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Technology Short Take #19

Tuesday, January 3, 2012 in Networking, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 5 comments

Welcome to Technology Short Take #19, the first Technology Short Take for 2012. Here’s this year’s first collection of links, articles, and thoughts regarding virtualization, storage, networking, and other data center technology-related topics. I hope you find something useful!

Networking

While configuration limits aren’t the most exciting reading, they are important from time to time. Here’s some configuration limits for the UCS 6100 and 6200 series.
Understanding the differences—both positive and negative—between the various approaches to solving a particular challenge is a key skill. That’s why I like this article on HP Flex-10 versus NIOC for VDI. The author (Dwayne) weighs the pros and cons of both approaches in helping to shape network traffic for VDI deployments using 10Gb Ethernet.
It would appear that my recent VXLAN and OTV connectivity posts (incorrect VXLAN post here, corrected VXLAN post here, and OTV/VXLAN post here) sparked a discussion about whether we really need to concern ourselves with traffic trombones. On one side we have Brad Hedlund speculating that the network should be treated like a large virtual I/O fabric; on the other side we have Greg Ferro countering that we do need to be concerned about the topology of the network. I can see both sides of the argument, but at this stage of the game, I’m inclined to agree more with Greg. In the future (it’s unclear how far in the future) I think that Brad’s points will be more valid, but not right now.
This post by Ivan Pepelnjak on VXLAN, IP multicast, OpenFlow, and control planes highlights some of the current limitations with VXLAN and thus reinforces why I think that Brad’s arguments are a bit ahead of their time.
A few folks had some write-ups on Embrane Heleos: Greg Ferro, Jason Edelman, Brad Hedlund, Brad Casemore, and Ivan Pepelnjak. My question (and this is spurred in part by some comments by Brad Casemore): is this another Cisco spin-in move?

Servers/Operating Systems/Applications

Want to play around with Hadoop/MapReduce? This quick tutorial might be useful in getting you started.
This two-part series on Hadoop (part 1 and part 2) might also help you understand the value of Hadoop and where it fits into your overall technology profile.
Continuing with Hadoop, this post by Brad Hedlund on understanding Hadoop clusters and the network gives a great overview of Hadoop and highlights some of the networking concerns/considerations.
I mentioned that one of my 2012 projects is learning Perl, and here are three “beginner’s introduction” articles that I’ve found useful so far (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3).
Fellow vSpecialist Clint Kitson recently started blogging, and here’s a recent post on a function he wrote for PowerShell that brings some color-coding feedback into the environment.
Running Mac OS X 10.7 Lion on your Mac? Then this article on setting up dual Time Machine backup destinations might be useful to you. (As an aside, I’ll add an extra plug for ControlPlane—it’s a very handy little tool that I also use).

Storage

Are you a networking geek, but haven’t had the chance to do much with Fibre Channel? This guide to Fibre Channel switching basics for network engineers might be handy to get you started.
Check out this post for a heads-up regarding soft media errors with SSDs and FAST Cache on EMC arrays (thanks to Chad Sakac for the link).

Virtualization

I’m not sure how often this actually comes up, but Ben Armstrong shows here how to use “built in” applications in Windows XP mode under Windows 7. Ben also has a write-up on how to convert to a fixed virtual hard disk “the hard way”.
Duncan revisits vSphere HA isolation response with IP storage in this recent post, pointing out a potential issue that can occur when both the IP-based storage link and the management link are lost. From what I gather from both the article and the comments, it sounds like this isn’t limited to only when the isolation response is set to “Leave Powered On.”
If you, like me, will be expanding beyond VMware in 2012, then this open source cloud and virtualization terminology post will be useful to you. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the most important steps in learning new technologies is learning the vocabulary. (Oh, and it might be worth it to just subscribe to this site. It looks to have an interesting mix of content coming.)
Seen the VMware Technical Publications YouTube channel?
Here’s a good post on using vSphere Auto Deploy with Cisco UCS.
Alan Renouf has posted a great PowerCLI script that helps automate the start-up of your virtual environment. This is a handy tool that should be in the toolbox of any administrator with a virtual vCenter instance in their environment.
Fellow vSpecialist and VCDX Matt Cowger has a good write-up on installing the vCenter Operations Symmetrix Collector plugin.
Kendrick Coleman has a good discussion of vCloud Director provider vDC strategies. His discussion is partially specific to Vblock, but some of the information would apply to any environment.
Frank Denneman has a good post on the recommendation to use similar types of disks in a datastore cluster.
Does Cisco regret not buying VMware? Brad Casemore seems to think so.
I think I might have referenced these before, but these Linked Clone posts on the VMware vSphere blog are a good read (part 1 and part 2).
Tony Bourke is depressed at the current state of statelessness. I can’t say that I disagree.
Massimo has a good write-up on vCloud Director, custom portals, and backend integrations in service provider environments.

And that it’s for this time around; as always, I hope you’ve found something useful here. Courteous comments are always welcome; feel free to speak up below.

Tags: Cisco, EMC, FibreChannel, Macintosh, Microsoft, Networking, Storage, Vblock, vCloud, Virtualization, VMware, VXLAN

UIM/Operations 3.0 Now GA

Thursday, December 15, 2011 in Networking, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 4 comments

Within the last couple of days, I received an e-mail notification that UIM/Operations 3.0 had been finalized and was now generally available (i.e., it was now considered GA).

For those that aren’t familiar, UIM has two flavors:

UIM/Provisioning (also referred to as UIM/P), which is tasked with handling provisioning/de-provisioning tasks in a Vblock. This would include tasks like deploying UCS B-series blades, zoning FC fabrics, and setting up storage pools.
UIM/Operations (also referred to as UIM/O) is tasked with providing near real-time visibility into the Vblock, as well as root cause and impact analysis.

In addition to support for UIM/P 3.0 (more info here) and all associated Vblock types, this latest release of UIM/O adds the following features:

Model-based deterministic automated root cause analysis for faults in a Vblock environment
Automated impact analysis that visualizes impact on higher-order abstractions such as vApps, UIM Services (these are defined within UIM/P) and Vblocks
Event forwarding via SNMP traps to enable northbound integration
Automation of trap reception from MDS and Nexus switches
Saving and restoring user preferences

As with UIM/P, the new version of UIM/O is available to authorized users on Powerlink:

Home > Support > Software Downloads and Licensing > Downloads E-I > Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager/Operations

Documentation for UIM/O 3.0 is also available on Powerlink:

Home > Support > Technical Documentation and Advisories > Software ~ E-I ~ Documentation > Ionix Family > Ionix for Data Center Automation and Compliance > Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager/Operations > 3.0 and Service Packs

(Think that’s a deep enough structure to navigate?)

Enjoy!

Tags: Networking, Storage, Vblock, Virtualization

New Version of UIM/P

Wednesday, November 9, 2011 in Networking, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 4 comments

An e-mail popped into my Inbox on Monday notifying me that Unified Infrastructure Manager/Provisioning (UIM/P) version 3.0 has been released and is now generally available. You might already be familiar with UIM/P as it is the primary provisioning tool for Vblocks.

Some features that are new to this version of UIM/P include:

UIM/P now has the ability to not only add new blades, VLANs, and datastores to a cluster, but also the ability to remove VLANs and individual blades (called “elastic operations”).
UIM/P now supports vCenter Server 5.0 and ESXi 5.0.
UIM/P has the ability to assign individual pools to specific Vblocks and specific fabrics.
UIM/P offers integration into vCloud Director so that UIM/P can push resources into a new Provider vDC.
UIM/P’s performance when provisioning infrastructure services is now significantly faster.

Product documentation and the product download are both available via Powerlink.

Tags: Networking, Storage, Vblock, Virtualization

Technology Short Take #15

Monday, October 3, 2011 in Networking, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 4 comments

Welcome to Technology Short Take #15, the latest in my irregular series of posts on various articles and links on networking, servers, storage, and virtualization—everything a growing data center engineer needs!

Networking

My thoughts this time around are pretty heavily focused on VXLAN, which continues to get lots of attention. I talked about posting a dissection of VXLAN, but I have failed miserably; fortunately, other people smarter than me have stepped up to the plate. Here are a few VXLAN-related posts and articles I’ve found over the last couple of weeks:

There is a three-part series over at Coding Relic that does a great job of explaining VXLAN, the components of VXLAN, and how it works. Here are the links to the series: part 1, part 2, and part 3. One note of clarification: in part 3 of the series, Denny talks about a VTEP gateway. Right now, the VTEP gateway is the server itself; anytime a packet on a VXLAN-enabled network leaves the physical server to go to a different physical server, it will be VXLAN-encapsulated. It won’t be decapsulated until it hits the destination VTEP (the ESXi server hosting the destination VM). If (when?) VXLAN awareness hits physical switches, then the possibility of a VTEP gateway existing outside the server exists. Personally, it kind of makes sense—to me, at least—to build VTEP gateway functionality into vShield Edge.
Some people aren’t quite so enamored with VXLAN; one such individual is Greg Ferro. I respect Greg a great deal, so it was interesting to me to read his article on why VXLAN is “full of fail”. Some of his comments are only slightly related to VXLAN (the rant over IEEE vs. IETF, for example), but Greg’s comment about VMware building a new standard instead of “leveraging the value of networking infrastructure” echoes some of my own thoughts. I understand that VXLAN accomplishes things that existing standards apparently do not, but was a new standard really necessary?
Omar Sultan of Cisco took the time to compile some questions and answers about VXLAN. One thing that is made more clear—for me, at least—in Omar’s post is the fact that VXLAN doesn’t address connectivity to the vApps from the “outside” world. While VXLAN provides a logical isolated network segment that can span multiple Layer 3 networks and allow applications to communicate with each other, VXLAN doesn’t address the Layer 3 addressing that must exist outside the VXLAN tunnel. In fact, in my discussions with some of the IETF draft authors at VMworld, they indicated that VXLAN would require a NAT device or a DNS update in order to address changes in externally-accessible applications. This, by the way, is why you’ll still need technologies like OTV and LISP (or their equivalents); see this post for more information on how VXLAN, OTV, and LISP are complementary. If I’m wrong, please feel free to correct me.
In case you’re still unclear about the key problem that VXLAN attempts to address, this quote from Ivan Pepelnjak might help (the full article is here):

VXLAN tries to solve a very specific IaaS infrastructure problem: replace VLANs with something that might scale better. In a massive multi-tenant data center having thousands of customers, each one asking for multiple isolated IP subnets, you quickly run out of VLANs.
Finally, you might find this PDF helpful. Ignore the first 13 slides or so; they’re marketing fluff, to be honest. However, the remainder of the slides have some useful information on VXLAN and how it’s expected to be implemented.

Servers

I didn’t really stumble across anything strictly server hardware-related; either I’m just not plugged into the right resources (anyone want to make some recommendations?) or it was just a quiet period. I’ll assume it was the former.

Storage

Tony Bourke at Data Center Overlords has a couple of good FCoE-related articles. First, there’s this piece on the odd pairing of Fibre Channel and Ethernet and how they are often at odds with one another. The second article was on the overall “health” of FCoE; is it dead, or not? Only time will tell.

Virtualization

Did you see this post about new network simulation functionality in VMware Workstation 8?
Here’s a good walk-through on setting up vMotion across multiple network interfaces.
VMware vSphere Design co-author Maish Saidel-Keesing has a post here on how to approximate the functionality of netstat on ESXi.
William Lam has a “how to” on installing the VMware VSA with running VMs.
Fellow vSpecialist Andre Leibovici did a write-up on a proof of concept that the vSpecialists did for a customer involving Vblock, VPLEX, and VDI. This was a pretty cool use case, in my opinion, and worth having a look if you need to design a highly available environment.
Thinking about playing with vShield 5? That’s a good idea, but check here to learn from the mistakes of others first. You’ll thank me later.
The question of defragmenting guest OS disks has come up again and again; here’s the latest take from Cormac Hogan of VMware. He makes some great points, but I suspect that this question is still far from settled.

It’s time to wrap up now; I hope that you found something useful. As always, thanks for reading! Feel free to share your views or thoughts in the comments below.

Tags: FCoE, LISP, Networking, OTV, Storage, Vblock, Virtualization, VMotion, VPLEX, VXLAN

Technology Short Take #14

Monday, September 12, 2011 in Networking, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | No comments

Welcome to Technology Short Take #14, another collection of links and tidbits of information I’ve gathered over the last few weeks. Let’s dive right in!

Networking

Much of my focus in the networking space recently has been around virtualization-centric initiatives, so the items on this list might seem a bit skewed in that direction. Sorry!

I’ve been doing some reading on 802.1Qbg (Edge Virtual Bridging). I still have a long way to go, but I think that I’m starting to better understand this draft and the problem(s) it’s attempting to address. As usual when I’m dealing with networking-related technologies, especially data center-focused networking technologies, I’m finding some of Ivan Pepelnjak’s articles useful. For example, he wrote an article on how EVB should ease VLAN configuration pains; this article is helpful in translating the terms the IEEE uses (like “virtual station interface” and “EVB station”) into terms virtualization-friendly folks like me can understand (like “vNIC” and “Hypervisor supporting EVB”, respectively). Ivan also provides a rough comparison of 802.1Qbh/FEX and 802.1Qbg, which I also found helpful in better understanding both technologies. There is still much that I want/need to understand, such as how 802.1Qbg affects or is affected by VXLAN, the recent darling of the cloud networking space.
Speaking of VXLAN, a number of articles have emerged since the announcement of VXLAN last week at VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas. Jon Oltsik of Network World called it “Cloud Network Segmentation at Layer 2.5″, which is catchy but doesn’t really delve into the details of VXLAN and how it plays into/with related data center protocols. Of course, there’s also the obligatory VMware post on the technology, talking about how great it is—naturally—but failing to again provide substantive information on the relationships between VXLAN and other, related data center technologies. If anything, Allwyn’s post made VXLAN seem even more proprietary and linked to vCloud Director and vShield Edge than I’d understood it to be. Fortunately, Ivan weighed in on the proposed new standard and also provided some information on the relationship between VXLAN, OTV, and LISP. I’m still digging into VXLAN myself and I plan to post an article within the next week or so (I’ve been a bit busy with moving halfway across the United States).
Ivan also has a post with more details on the Brocade VCS fabric load-balancing behaviors that’s worth having a look.

Servers

This article on AES-NI in the newer Intel CPUs is a great look at the benefits of adding symmetric encryption support at the CPU level. Almost makes me want to go out and buy a new MacBook Pro so that I could use File Vault 2 with hardware encryption support…

Storage

One cool find recently is this series of “hands-on” posts by Henri Hamalainen (aka @henriwithani) on the EMC VNXe 3300. I had the pleasure of meeting Henri in person at VMworld this year, and he mentioned that he’d started a series of posts on the VNXe 3300. His posts are here: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6. (Part 7 hasn’t yet been written.)
There’s been quite a hubbub going on in the FCoE space, with so many articles flashing back and forth from various contributors I’m still having a hard time deciphering all of it. From what I can tell, it all started with an article by a VP at Juniper about FCoE over TRILL. That sparked Ivan Pepelnjak to coin some new terms: “dense-mode FCoE” (in which FCFs exist at every hop) and “sparse-mode FCoE” (in which LAN switches may forward FCoE frames without any FCoE awareness). That, in turn, sparked an article by Tony Bourke in which he creates more new modes of operation: single hop FCoE (SHFCoE), dense-mode FCoE (DMFCoE), and sparse-mode FCoE (SMFCoE). A fantastic (and very informative) discussion ensued in the comments to that article and the follow-up article. Ivan also responded to Tony’s post as well with a post on FCoE network elements classification. I’m not sure that all the contributors ever came to a consensus, but you’ll learn a lot about FCoE and related technologies just following along, that’s for sure.
By the way, this transcript of questions and answers from a live FCoE webcast has some great information buried in it as well.
This is an older article, but Stephen Foskett does a good job with discussing FCoE vs. iSCSI. Like so many other IT-related decisions, it’s not an “either-or” discussion—it’s about finding the right tool to do the job.
This article provides one suggestion for handling zoning with multiple storage arrays, and provides some good information on EMC CLARiiON/VNX arrays in the process.

Virtualization

The idea of stretched clusters and interconnecting data centers continues to be an idea many people are interested in exploring. Rawley Burbridge, of IBM, discusses how this might be done using IBM SVC and VMware vSphere in this three-part series (part 1, part 2, and part 3).
Kendrick Coleman, in conjunction with a collection of folks from both VMware and VCE, recently published an article on design considerations for vCloud Director on a Vblock. I haven’t yet read the full document, primarily because it appears to require a Facebook login in order to download. (I don’t use Facebook.)
Andre Leibovici—who I had the pleasure of meeting in person at VMworld—has an article on how to modify the Windows Registry settings (or apply Group Policy) for the VMware View Client in order to integrate self-service password reset.
The VMware vCloud Architecture Toolkit (vCAT) version 2.0 is now available; get it here (via Beaker).
Forbes Guthrie—the lead author with whom I worked on VMware vSphere Design, published earlier this year—posted some great 10Gb Ethernet-related information from VMworld session SPO3040.
This is a slightly older post from Hany Michael, but a good one nevertheless; he posts information on how to publish the vCloud Director portal on the Internet.

I guess that will wrap things up for this time around. Thanks for reading, and I hope that you found something useful in this varied mix of links. Feel free to share more in the comments below!

Tags: FCoE, Networking, Storage, Vblock, vCloud, Virtualization

Some Vblock Posts

Wednesday, May 26, 2010 in Virtualization by slowe | No comments

The Vblock is starting to get a bit more attention, which is a good thing. Part of it is driven by an increased awareness of the Vblock as a solution; I’d like to think of that as something Ed Saipetch and I had a little to do with after our Gestalt IT Tech Field Day presentation in Boston, but I’m not so naive as to actually believe that. However, I am confident that part of the increased visibility and discussion around Vblock is due to the continued investment and continued persistence by all three members of the VCE Coalition. Regardless of the reason, I’ve collected a few Vblock posts here for your continued enjoyment:

The Case for the Vblock « Jason Nash’s Blog
Vblocks – StorageNerve
VCE VBlock – Perspective for the Technical Decision Maker
VCE Vblock – Alignment of Technology and Operations
UCS, VCE, Acadia, Vblocks and the Journey to the Cloud
What makes up a VCE Vblock 0? Overview Video with Scott Lowe & Mike Foley
Cisco, VMware, EMC Detail Ambitious Vblock Expansion

Tags: Cisco, EMC, Hardware, Vblock, Virtualization, VMware

Using IP-Based Storage with VMware vSphere on Cisco UCS

Thursday, February 4, 2010 in Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 18 comments

I had a reader contact me with a couple of questions, one of which I felt warranted a blog post. Paraphrased, the question was this: How do I make IP-based storage work with VMware vSphere on Cisco UCS?

At first glance, you might look at this question and scoff. Remember though, that Cisco UCS does—at this time—have a few limitations that make this a bit more complicated than at first glance. Specifically:

Recall that the UCS 6100XP fabric interconnects only have two kinds of ports: server ports and uplink ports.
Server ports are southbound, meaning they can only connect to the I/O Modules running in the back of the blade chassis.
Uplink ports are northbound, meaning they can only connect to an upstream switch. They cannot be used to connect directly to another end host or directly to storage.

With this in mind, then, how does one connect IP-based storage to a Cisco UCS? In these scenarios, you must have another set of Ethernet switches between the 6100XP fabric interconnects and the target storage array. Further, since the 6100XP fabric interconnects require 10GbE uplinks and do not—at this time—offer any 1GbE uplink functionality, you need to have the right switches between the 6100XP fabric interconnects and the target storage array.

Naturally, the Nexus 5000 fits the bill quite nicely. You can use a pair of Nexus 5000 switches between the UCS 6100XP interconnects and the storage array. Dual-connect the 6100XP interconnects to the Nexus 5000 switches for redundancy and active-active data connections, and dual-connect the target storage array to the Nexus 5000 switches for redundancy and (depending upon the array) active-active data connections. It would look something like this:

From the VMware side of the house, since you’re using 10GbE end-to-end, it’s very unlikely that you’ll need to worry about bandwidth; that eliminates any concerns over multiple VMkernel ports on multiple subnets or using multiple NFS targets so as to be able to use link aggregation. (I’m not entirely sure you could use link aggregation with the 6100XP interconnects anyway. Anyone?) However, since you are talking Cisco UCS you’ll have only two 10GbE connections (unless you’re using the full width blade, which is unlikely). This means you’ll need to pay careful attention to the VMware vSwitch (or dvSwitch, or Nexus 1000V) configuration. In general, the recommendation in this sort of configuration is to place Service Console, VMotion, and IP-based storage traffic on one 10GbE uplink, place virtual machine traffic on the second 10GbE uplink, and use whatever mechanisms are available to preferentially specify which uplink should be used in the course of normal operation. This provides redundancy in the uplinks but some level of separation of traffic.

One quick side note: although I’m talking IP-based storage here, block-based storage fans need to remember that Cisco UCS does not—at this time—support northbound FCoE. That means that although you have FCoE support southbound, and FCoE support in the Nexus 5000, and possibly FCoE support in your storage arrays, you still can’t do end-to-end FCoE with Cisco UCS.

For those readers who are very familiar with Cisco UCS and Nexus, this will seem like a pretty simplistic post. However, we need to keep in mind that there are lots of readers out there who have not had the same level of exposure. Hopefully, this will help provide some guidance and food for thought.

(Of course, one could just buy a Vblock and not have to worry about putting all the pieces together…hey, can’t blame me for trying, right?)

Clarifications, questions, or suggestions are welcome in the comments below. Thanks!

Tags: Cisco, iSCSI, NFS, UCS, Vblock, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere