Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vmworld

VMworld Sessions with vSAN Customers

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At VMworld, there were various sessions with vSAN Customers, many of which I have met in some shape or form in the past couple of years. Some of these stories contain some great use cases or stories. Considering they are “hidden” in 60-minute sessions I figured I would write about them and share with you the link where and when applicable.

In the Monday keynote, there were also a couple of great vSAN quotes and customers mentioned. Not sure everyone spotted this, but definitely, something I felt is worth sharing, as these were powerful stories and use cases. First of all the vSAN numbers were shared, with 15k customers and adoption within 50% of the Global 2000 within 4 years I think it is fair to say that our business unit is doing great!

In the Make A Wish foundation video I actually spotted the vSAN management interface, although it was not explicitly mentioned still very cool to see that vSAN is used. As their CEO mentioned, it was great to get all that attention after they appeared on national television but it also resulted in a big website outage. The infrastructure is being centralized and new infra and security policies are put into place, “working with VMware enables us to optimize our processes and grant more wishes”.

Another amazing story was Mercy Ships, this non-profit operates the largest NGO hospital ship bringing free medical care to different countries in Africa. Not just medical care, they also are providing training to local medical staff so they can continue providing the help needed in these areas of the world. They are now building their next generation ship which is going live in 2020, VMware and Dell/EMC will be a big part of this. As Pat said: “it is truly amazing to see what they do with our technology”. Currently, they use VxRail, Dell Isilon etc on their ships as part of their infrastructure.

The first session I watched was a session by our VP of Product Management and VP of Development, I actually attended this session in person at VMworld, and as a result of technical difficulties, they started 20 minutes late, hence the session is “only” 40 minutes. This session is titled “HCI1469BU – The Future of vSAN and Hyperconverged Infrastructure“. In this session, David Selby has a section of about 10 minutes and he talks about the vSAN journey which Honeywell went through. (If you are just interested in David’s section, skip to 9:30 minutes into the session) In his section, David explains how at Honeywell they had various issues with SAN storage causing outages of 3k+ VMs, as you can imagine very costly. In 2014 Honeywell started tested with a 12 Node cluster for their management VMs. This for them was a low-risk cluster. Their test was successful and they quickly started to move VMs over to vSAN in other parts of the world. Just to give you an idea:

  • US Delaware, 11k VMs on vSAN
  • US Dallas, 500 VMs on vSAN
  • NL Amsterdam, 12k VMs (40% on vSAN, 100% by the end of this year!)
  • BE Brussels, 1000 VMs (20% on vSAN, 100% by the end of this year!)

That is a total of roughly 24,500 VMs on vSAN, with close to 1.7PB of capacity, with an expected capacity of around 2.5PB by the end of this year. All running on vSAN All Flash the Dell PowerEdge FX2 platform by the way! Many different types of workloads run on these clusters. Apps ranging from MS SQL, Oracle, Horizon View, Hadoop, Chemical Simulation software, and everything else you can think off. What I found interesting is that they are running their Connexo software on top of vSAN, in this particular case the data of 5,000,000 smart energy meters in homes in a country in Europe is landing on vSAN. Yes, that is 5 million devices sending data to the Honeywell environment and being stored, and analyzed on vSAN.

David also explained how they are leveraging IBM cloud with vSAN to run Chemical Plant simulators so operators of chemical plants can be trained. IBM cloud also runs vSAN, and Honeywell uses this so they can leverage the same tooling and processes for on-premises as well as in IBM Cloud. What I think was a great quote, “performance has gone through the roof, applications load in 3 seconds instead of 4 minutes, they received helpdesk tickets as users felt applications were loading too fast”. David works closely with the vSAN team on the roadmap, and had a long list of features he wanted in 2014, all of those have been released now, now there are a couple of things he would like to see addressed and as mentioned by Vijay, they will be worked on in the future.

A session I watched online was “HCI1615PU -vSAN Technical Customer Panel on vSAN Experiences“. This was a panel session that was hosted by Peter Keilty from VMware and had various customers: William Dufrin – General Motors, Mark Fournier – US Senate Federal Credit Union, Alex Rodriguez – Rent A Center, Mariusz Nowak – Oakland University. I always like these customer panels as you get some great quotes and stories, which are not scripted.

First, each of the panel members introduces themselves and followed by an intro of their environment. Let me quickly give you some stats of what they are doing/running:

  • General Motors – William Dufrin
    • Two locations running vSAN Thirteen vCenter Server instances
    • 700+ physical hosts
    • 60 Clusters
    • 13,000+ VMs

William mentioned they started with various 4 node vSAN clusters, now they by default role out a minimum of 6-node or 12-node, depending on the use-case. They have server workloads and VDI desktops running, here we are talking thousands of desktops. Not using stretched vSAN yet, but this is something they will be evaluating in the future potentially.

  • US Senate Federal Credit Union – Mark Fournier
    • Three locations running vSAN (remote office location
    • 2 vCenter Instances
    • 8 hosts
    • 3 clusters
      • one cluster with 4 nodes, and then two 2-node configurations
    • Also using VVols!

What is interesting is that Mark explains how they started virtualizing only just 4 years ago, this is not something I hear often. I guess change is difficult within the US Senate Federal Credit Union. They are leveraging vSAN in remote offices for availability/resiliency purposes at a relatively low cost (ROBO Licensing). They run all-flash but this is overkill for them, resource requirements are relatively low. Funny detail is that vSAN all-flash is outperforming their all-flash traditional storage solution in their primary data center. Now considering moving some workloads to the branches to leverage the available resources and perform better. Also a big user of vSAN Encryption, considering this is a federal organization that was to be expected, leveraging Hytrust as their key management solution.

  • Rent-A-Center – Alex Rodriguez
    • One location using vSAN
    • 2 vCenter Server instances
    • 16 hosts
    • 2 clusters
    • ~1000 VMs

Alex explains that they run VxRail, which for them was the best choice. Flawless and very smooth implementation, which is a big benefit for them. Mainly using it for VDI and published applications. Tested various other hyper-converged solutions, but VxRail was clearly better than the rest. Running a management cluster and a dedicated VDI cluster.

  • Oakland University – Mariusz Nowak
    • Two locations
    • 1 vCenter Server instance
    • 12 hosts
    • 2 clusters
    • 400 VMs

Mariusz explains the challenges around storage costs. When vSAN was announced in 2014 Mariusz was intrigued instantly, he started reading and learning about it. In 2017 they implemented vSAN and moved all VMs over, except for some Oracle VMs, but this is for licensing reasons. Mariusz leverages a lot of enterprise functionality in their environment, ranging from Stretched Cluster, Dedupe and Compression, all the way to Encryption. This is due to compliance/regulations. Interesting enough, Oakland University runs a stretched cluster with a < 1ms RTT, pretty sweet.

Various questions then came in, some interesting questions/answers or quotes:

  • “vSAN Ready Node and ROBO licensing is extremely economical, it was very easy to get through the budget cycle for us and set the stage for later growth”
  • The Storage Policy Based Management framework allows for tagging virtual disks with different sets of rules and policies when we implemented that we crafted different policies for SolidFire and vSAN to leverage the different capabilities of each platform (reworded for readability)
  • QUESTION: What were some of the hurdles and lessons learned?
    • Alex: We started with a very early version vSPEX Blue and the most challenging for us back then was updating, going from one version to the other. Support, however, was phenomenal.
    • William: Process and people! It is not the same as traditional storage, you use a policy-based management framework on object-based storage, which means different procedures. Networking, in the beginning, was also a challenge, consistent MTU settings across hosts and network switches are key!
    • Mariusz: We are not using Jumbo Frames right now as we can’t enable it across the cluster (including the witness host), but with 6.7 U1 this problem is solved!
    • Mark: What we learned is that dealing with different vendors isn’t always easy. Also, ROBO licensing makes a big difference in terms of price point.
  • QUESTION: Did you test different failure scenarios with your stretched cluster? (reworded for readability)
    • Mariusz: We did various failure scenarios. We unplugged the full network of a host and watched what happened. No issues, vSphere/vSAN failed over VMs with no performance issues.
  • QUESTION: How do you manage upgrades of vSphere and firmware?
    • Alex: We do upgrades and updates through VxRail Manager and VUM. It downloads all the VIBs and does a rolling upgrade and migration. It works very well
    • Mark: We leverage both vSphere ROBO as well as vSAN ROBO, one disadvantage is that vSphere ROBO does not include DRS which means you don’t have “automated maintenance mode”. This results in the need to manually migrate VMs and placing hosts into maintenance mode manually. But as this is a small environment this is not a huge problem currently. We can probably script it through PowerCLI.
    • Mariusz: We have Ready Nodes, which is more flexible for us, but it means upgrades are a bit more challenging. But VMware has promised more is coming in VUM soon. We use Dell Plugins for vCenter so that we can do firmware upgrades etc from a single interface (vCenter).

The last session I watched was “HCI3691PUS – Customer Panel: Hyper-converged IT Enabling Agility and Innovation“, which appeared to be a session sponsored by Hitachi with ConAgra Brands and Norwegian Cruise Line as two reference customers. Matt Bouges works for ConAgra Brands as an Enterprise Architect, Brian Barretto works for Norwegian Cruise Line as a Virtualization Manager.

First Matt discussed why ConAgra moved towards HCI, which is all about scaling and availability as well as business restructuring. They needed a platform that could scale with their business needs. For Brian / Norwegian Cruise Line‘s it was all about cost. The current SAN/Storage architecture was very expensive, and as at the time, a new scalable solution (HCI) emerged they explored that and found that the cost model was in their favor. As they run the data centers on the ships as well they need something that is agile, note that these ships are huge, basically floating cities, with redundant data centers onboard of some of these ships. (Note they have close to 30 ships, so a lot of data centers to manage.) Simplicity and also rack space was a huge deciding factor for both ConAgra and Norwegian Cruise Lines.

Norwegian Cruise Line mentioned that they also still use traditional storage, same for ConAgra. It is great that you can do this with vSAN, keep your “old investment”, while building out the new solution. Over time most applications will move over though. One thing that they feel is missing with hyper-converged is the ability to run large memory configurations or large storage capacity configurations. (Duncan: Not sure I entirely agree, limits are very close to non-HCI servers, but I can see what they are referring to.) One thing to note as well from an operational aspect is that certain types of failures are completely different, and handled completely different in an HCI world, that is definitely something to get familiar with. Another thing mentioned was the opportunity of HCI in the Edge, nice small form factor should be possible and should allow running 10-15 VMs. It removes the need for “converged infra” in those locations or traditional storage in general in those environments. Especially now that compute/processing and storage requirements go up at the edge due to IoT and data analytics that happens “locally”.

That was it for now, hope you find this useful!

CTO3509BU: Embracing the Edge: Automation, Analytics, and Real-Time Business

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This is the last post in this VMworld Sessions series. Although the title lists “CTO3509BU: Embracing the Edge: Automation, Analytics, and Real-Time Business” which is by Chris Wolf and Daniel Beveridge, I would also highly recommend watching Daniel’s other session titled “CTO2161BU Smart Placement of Workloads in Tomorrow’s Distributed Cloud“. Both sessions discuss a similar topic and this Edge vs Cloud and where workloads and data should be placed. Both very interesting topics if you ask me, and definitely topics I am starting to explore more.

Chris discussed the various use cases around Edge Computing and the Technology Drivers, some of these very obvious but some of them not so much. What often is skipped is the business continuity aspect of edge but also things like network costs, limitations, and even data gravity. It is good to see that Chris addressed these. Some people still seem to be under the impression that every workload can run in the cloud, but in many cases it simply isn’t possible to send data to the cloud. Could be that the volume is too high, could be that the time it takes to transfer and analyze is too long (transaction execution time), or maybe it is physically impossible. It could also be that the application is mission-critical, meaning that the service can’t rely on a connection to the internet.

As a company, VMware is aiming to provide a solution for Edge and IoT, yet work closely with the very rich partner ecosystem and the main focus is providing a “native experience” for developers. Which provides customers choice as it avoids lock-in. Now I don’t want to start a lock-in discussion here as one could claim that it is difficult to migrate between platforms, and this is always the case, if not only because of the operational aspects (tooling/processes). A diagram which explains the different initiatives was then presented, and I like this diagram a lot as it differentiates between “device edge” and “compute edge”, on top of that it shows a differentiation between the device edge focussed on things vs people (big difference).

Next discussed is IoT management, Chris explains how Pulse 2.0 will be capable of managing up to 500 million managed objects. Pulse provides central management across different IoT device manufacturers. Instead of having a point solution for each manufacturer we introduced an abstraction layer and automate things like updates etc. (Sounds familiar?) Then ESXi for ARM is briefly touched upon, as Christ mentioned this is not for general purpose intended. VMware is looking for very specific use cases, if you are one of those partners/customers that has a use case for ESXi on ARM then please reach out to us and let’s discuss the use case and opportunity!

First, a new project is introduced by Daniel, it is called Project Nebula. Nebula brings an IoT marketplace, in this marketplace you can select various IoT services (which come in the form of containers), which are then sent to the IoT gateways. It looks pretty cool, as Daniel shows how he simply pushed various IoT services down to capable IoT gateways. So there’s a validation there if the edge services can run on the specific devices. On top of that, a connection to specific cloud services can also be provided so that certain metrics can be send up and analyzed when needed. Pretty smooth, I also like the fact that it provides monitoring, even down to the sensor and individual service as shown in the second screenshot below.

Next, it is briefly discussed why vSphere/VMware is the right platform, and then they jump into the momentum there is around cloud services and edge computing today. A brief overview of Amazon RDS on VMware is given and more importantly why this is a valuable solution, especially the replication of instances from on-premises to cloud and across regions. Of course, AWS Greengrass is mentioned, VMware also has a story in this space. You can run Greengrass on-premises in a highly available manner and it is dead simple to implement. For those who have not seen the announcements around that, read up here. Next Chris and Daniel go over various use cases, I guess Daniel likes wine as he explains how a Winery leverages AWS Lamba and Greengrass to analyze data coming from sensors which then drives control systems. On top of that, based on customer (and sommelier) ratings of wine, leveraging the data provided by sensors and matching that with customer behavior the winery can predict which barrels will score higher and most likely sell better etc. Very interesting story.

Compute edge is discussed next, this is where project dimension comes in to play, however first Chris defines the difference between the different option people have for consuming certain services. When does Cloud, Compute or Device Edge make sense? It is all about “time” or “latency”, how fast do you or the process need a response from the system? Transaction time window within 500ms and latency lower than 5ms? Well then you need to process at “device edge layer”, if a transaction time of below 1s is acceptable and latency of around 20ms then the “compute edge would work. Is a transaction time of larger than 1s okay and latency of higher than 20ms, then the cloud may be an option. As I said, it all revolves around how long you can wait.

Project Dimension delivers a compute edge solution which runs on-premises but is managed by VMware and delivered as a service. What I also liked is that the “micro” and “nano” data center is discussed, meaning that there potentially will be an option in the future to buy small form factor solutions which allow you to run a handful of VMs. More importantly, these solutions will consume less power and require less cooling. These things can make a big difference, especially as many Edge locations don’t have a data center room. Again ESXi for ARM is mentioned, this sounds very interesting, would be interesting to see if there are plans to mix this with Project Dimension over time, but that is just me thinking out loud.

From a networking perspective of course VeloCloud is discussed, and some very cool projects where cloud networks can be utilized and per traffic type certain routes can be used based on availability and performance (I probably should say QoS).

That was it for now as I don’t want to type out the whole session verbatim, for more specifics please watch the two sessions, worth your time, TO3509BU: Embracing the Edge: Automation, Analytics, and Real-Time Business” and/or “CTO2161BU Smart Placement of Workloads in Tomorrow’s Distributed Cloud“.

HCI2476BU – Tech Preview RDMA and next-gen storage tech for vSAN

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This session I had high on my list to go and watch live. Unfortunately, I was double booked during the show, hence I had to watch “HCI2476BU – Tech Preview RDMA and next-gen storage tech for vSAN” online as well. This session was by my colleagues Biswa and Srinath (PM/Engineering) and discusses how we can potentially use RDMA and next-gen storage technology for vSAN.

I am not going to cover the intro, as all readers by now are well aware of what vSAN is and does. What I think was interesting was the quick overview of the different types of ready nodes we have available. Recently included is the Cisco E-Series which is intended for Edge Computing scenarios. Another interesting comment was around some of the trends in the market around CPU, it seems that “beefy” single-socket servers are gaining traction. Not entirely surprising considering it lowers the licensing considerably and you can go up to 64 cores per CPU with AMD EPYC. Next up is the storage aspect of things, what can we expect in the upcoming years?

Biswa mentions that there’s a clear move towards the adoption of NVMe, moving away from SAS/SATA. It is expected that the NVMe devices will be able to deliver 500k+ of IOPS in the next 2 years. Just think about that. 500k IOPS from a single device. Biswa also briefly touched on DDR4 based Persistent Memory, where we can expect million(s) of IOPS with nanoseconds of latency. Next various types of devices are discussed and the performance and endurance capabilities. Even if you consider what is available today, it is a huge contrast compared to 1-2 years ago. Of course, all of this will come at a cost. From a networking perspective 10G/25G/40G is mainstream now or becoming, and RDM enabled (RoCE) NIC is becoming standardized as well. 100G will become the new standard, but this will take 3-5 years at a minimum.

Before the RDMA section started a quick intro to RDMA was provided: “Remote direct memory access from one computer into that of another without involving either one’s operating system allows for high throughput and low latency, which is especially useful in massive parallel computer clusters”. The expected potential / benefits for vSAN is:

  • Improved application performance
  • Better VM Consolidation
  • Speeds up cloning & vMotion
  • Faster metadata updates
  • Faster resync/rebuild times
  • NVMe-oF technology enablement

Early performance tests show a clear performance benefit for using RDMA. Throughput and IOPS are clearly higher, while latency is consistency lower when comparing RDMA to TCP/IP. Note that vSAN has not been optimized in these particular cases yet and this is just one example of a particular workload on a very specific configuration. (Tests were conducted with Mellanox.)

But what about that “next-gen storage”? How can we use this to increase IOPS/throughput while lowering not only latency but also HCI “overhead” like CPU and Memory consumption? Also, what does it mean for the vSAN architecture, what do we need to do to enable this? Faster networks, faster devices may mean that changes are required to various modules/processes. (Like DOM, LSOM, CLOM etc.)

Persistent Memory is definitly one of those next-gen storage devices which will require us to rethink the architecture. Simply because of the ultra low latency, the lower the latency the higher the overhead of the storage stack appears to be. Especially when we are reaching access times which are close to memory speeds. Can we use these devices in an “adaptive tiering” architecture where we use PMEM, NVMe and SSDs? Where for instance PMEM is used for metadata, or even metadata and capacity for hot blocks?

Last but not least a concept demo was shown around NVMe-oF for vSAN. Meaning that NVMe over Fabric allows you to present (additional) capacity to ESXi/vSAN hosts. These devices would be “JBOF”, aka “just a bunch of flash” connected over RDMA / NVMe-oF. In other words, these hosts had no direct locally attached storage, but instead these NVMe devices are presented as “local devices” across the fabric. Which, potentially, allows you to present a lot of storage to hosts which have no local storage capabilities even(Blades anyone?). Also, I wonder if this would allow us in the future to have similar benefits of fabric connected devices as for instance VMware Cloud on AWS has. Meaning that devices can be connected to other hosts after a failure, so that a resync/rebuild can be avoided? Food for thought definitely.

Make sure to watch “HCI2476BU – Tech Preview RDMA and next-gen storage tech for vSAN” online if you want to know more, as it doesn’t appear to be scheduled for VMworld Europe!

HCI2164BU – HCI Management, current and futures

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This session by Christian Dickmann and Junchi Zhang is usually one of my favorites in the HCI track, mainly because they show a lot of demos and in many cases show you what ends up being part of the product in 6-12 months. The session revolved all around management, or as they called it in the session “providing a holistic HCI experience”.

After a short intro Christian showed a demo around what we currently have around the installation of the vCenter Server Appliance and how we can deploy that to a vSAN Datastore, followed by the Quickstart functionality. I posted a demo of Quickstart earlier this week, let me post it here as well so you have an idea of what it is/does.

In the next demo, Christian showed how you can upgrade the firmware of a disk controller using Update Manager. Pretty cool, but afaik still limited to a single disk controller, hopefully, more will follow soon. But more importantly, after that demo ended he started talking about “Guided SDDC Update & Patching”, and this is where it got extremely interesting. We all know that it isn’t easy to upgrade a full stack, and what Christian was describing would be doing exactly that. Do you have Horizon? Sure, we will upgrade that as well when we do vCenter / ESXi / vSAN etc. Do you have NSX as part of your infra? Sure, that is also something we will take into account and upgrade it when required. This would also include firmware upgrades for NICs, disk controllers etc.

Next Christian showed the Support Insight feature, which is enabled through the Customer Experience Improvement Program. His demo then showed how to create a support request right from the H5 Client. The process shows that the solution understands the situation and files the ticket. Then it shows what the support team sees. It allows the support team to quickly analyze the environment, and more importantly inform the customer about the solution. No need to upload log bundles or anything like that, that all happens automatically. That’s not where it stop, you will be informed in the H5 client about the solution as well. Cool right?

Next Junchi was up and he discussed Capacity Management first. As he mentioned it appears to be difficult for people to understand the capacity graphs provided by vSAN. Junchi proposes a new model where it is clear instantly what the usable space is and by what current capacity is being consumed. Not just on a cluster level, but also at a VM level. This should also include what-if scenarios for usage projection. Junchi then quickly demoed the tools available that help with sizing and scaling.

Next Native File Services was briefly discussed, Data Protection and Cloud Native Storage. What does the management of these services look like? The file services demo that Junchi showed was really slick. Fill out IP details and Domain details and have File Services running in a minute or two natively on vSAN. Only thing you would need to do is create file shares and give folks access to the file shares. Also, monitoring will go through the familiar screens like the health check etc.

Last but not least Junchi discusses the integration with vRealize Automation on-premises and SaaS-based, a very cool demo showing how Cloud Assembly (but also vRA) will be able to leverage storage policies and new applications are provided using blueprints which have these policies associated with them.

That was it, if you like to know more, watch the session online, or attend it in EMEA!

VMworld Video: vSphere 6.7 Clustering Deep Dive

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As all videos are posted for VMworld (and nicely listed by William), I figured I would share the session Frank Denneman and I presented. It ended up in the Top 10 Sessions on Monday, which is always a great honor. We had a lot of positive feedback and comments, thanks for that! Most importantly, it was a lot of fun again to be up on stage at VMworld talking about this content after 6 years of absence or so. For those who missed it, watch it here:

Also very much enjoyed the book signing session at the Rubrik booth with Niels and Frank. I believe Rubrik gave away around 1000 copies of the book. Hoping we can repeat this huge success in EMEA. But more on that later. If you haven’t picked up the book yet and won’t be at VMworld Europe, consider picking it up through Amazon, e-book is 14.95 USD only.