Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vmworld

IO DRS – Providing Performance Isolation to VMs in Shared Storage Environments (TA3461)

· ·

This was probably one of the coolest sessions of VMworld. Irfan Ahmad was the host of this session and some of you might know him from Project PARDA. The PARDA whitepaper describes the algorithm being used and how the customer could benefit from this in terms of performance. As Irfan stated this is still in a research phase. Although the results are above expectations it’s still uncertain if this will be included in a future release and if it does when this will be. There are a couple of key take aways that I want to share:

  • Congestion management on a per datastore level -> limits on IOPS and set shares per VM
  • Check the proportional allocation of the VMs to be able to identify bottlenecks.
  • With I/O DRS throughput for tier 1 VMs will increase when demanded (More IOPS, lower latency) of course based on the limits / shares specified.
  • CPU overhead is limitied -> my take: with the new hardware of today I wouldn’t worry about an overhead of a couple percent.
  • “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it” -> if the latency is low for all workloads on a specific datastore do not take action, only above a certain threshold!
  • I/O DRS does not take SAN congestion in account, but SAN is less likely to be the bottleneck
  • Researching the use of Storage VMotion move around VMDKs when there’s congestion on the array level
  • Interacting with queue depth throttling
  • Dealing with end-points and would co-exist with Powerpath

That’s it for now… I just wanted to make a point. There’s a lot of cool stuff coming up. Don’t be fooled by the lack of announcements(according to some people, although I personally disagree) during the keynotes. Start watching the sessions, there’s a lot of knowledge to be gained!

VMware Availability Solutions and Futures (BC3425 – Banjot Chanana)

· ·

I was just replaying Banjot Chanana’s session “VMware Availability Solutions and Futures“. Banjot is the product manager for the availability solutions HA and FT. I met Banjot in Palo Alto the week before VMworld and we spoke about HA, present and futures. Unfortunately I can’t elaborate on anything that has been discussed but I can however repeat what Banjot spoke about during his session at VMworld.

The most exciting part of the presentation, for me at least, start at roughly 35:40. Banjot start to elaborate on futures especially when the 3D model gets expanded with “Stretched Clusters with FT” and “Stretched HA Clusters” I start to get interested. Some bullet points on future developments:

  • VM Component Protection -> loss of storage / loss of VM network -> fail-over / alert
    Drives higher availability against granular outages
  • Stretched HA Clusters -> Carving up Clusters in “sub-clusters” by tagging VMs -> fail-over to other “sub-cluster” based on affinity
    Drives higher availability against site failures
  • Application Monitoring -> Application awareness / correlation between infrastructure and application events -> SLA awareness also performance by using DRS
    Drives higher availability against application / service failure
  • Host Retirement -> Host health scores would also indicate “VM readiness” of a host -> VMotion based on host health scores ->
    Drives higher availability by monitor host health and taking action when thresholds are exceeded
  • Integrated Availability -> Availability Policies vs per VM settings -> Defining tiers and applying them to sets of VMs -> Based on SLA
    Decreases operational efforts and increases availability by reducing “human errors”

Although some people were disappointed by the lack of announcements of new products I think there’s more than enough exciting features coming up if you know where to find them. Thanks Banjot for these insights,

VMworld 2009 Sessions are available online!

· ·

One of the biggest resources of information for me personally always has been the VMworld Presentations. I usually download every single presentation and store them in a separate folder and index them and read most of them at least once and some of them multiple times. The VMworld 2009 Sessions are available for download and I recommend you start reading/listening/watching them.

There are three that I want to highlight this time:

  1. TA3220 VMware vStorage VMFS-3: Architectural Advances since ESX 3.0
  2. TA2963 ESXtop for Advanced Users
  3. TA1394 vSphere 4 Advanced Storage Log Analysis

Start downloading here, if you did not attend VMworld 2009, you can always purchase a VMworld.com Subscription for full access to all VMworld 2009 Sessions & Labs. I think it’s worth it.

VMworld 2009 (San Francisco) – Linkage

· ·

My VMworld 2009 Europe Linkage post got a lot of great feedback, that’s why I decided to do one again. Here’s what I managed to gather today, if there’s something missing just let me know and I will add it asap.

Day 1 Keynote & Wrap-ups:

Day 2 Keynote and wrap-ups:

Day 3 wrap-ups:

Official Announcements:

Sessions and Hands-on labs:

Various:

VMworld Golden Gate Bridge Run – 2009 – Thanks everyone

· ·

I’ve seen many cool things this week and I’ve met a lot of cool people. But the VMworld Golden Gate Bridge Run was definitely the best thing ever. We had roughly 200 people who joined us and everyone had so much fun. The view was amazing, almost a clear blue sky.

Five weeks ago I never expected that a single tweet between @jasonboche and myself would end up in an event like this. Imagine just a couple of guys talking about running during VMworld and ending up with 200 people running the Golden Gate Bridge with multiple sponsors who committed to this on twitter. That’s not something that happens every day! Thanks Stephen Herrod, Chad Sakac, Vaughn Stewart and last but not least David Davis for sponsoring the run.

Of course thanks also goes out to my VMware colleagues Craig Williams, Scott Drummonds and Timothy Stephan for stepping up to the plate and making this happen.

If anyone made pictures during the run please share them and drop a link in the comments section of my blog.

Thanks everyone for participating! And for those who missed out, we know it was all very last minute but we already spoke about making this an annual event and not only in San Francisco also Copenhagen!