 5 Web servers, Sharepoint
Tier 2 Professional $$$ 2 hours iSCSI, NFS 3, 5, X Custom apps, QA
Tier 3 Basic $ 2 days NFS 3, 5, X Dev/Test

This basically states, as Mike elegantly translated, that FC/SSD is top performing storage while NFS is slow or should I say “donkey”. Mike’s comment is completely fair. I don’t agree with this table and actually did recommend changing it, somehow that got lost during the editing phase. In the first place we shouldn’t have mixed protocols with disks. Even an FC array will perform crap if you have SATA spindles backing your VMFS volumes. Secondly, there is no way you could compare these really as there are so many factors to take in to account ranging from cache to raid-level to wire speed. I guess it is still an example as clearly mentioned on page 64, nevertheless it is misleading. I would personally prefer to have listed it as follows:

SLA Service Cost RTO Protocol Disk RAID BC/DR
Tier 1 Enterprise $$$ 20 min FC 8GBps SSD 10 Sync replication
Tier 2 Professional $$ 1 hour NFS 10GBps FC 15k 6 Async Replication
Tier 3 Basic $ 1 day iSCSI 1GBps SATA 7k 5 Backup

Of course with the side note that performance is not solely dictated by the transport mechanism used, there is no reason why NFS couldn’t or shouldn’t be Tier 1 to be honest. Once again this is just an example. Thanks Mike for pointing it out,

Win a signed copy of “Cloud Computing with VMware vCloud Director”

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Book #24, As you hopefully know about a month ago my latest publication was released titled “Cloud Computing with VMware vCloud Director“. When I was visiting Palo Alto a week ago I met up with one of the co-authors and vCloud Security Expert Michael Haines. Michael managed to get a stack of books signed by the author of the foreword, Paul Maritz. Luckily he managed to get 3 of my books signed by Paul Maritz as well. Of course I will hold on to one of those copies myself, but I want to offer all of you the opportunity to win a signed copy by Paul Maritz.

So if you want to win a copy, comment on this post and let me know what cloud computing means to you… that is all you need to do. I will contact 2 randomly picked winners on the 8th of June and announce their names in this article.

Randomly picked winners (thanks to my daughter for assisting me in randomly picking :-)): Adam, Mark

New Book: Cloud Computing with VMware vCloud Director

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This is one of those days that you realize how quickly things can change… 3.5 years ago I worked for a small consultancy company in the south of the Netherlands. Today I work for the number 1 virtualization/cloud company in the world, VMware, and just published my 4th book with a 5th coming later this year. What a ride, what a change, a lot of work and yes it was more than worth it.

I was part of a team of 6 guys who worked on this new book that was just published in the Short Topics series by Sage/Usenix. I guess you could say it is a follow up of “Foundation for Cloud Computing with VMware vSphere 4”. This book deals with VMware vCloud Director and touches each of the components of vCloud Director. Although it is a short topic series with only 136 pages there is in-depth information to be found on the various aspects of vCloud environments. I guess for me personally the most exciting part is the fact that no one less than VMware CEO Paul Maritz wrote the foreword! That is a great honor!

I want to especially thank Ben Lin and John Arrasjid for bringing this together. I know they’ve spend countless of hours in the evening editing the book. Of course I also want to thank my fellow co-authors: Michael Haines, Steve Kaplan and Raman Veeramraju. It was a pleasure working with you guys. I also want to thank Usenix/Sage for this opportunity. I want to point out that none of the authors receives or has received royalties. (Except for complementary copies of the book which we will give away for free at various events!) Usenix / Sage is a great organization which organizes many great events to which hopefully the revenue of this book will contribute.

Book #24, Cloud Computing with VMware vCloud Director, by John Arrasjid, Duncan Epping, Steve Kaplan Ben Lin, Michael Haines and Raman Veeramraju. This Short Topics book provides use cases, design considerations, and technology guidance to answer your questions about cloud computing. The primary intended audience is those interested in learning about VMware cloud computing products and solutions, but content on third-party technologies is also included where appropriate. Without diving overly deeply into specific design patterns, it provides insight into the tools to fit your design criteria and it explains the concepts used by vCloud ranging from Organization Virtual Datacenters to External Networks. The book includes a 17″x38″ poster with a deepdive on vCloud Director networking.

  • Authors: John Arrasjid, Duncan Epping, Steve Kaplan, Ben Lin, Michael Haines and Raman Veeramraju
  • Paperback: 136 pages
  • Publisher: Sage/Usenix (May, 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-13: 978-1-931971-83-6

Buy it here on Amazon (Paper | ebook coming soon)

vCloud Director Demo, creation of an Organization and its resources

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At the Dutch VMUG I presented two sessions. One was about HA/DRS and the other was about vCD. The vCD session contained a live demo and as a backup I decided to record the demo just in case for instance the internet connect would go down. The video shows the creation of an Organization, Org vCD, Org Network and of course a vApp. I didn’t want the video to go to waste so I decided to share it with all of you. I hope you will enjoy it.

Storage IO Control Best Practices

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After attending Irfan Ahmad’s session on Storage IO Control at VMworld I had the pleasure to sit down with Irfan and discuss SIOC. Irfan was so kind to review my SIOC articles(1, 2) and we discussed a couple of other things as well. The discussion and the Storage IO Control session contained some real gems and before my brain resets itself I wanted to have these documented.

Storage IO Control Best Practices:

  • Enable Storage IO Control on all datastores
  • Avoid external access for SIOC enabled datastores
    • To avoid any interference SIOC will stop throttling, more info here.
  • When multiple datastores share the same set of spindles ensure all have SIOC enabled with comparable settings and all have sioc enabled.
  • Change latency threshold based on used storage media type:
    • For FC storage the recommended latency threshold is  20 – 30 MS
    • For SAS storage the recommended latency threshold is  20 – 30 MS
    • For SATA storage the recommended latency threshold is 30 – 50 MS
    • For SSD storage the recommended latency threshold is 15 – 20 MS
  • Define a limit per VM for IOPS to avoid a single VM flooding the array
    • For instance limit the amount of IOPS per VM to a 1000