Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vmworld

VMworld Europe, where can you find me?

· ·

I have a couple of sessions schedule for VMworld Europe, as it stands right now all of those still have availability. If you are going to VMworld Europe and haven’t registered any sessions yet I would urge you to do so today, you don’t want to show up and find the session is full. I have one more session which isn’t listed below, which is the Quick Talk on VSAN Use Cases which is being rescheduled as we speak due to a conflict. I hope I can add that one soon to the list.

VMworld Virtual SAN slidedecks up on slideshare

· ·

I just posted the slidedecks that I presented at VMworld on Virtual SAN up on slideshare. The recording and the slides will probably at some point also show up on vmware.com but as I had many requests from people to share the material I figured I would do that straight after the event. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask.

Building a Stretched Cluster with Virtual SAN 6.1

Five common customer use cases for Virtual SAN

VMworld Session: VSAN – Software Defined Storage Platform of the Future #STO6050

· ·

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to attend too many sessions, only 2 so far. This is one I didn’t want to miss as it was all about what VMware is working on for VSAN and layers that could sit on top of VSAN. Rawlinson and Christos spoke about where VSAN is today first. Mainly discussion the use cases (monolithic apps like Exchange, SQL etc.) and the simplicity VSAN brings. After which an explanation of the VSAN object/component model was provided which was the lead in to the future.

We are in the middle of an evolution towards cloud native applications Christos said. Cloud native apps scale in a different way then traditional apps, and their requirements differ. Usually not a need for HA and DRS, and will contain this functionality within their own framework. What does this result in for the vSphere layer?

VMware vSphere Integrated Containers and VMware Photon Platform enabled these new types of applications. But how do we enable these from a storage point of view? What kind of scale will we require? Will we need different data services? Will we need to different tools, what about performance?

First project being discussed is the Performance Service which will come as part of the Health Check plugin. Providing cluster level, host level, disk group level, disk level… The Performance Service Architecture is very interesting and is not a “standard vCenter Server service”. Providing deep insights using per host traces is not possible as it would not scale. A distributed model is proposed which will enable this, but in a decentralized way. Each host can collect data, each cluster can roll this up, and this can be done for many clusters. Data is both processed and stored in a distributed fashion. The cost for a solution like this should be around 10% of 1 core on a server. Just think what a vCenter Server would look like if you had the same type of scale and cost, with a 1000 host solution could easily result in a 100 vCPU requirement, which is not realistic.

Rawlinson demoes a potential solution for this, in this scenario we are talking 1000s of hosts of which data is gathered, analyzed and presented in what appears to be an HTML-5 interface. The solution doesn’t just provides details on the environment it also allows you to mitigate these problems. Note that this is a prototype of an interface that may or may not at some point in time be released. If you like what you see though, make sure to leave a comment as I am sure that helps making this prototype reality!

Next being discussed is the potential to leverage VSAN not just for virtual machines, but also for containers, having the capabilities to store files on top of VSAN. A distributed file system for cloud native apps is now introduced. Some of the requirements for a distributed file system would be a scalable data path, clones at massive scale, multi-tenancy and multi-purpose.

VMware is also prototyping a distributed file system and have it running in their labs. It sits on top of VSAN and leverages that scalable path and uses it to store its data and metadata. Rawlinson demonstrates how he can create 2000 clones of a file in under a second across a 1000 host and runs his application. Note that this application isn’t copied to those 1000 hosts, but it is a simple mountpoint on 1000 hosts, truly distributed filesystem with extremely scalable clone and snapshot technology.

Christos wraps up, key points are that VSAN will be the enabler of future storage solutions as it provides extreme scale, with at a low resource overhead. Awesome session, great peak in to the future.

Project #vGiveback

· ·

It is VMworld again, and just like last year VMware decided to give back to the community. No I am not talking about the virtualization community, but I am talking about charity, the great thing is that just like last year you can get VMware to give away an X amount to a charity cause of your choice (health, children, education or environment). As a friend of the VMware foundation I would like to ask ALL of you to help. So what do you need to do, what is the goal?

Well it is simple. Publish a picture on either Instagram or Twitter. Make sure the picture represents the cause and of course you need to tag it, use #vGiveBack and copy in @vmwFoundation. Your message should look like something like this:

(Causes can be: #health #children #education or #environment)

The goal is 10,000 photos between Monday, August 31st and Thursday, September 3rd, out of which a mosaic will be crated. The final image for the mosaic symbolizes our community impact, and once complete, unlocks a donation that will be divided in proportion to the causes you select.

So what am I asking?

  1. Post a picture on twitter or instagram with the right hashtags and make copy in @vmwFoundation (it doesn’t need to be in front of one of those signs by the way, it can be a different pic…)
  2. Ask all of your friends to do the same, we need to hit that number lets make this go viral!

Every little bit will help. Each tweet or instagram post will bring us one step closer to unlocking our collective impact. If you don’t have twitter or instagram, ask your wife/son/daughter/friend to post for you!

My top 15 VMworld sessions for 2015

· ·

Every year I do a top VMworld sessions post. It is getting more complicated each year as there are so many great sessions. In the past years I tried to restrict myself to 20 but it always ends up being 22, 23 or even more sessions. This year I am going to be strict, 15 at most and in random order. These are the sessions I would sign up for myself, unfortunately as a VMware employee you can’t register, but I am sure going to try to sneak in when I have time, or watch the recording!

I did not include any sessions of my own, if you are interested in my sessions, look at the below:

See you guys there!