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VMware

Live Blog: Raising The Bar, Part V

Duncan Epping · Jul 12, 2011 ·

I am live at the Launch event in San Francisco with many other bloggers, journalists and analysts. It is the 12th of July, almost 09:00 PDT and Paul Maritz is about come up on stage to talk about the Cloud Infrastructure launch. This article will be update live during the event as we go.

Paul Maritz is taking the stage… Taking the next step in towards the more automated world.

We need to make infrastructure become something that people can depend on and focus on what is important to their business. Navigating your way forward offering a more dynamic infrastructure that will support your existing applications. Using a more flexible infrastructure, allowing people to take resources and aggregate to larger pools reducing operational costs by automating the use of these resources. More and more use of social media and use of mobile devices to connect anytime anywhere and most importantly securely.

Today we will be talking about  a more efficient infrastructure with exists of three stages IT Production, Business Production and IT as a Service. In 2009, the VI 3 era, 30% of the workloads were virtualized…. in 2010 with vSphere 4 we reached 40% and it is expected that in 2011 we will hit 50% virtualized with the majority on vSphere.

Accelerating and Amplifying business agility with vSphere 5! Not only vSphere 5 but the worlds first Cloud Infrastructure suite! In addition to vSphere 5 today we announce vSphere Site Recovery Manager 5 (Business Continuity), vCloud Director 1.5 (Policy, Reporting, Self-Service), vCenter Operations 1.0.1 (Monitoring and Management), vShield 5 (Security and Edge functionality).

VMware vCloud = Hybrid. Your private cloud experience needs to be similar to public cloud experience. VMware allows this through the vCloud offering and vCloud Service Providers. Trusted vCloud partners like Colt, Bluelock, Singtel, Verizon, NYSE Euronext, Softbank and CSC are some of the enablers for this.

Steve Herrod up on stage… I expect it is about to get more technical

Why do these new products matter and how do they fit together. Accelerating the adoption by increasing scalability. ESX 1.0 capable of 5000 IOps, ESX 2.0 ~ 7000 IOps, VI 3 100.000 IOps, vSphere 4 300.000 IOps and vSphere 5.0 1.000.000 IOps. Besides performance availability is key. Both HA and FT have been enhanced and of course SRM 5.0 has been released. Added to SRM 5.0 is vSphere Replication. vSphere Replication allows you to use the network to replicate between sites and different arrays. It will allow you to replicate more workloads with a lower costs. SRM is about datacenter mobility, not only for an outage but also pro-actively moving datacenters after an acquisition.

What does cloud computing really mean? Being able to order what you need and what without knowing what happens behind the scenes. IT will behind the scenes validate if they meet the consumers requirements. vCloud Director is all about Simple Self-Service. Deploy virtual machines but more importantly create new vApps and offer these in your own “app store”. The IT Cloud of the producer is all about offering agility. Virtualization enables automation in a way unheard in a physical environment.

Typically multiple tiers are offered within a cloud environment. The VMware Cloud Infrastructure enable you to do so. Intelligent Policy based Management is key with vCloud Director 1.5. Linked Clones is a very important feature to provision virtual machines “aggressively” within the system. It allows for fast provisiong and save up to 60% of storage.

Profile-Driven Storage and Storage DRS are part of vSphere 5.0. It enables you to map different arrays in to logical entities by a concept called a “datastore cluster” and link these to a profile. Virtual machines will be tagged with a profile and this allows you to validate compliancy. Storage DRS does for storage what DRS does for compute resources. Storage and Network IO Control ensures each virtual machine receives what it is entitled to.

For the SMB market a brand new shared storage appliance is introduced today: vSphere Storage Appliance 1.0. It takes vanilla servers and use local drives and present it as shared storage. It will bring agility and availability through shared storage to the SMB.

Auto-Deploy, PXE booting your ESXi hypervisor in to memory! It allows to spin-up more hosts within minutes instead of hours. Adding capacity has never been this simple?

vSphere 5 offers comprehensive security and isolation capabilities through vShield 5.0. vShield App 5 allows you to select regulations to protect sensitive data. It also enables you to get additional auditing in place.

The Cloud Infrastructure represents more than a million engineering hours, more than 100 additional capabilities, more than two million QA hours, more than 2000 partner certifications to enable this.

Rick Jackson up next discussing licensing.

Industry has traditionally licensed on physical constraints. It makes it difficult to create a cloud environment. Customers need to be able to upgrade to new hardware without having physical boundaries. No more “Cores per Proc” limits, no more “Physical RAM per host license”… vSphere introducing vRAM entitlement. Virtual RAM is the amount of virtual memory configured for a powered on virtual machine. vSphere 5 used pooled vRAM across the entire environment.

Packaging has been simplified and moving from 6 down to 5 packages. vSphere Advanced has been eliminated, all customers currently using Advanced are entitled to vSphere Enterprise.

Join us at VMworld for more details around the new product releases. 10AM virtual show, be there for more technical in-depth details!

Order of storage tiers… (via twitter @mike_laverick)

Duncan Epping · Jun 16, 2011 ·

@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,

Which metric to use for monitoring memory?

Duncan Epping · Apr 29, 2011 ·

** PLEASE NOTE: This article was written in 2011 and discussed how to monitor memory usage, which is different then memory / capacity sizing. For more info on “active memory” read this article by Mark A. **

This question has come up several times over the last couple of weeks so I figured it was time to dedicate an article to it. People have always been used to monitoring memory usage in a specific way, mainly by looking at the “consumed memory” stats. This always worked fine until ESX(i) 3.5 introduced the aggressive usage of Large Pages. In the 3.5 timeframe that only worked for AMD processors that supported RVI and with vSphere 4.0 support for Intel’s EPT was added. Every architectural change has an impact. The impact is that TPS (transparent page sharing) does not collapse these so called large pages. (Discussed in-depth here.) This unfortunately resulted in many people having the feeling that there was no real benefit of these large pages, or even worse the perception that large pages are the root of all evil.

After having several discussions with customers, fellow consultants and engineers we managed to figure out why this perception was floating around. The answer was actually fairly simple and it is metrics. When monitoring memory most people look at the following section of the host – summary tab:

However, in the case of large pages this metric isn’t actually that relevant. I guess that doesn’t only apply to large pages but to memory monitoring in general, although as explained it used to be an indication.  The metric to monitor  is “active memory“. Active memory is is what the VMkernel believes is currently being actively used by the VM. This is an estimate calculated by a form of statistical sampling and this statistical sampling will most definitely come in handy when doing capacity planning. Active memory is in our opinion what should be used to analyze trends. Kit Colbert has also hammered on this during his Memory Virtualization sessions at VMworld. I guess the following screenshot is an excellent example of the difference between “consumed” and “active”. Do we need to be worried about “consumed” well I don’t think so, monitoring “active” is probably more relevant at this point! However, it should be noted that “active” represents a 5 minute time slot. It could easily be that the first 5 minute value observed is the same as the second, yet they are different blocks of memory that were touched. So it is an indication of how active the VM is. Nothing more than that.

What have you been up to – part 2

Duncan Epping · Apr 28, 2011 ·

As I have been posting more regularly on the ESXi Chronicles blog I figured it made sense to make people aware of the series of articles I produced like I did last time. These are the articles I recently published, check them out as I feel they are worth reading. Also note that many of the “Ops Changes” articles will be rolled up in to an official whitepaper that will be published on the Tech Resources section of the VMware website.

  • VMTN Podcast about Transitioning to ESXi
  • Scratch partition best practices for USB/SD booted ESXi?
  • Need to install 100s of ESXi hosts?
  • Is your environment secure?
  • The missing link for scripted installs, adding your ESXi host to vCenter
  • Scripted install with ESXi
  • Cool PowerCLI script for backing up the ESXi System Image
  • Ops changes part 8 – Logging in, Auditing and Log files
  • Ops changes part 7 – Upgrading Firmware
  • Ops changes part 6 – Quick troubleshooting tips
  • Ops changes part 5 – Scratch partition
  • Ops changes part 4 – Injecting or installing drivers
  • Ops changes part 3 – Local disk vs USB vs BFS
  • Ops changes part 2 – Scripted installation
  • Ops changes part 1 – Introduction

I hope my efforts with regards to smoothing the transition to ESXi are helpful so far. If there are any specific areas which you feel need to be covered feel free to leave a comment and I will try to cover asap.

Disk.UseDeviceReset do I really need to set it?

Duncan Epping · Apr 13, 2011 ·

I noticed a discussion on an internal mailinglist which mentioned the advanced setting “Disk.UseDeviceReset” as it is mentioned in the FC SAN guide. The myth that you need to set this setting to “0 “in order to allow for Disk.UseLunReset to function properly has been floating around too long. Lets discuss first what this options does. In short, when an error or SCSI reservations need to be cleared a SCSI reset will be send. We can either do this on a device level or on a LUN level. With device level meaning that we will send it to all disks / targets on a bus. As you can imagine this can be disruptive and when there is no need to reset a SCSI but this should be avoided. With regards to the settings here is what will happen with the different settings:

  • Disk.UseDeviceReset = 0  &  Disk.UseLunReset = 1  --> LUN Reset
  • Disk.UseDeviceReset = 1  &  Disk.UseLunReset = 1  --> LUN Reset
  • Disk.UseDeviceReset = 1  &  Disk.UseLunReset = 0  --> Device Reset

I hope that this makes it clear that there is no point in changing the Disk.UseDeviceReset setting as Disk.UseLunReset overrules it.

ps: I filed a document bug and hope that it will be reflected in the doc soon.

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About the Author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist and Distinguished Engineering Architect at Broadcom. Besides writing on Yellow-Bricks, Duncan is the co-author of the vSAN Deep Dive and the vSphere Clustering Deep Dive book series. Duncan is also the host of the Unexplored Territory Podcast.

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