VMware

VMworld Reveals: vMotion innovations

Duncan Epping · Sep 3, 2019 ·

At VMworld, various cool new technologies were previewed. In this series of articles, I will write about some of those previewed technologies. Unfortunately, I can’t cover them all as there are simply too many. This article is about enhancements that will be introduced in the future to vMotion, the was session HBI1421BU. For those who want to see the session, you can find it here. This session was presented by Arunachalam Ramanathan and Sreekanth Setty. Please note that this is a summary of a session which is discussing a Technical Preview, this feature/product may never be released, and this preview does not represent a commitment of any kind, and this feature (or it’s functionality) is subject to change. Now let’s dive into it, what can you expect for vMotion in the future.

The session starts with a brief history of vMotion and how we are capable today to vMotion VMs with 128 vCPUs and 6 TB of memory. The expectation is though that vSphere in the future will support 768 vCPUs and 24 TB of memory. Crazy configuration if you ask me, that is a proper Monster VM.

Runecast Analyzer 3.0!

Duncan Epping · Aug 21, 2019 ·

This week I had a brief conversation with the folks from Runecast. I have been following them since day 1 and they have made a big impression on me from the start. During the conversation the Runecast folks shared with me that Runecast Analyzer 3.0 was going to be announced today and they gave a quick overview and demo of what would be announced and included in 3.0. They also quickly went over the functionality that was added the past year, some things which really were well adopted by customers were HIPAA and DISA-STIG compliance feature. Also Horizon support and security auto-remediation capabilities. Another thing that customers really appreciated were the upgradability simulations (beta feature), where Runecast validates your environment against the HCL.

Stan (Runecast CEO) also mentioned that this year Runecast signed up a customer with over 10k hosts, as you can imagine a lot of the work in the past 12 months was focused on scalability and performance at that level of scale. But that is not what today’s announcement is about, today Runecast is announcing 3.0. In 3.0 there are some great enhancements to the platform again. First of all, production-ready HCL Analysis for vSphere and vSAN. On top of that, the ESXi Upgrade Simulation is now GA, and the log analysis has been improved. Runecast is also introducing a new H5 Client plugin-in with new widgets and a dark theme! Just look at it below, you have got to love the dark theme!

But as I mentioned, there’s more to it than just the H5 Client Plugin, the HCL Analysis and the Upgrade Simulation are two key features if you ask me. During the demo, Stan showed me the below screen, and I think that by itself makes it worth testing out Runecast. It simply shows you in one overview if your environment is compliant to the HCL or not, and if it is not compliant, which combination of firmware and driver you should be using to make it compliant. In this example, the driver should be upgraded to 2.0.42. A very useful feature if you ask me. Note that this will work for both vSphere and vSAN and all components needed to run either of these.

Just as useful is the Upgrade Simulation by the way, are you considering upgrading? Make sure to run this first so you know if you will end up in a supported state or not?! And some of you may say that VMware has similar capabilities in their product, but the Runecast appliance doesn’t need to be connected to the internet at all times. You can regularly update the dataset and run these compliancy and upgrade checks (or any of the other checks) regularly offline. Especially for customers where internet access is challenging (dark sites) this is very helpful.

All in all, some very useful updates to an already very useful solution.

Does a vSAN IO Limit impact resync traffic?

Duncan Epping · Jun 12, 2019 ·

A question just came in, and I figured other people may have the same question so I would share it. The question was if a vSAN IO limit would impact resync traffic or for instance SvMotion? In this case the customer defines limits within each policy to ensure VMs do not interfere with other VMs or excessively uses IO resources. Especially in cloud environments this can be useful, or when running production and test/dev on the same cluster. The concern, of course, was if this limit would impact for instance recovery times after a failure. Because you can imagine that a limit of 50 IOPS would be devastating when a VM (or multiple VMs) need to have objects resynced.

The answer is simple: no, the IO limit specified within a policy does not impact resync traffic (or SvMotion for that matter). It only applies to Guest IO to a VMDK, namespace or swap object. Which means that it is safe to set limits when it comes to recovery times.

Major vSAN Milestone: 20K customers – Celebrating by dropping the price of our book with 50%!

Duncan Epping · Jun 2, 2019 ·

I haven’t done one of these in a while, and as it is a question that comes up regularly during customer conversations I figured I would share a nice quote from the VMware earnings call. But before I do I want to thank every VMware employee, partner and customer who helped us reaching this major milestone. Sometimes customers ask how invested VMware is in storage, well very invested. Determined to remain the number 1 player in the hyperconverged and hybrid cloud world, and the below numbers show why!

vSAN license bookings grew over 50% year-over-year in Q1 with a total customer count growing to over 20,000. (seekingalpha.com)

Yes, that is 20,000 customers indeed. Actually, more than 20k customers. Which, again, is a great success and would not have been possible without the help from you guys. So to thank all of you Cormac and I have decided to lower the price of our book temporarily. For 1 week, today until Friday the 7th, we have lowered the price of the book by ~50%. This means that on the Amazon US store the book will be 20 USD for the paper version, and only 5 USD for the ebook. So pick it up! (It may take a day for the price change to reach some of the Amazon stores…) Please note, as an Amazon Associate I earn from below qualifying purchases.

Paper – https://amzn.to/2SFsKxF
Ebook – https://amzn.to/2L67DCl

It seems the price has been pushed down to all “local” amazon websites. So go to your local website and pick up the book for 50% of the previous price. Links to most localized websites here:

Site locality in a vSAN Stretched Cluster?

Duncan Epping · May 28, 2019 ·

On the community forums, a question was asked around the use of site locality in a vSAN Stretched Cluster. When you create a stretched cluster in vSAN you can define within a policy how the data needs to be protected. Do you want to replicate across datacenters? Do you want to protect the “site local data” with RAID-1 or RAID-5/6? All of these options are available within the UI.

What if you decide to not stretch your object across locations, is it mandatory to specify which datacenter the object should reside in?

The answer is simple: no it is not. The real question, of course is, would be: should you define the location? Most definitely! If you wonder how to do this, simplicy specify it within the policy you define for these objects as follows:

The above screenshot is taken from the H5 client, if you are still using the Web Client it probably looks slightly different (Thanks Seamus for the screenshot):

Why would you do this? Well, that is easy to explain. When the objects of a VM get provisioned the decision will be made per object where to place it. If you have multiple disks, and you haven’t specified the location, you could find yourself in the situation where disks of a single non-stretched VM are located in different datacenters. This is, first of all, terrible for performance, but maybe more importantly also would impact availability when anything happens to the network between the datacenters. So when you use site locality for non-stretched VMs, make sure to also configure the location so that your VM and objects will align as demonstrated in the below diagram.