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Technology Short Take #19

Tuesday, January 3, 2012 in Networking, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 4 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

Storage

Virtualization

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.

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Technology Short Take #18

Sunday, December 11, 2011 in Networking, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 3 comments

Welcome to Technology Short Take #18! I hope you find something useful in this collection of networking, OS, storage, and virtualization links. Enjoy!

Networking

The number of articles in my “Networking” bucket continues to overflow; I have so many articles on so many topics (soft switching, OpenFlow, Open vSwitch, MPLS) that it’s hard to get my head wrapped around all of it. Here are a few posts that stuck out to me:

  • Ivan Pepelnjak has a very well-written post explaining the various ways that virtual networking can be decoupled from the physical network.
  • I stumbled across a trio of articles by Denton Gentry on hash tables (part 1, part 2, and part 3). This is an interesting perspective I hadn’t considered before; as we move more into software-defined networks (SDNs), why are we continuing to use the same mechanisms as before? Why not take advantage of more efficient mechanisms as part of this transition?

Servers/Operating Systems

  • Nigel Poulton and I traded a few tweets during HP Discover Vienna about SCSI Express (or SCSI over PCIe, SoP). He wrote up his thoughts about SoP and its future in the storage industry here. Further Twitter-based discussions about fabrics led him to say that HP buying Xsigo would bring the competition back against UCS. I’m not so sure I agree. Xsigo’s server fabric technology/product is interesting, but it seems to me that it’s still adding layers of abstraction that aren’t necessary. As SR-IOV, MR-IOV, and PCIe extension matures, it seems to me that Ethernet as the fabric is going to win. If that’s the case, and HP wants to bring the hurt against UCS, they’re going to have to invest in Ethernet-based fabrics.
  • Speaking of UCS, here’s a “how to” on deploying the UCS Platform Emulator on vSphere. You might also like the UCS PE configuration follow-up post.
  • Here’s what looks to be a handy Mac OS X utility to track how long until your Active Directory password expires. Sounds simple, yes, but useful.

Storage

Virtualization

  • Jason Boche, after some collaboration with Bob Plankers, wrote up a good procedure for expanding the vCloud Director Transfer Server storage space. It’s definitely worth a read if you’re going to be working with vCloud Director.
  • Microsoft has released version 3.2 of the Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V. The new release adds integrated mouse support, updated network drivers, and fixes an issue with SCVMM compatibility.
  • Julian Wood, who I had the opportunity to meet in Copenhagen at VMworld 2011, has published a four-part series on managing vSphere 5 certificates. Follow these links for the series: part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.
  • Thinking of deploying Oracle on vSphere? You should probably read this three-part series from VMware’s Business Critical Applications blog: part 1 is here, part 2 is here, and part 3 is here.
  • I’m so used to dealing with VLANs in a vSphere environment, I didn’t consider the challenges that might come up when using them with VMware Workstation. Fortunately, this author did—read his post on mapping VLANs to VMnets in VMware Workstation.
  • I thought that this article on virtual disks with business critical applications would be a deep dive on which virtual disk formats (thin, lazy zeroed, eager zeroed) are best suited for various applications. While the article does discuss the different virtual disk formats, unfortunately that’s as far as it goes.
  • Fellow VMware vSphere Design co-author Forbes Guthrie highlights an important design concern with AutoDeploy: what about a virtual vCenter instance? Read his full article for the in-depth discussion.
  • This post by William Lam gives a good overview of when vSphere MoRefs change (or don’t change).
  • Here’s a good explanation why NIC teaming can’t be used with iSCSI binding.
  • Cormac Hogan also posted a nice overview of some new vmkfstools enhancements in vSphere 5.
  • Terence Luk posts a detailed procedure to help recover VMware Site Recovery Manager in the event of a failure of one of the SRM servers. Good information—thanks Terence!

And that’s it for this time around. Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments below—all comments are welcome! (Please provide full disclosure of vendor affiliations/employment where applicable. Thanks!)

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Examining VXLAN

Friday, December 2, 2011 in Networking, Virtualization by slowe | 3 comments

It’s taken me far too long to write this post, that’s for sure. Since the announcement of VXLAN at VMworld earlier in the year, I’ve been searching for additional information on these questions: “What is VXLAN? How does it fit into the broader networking landscape? Why did we need a new standard?” I talked to Cisco, I attended a VMworld session about networking futures, I talked to some of the authors of the IETF draft on VXLAN, I read (most of) the VXLAN draft, and I studied some existing protocols that one might think could have been put to use. I think I’m finally ready to try to address these questions.

What is VXLAN?

The answer to this question is taken directly from the IETF draft (the emphasis is mine):

This document describes Virtual eXtensible Local Area Network (VXLAN), which is used to address the need for overlay networks within virtualized data centers accommodating multiple tenants.

I think it’s important to keep this purpose in mind. While it’s a bit simplistic to state it this way, VXLAN is—essentially—a proposed standards-based replacement for the proprietary MAC-in-MAC encapsulation that is currently used in vCloud Director. Instead of using MAC-in-MAC encapsulation, VXLAN uses MAC-in-IP encapsulation, with multicast groups to handle MAC learning and unique UDP source ports to help with load balancing across multiple links. Yes, that’s a bit of a simplification, but I think it gets the main point across.

How does VXLAN fit into the broader networking landscape?

Trying to answer this question is what has occupied the majority of the time it’s taken to write this post. You can’t explain how VXLAN fits into the broader networking landscape without having a minimal understanding, at least, of what the rest of the networking landscape looks like. I had to dig in a bit deeper to MPLS, OTV, FabricPath/TRILL, and other standards/emerging standards. I’m sure that I’ve still omitted some technologies that should have been included, and I know that there are still (so much) more to learn about the technologies I did include.

Based on the information I was able to gather, the answer to this second question really builds on the answer to the first question. VXLAN only really addresses a few fundamental concerns:

  • A shortage of VLAN address space (the theoretical limit is 4094 VLANs, with many switches supporting fewer than that)
  • An inability to support multi-tenancy (both from a scale perspective as well as a separation perspective)
  • Problems with Layer 2 connectivity across disparate virtual data centers

VXLAN addresses these concerns in this way:

  • It adds a 24-bit VXLAN Network Identifier (VNI), expanding the realm of potentially unique identifiers to just shy of 17 million (16.7 million). This addresses any scale-based concerns of multitenancy.
  • It wraps Layer 2 frames in Layer 3 packets. This addresses the other part of any multitenancy concerns (VXLAN hides duplicate MAC addresses, duplicate IP addresses, and duplicate VLAN IDs found in separate VNIs). This also addresses the Layer 2 connectivity issues between disparate virtual data centers.

And that’s really about it. It doesn’t address Layer 2 multipathing/STP, it doesn’t address Layer 2 connectivity in the physical world (layer 2 connectivity is only preserved at the virtualization level), and it doesn’t address Layer 3 routing issues created by stretched VLANs and VM mobility designs. Which brings us to our third question…

Why did we need a new standard?

This answer builds on the previous two answers. Once you have a clear understanding of what VXLAN was designed to do, and how VXLAN fits into the rest of the networking protocols, then this answer is pretty easy:

  • If you’ve been reading my articles, you know already that VXLAN doesn’t preserve all forms of Layer 3 connectivity. Because it doesn’t, you still need protocols like OTV to address Layer 2/3 connectivity at the physical level.
  • Because you still need protocols like OTV to achieve VM mobility (for the time being, at least), you’re still going to need protocols like LISP to fix funny routing issues being caused by IP addresses from the same subnet existing in multiple locations at the same time.
  • Because VXLAN doesn’t address Layer 2 multipathing concerns, you still need protocols like TRILL and technologies like FabricPath.
  • Because using MPLS—which, by the way, would also address the 3 concerns VXLAN addresses—would require MPLS-enabled/MPLS-aware equipment throughout the data center, that would make an MPLS-based solution difficult for many enterprises to adopt. Using an IP encapsulation scheme means that existing physical networking equipment doesn’t have to change. (Although it might change—to add VXLAN support—at some point in the future.)

I was not a fan of VMware (apparently) driving the creation of an entirely new networking standard. However, as I dug into this, I began to see that while other solutions almost addressed these concerns, none of them were a really good fit. Yes, using MPLS probably would have worked. Using GRE might have worked (take NVGRE, for example, but that’s also a proposed new protocol). To really address the concerns head-on, though, required a solution that was written/created expressly for that purpose, and that’s VXLAN. It’s just important, though, to really understand what VXLAN is as well as what VXLAN isn’t. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself trying to fit VXLAN to a solution for which it really wasn’t intended—which, by the way, was why VXLAN was created in the first place.

Comments, corrections, and clarifications are always welcome!

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Technology Short Take #17

Monday, November 28, 2011 in Linux, Macintosh, Microsoft, Networking, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 1 comment

Welcome to Technology Short Take #17, another of my irregularly-scheduled collections of various data center technology-related links, thoughts, and comments. Here’s hoping you find something useful!

Networking

  • I think it was J Metz of Cisco that posted this to Twitter, but this is a good reference to the various 10 Gigabit Ethernet modules.
  • I’ve spoken quite a bit about stretched clusters and their potential benefits. For an opposing view—especially regarding the use of stretched clusters as a disaster avoidance solution—check out this article. It’s a nice counterpoint, especially from the perspective of the network.
  • Anyone know anything about sFlow?
  • Here’s a good post on VXLAN that has some useful information. I’d just like to point out that VXLAN is really only intended to address Layer 2 communications “within” a vApp or a collection of VMs (perhaps a single organization’s VMs), and doesn’t do anything to address Layer 3 routing/accessibility for clients (or “consumers”) attempting to connect to those systems. For that, you’ll still need—at least today—technologies like OTV, LISP, and others.
  • A quick thought that I’m still exploring: what’s the impact of OpenFlow on technologies like VXLAN, NVGRE, and others? Does SDN eliminate the need for these technologies? I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.

Servers/Operating Systems

  • If you’ve adopted Mac OS X Lion 10.7, you might have noticed some problems connecting to older servers/NAS devices running AFP (AppleTalk Filing Protocol). This Apple KB article describes a fix. Although I’m running Snow Leopard now, I was running Lion on a new MacBook Pro and I can attest that this fix does work.
  • This Microsoft KB article describes how to extend the Windows Server 2008 evaluation period. I’ve found this useful for Windows Server 2008 instances in the lab that I need for longer 60 days but that I don’t necessarily want to activate (because they are transient).

Storage

  • Jason Boche blogged about a way to remove stubborn hosts from Unisphere. I’ve personally never seen this problem, but it’s nice to know how to address it should it occur.
  • Who would’ve thought that an HDD could serve as a cache for an SSD? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Normally, that would probably be the case, but as described here there are certain instances and ways in which using an HDD as a cache for an SSD can improve performance.
  • Scott Drummonds wraps up his 3 part series on flash storage in part 3, which contains information on sizing flash storage. If you haven’t been reading this series, I’d recommend giving it a look.
  • Scott also weighs in on the flash as SSD vs. flash on PCIe discussion. I’d have to agree that interfaces are important, and the ability of the industry to successfully leverage flash on the PCIe bus is (today) fairly limited.
  • Henri updated his VNXe blog series with a new post on EFD and RR performance. No real surprises here, although I do have one question for Henri: is that your car in the blog header?

Virtualization

  • Interested in setting up host-only networking on VMware Fusion 4? Here’s a quick guide.
  • Kenneth Bell offers up some quick guidelines on when to deploy MCS versus PVS in a XenDesktop environment. MCS vs. PVS is a topic of some discussion on the vSpecialist mailing list as they have very different IOPs requirements and I/O profiles.
  • Speaking of VDI, Andre Leibovici has two articles that I wanted to point out. First, Andre does a deep dive on Video RAM in VMware View 5 with 3D; this has tons of good information that is useful for a VDI architect. (The note about the extra .VSWP overhead, for example, is priceless.) Andre also has a good piece on VDI and Microsoft Outlook that’s worth reading, laying out the various options for Outlook-related storage. If you want to be good at VDI, Andre is definitely a great resource to follow.
  • Running Linux in your VMware vSphere environment? If you haven’t already, check out Bob Plankers’ Linux Virtual Machine Tuning Guide for some useful tips on tuning Linux in a VM.
  • Seen this page?
  • You’ve probably already heard about Nick Weaver’s new “Uber” tool, a new VM alignment tool called UBERAlign. This tool is designed to address VM alignment, a problem with how guest file systems are formatted within a VMDK. For more information, see Nick’s announcement here.
  • Don’t disable DRS when you’re using vCloud Director. It’s as simple as that. (If you want to know why, read Chris Colotti’s post.)
  • Here’s a couple of great diagrams by Hany Michael on vCloud Director management pods (both public cloud and private cloud management).
  • People automatically assume that “virtualization” means consolidating multiple workloads onto a single physical server. However, virtualization is really just a layer of abstraction, and that layer of abstraction can be used in a variety of ways. I spoke about this in early 2010. This article (written back in March of 2011) by Brad Hedlund picks up on that theme to show another way that virtualization—or, as he calls it, “inverse virtualization”—can be applied to today’s data centers and today’s applications.
  • My discussion on the end of the infrastructure engineer generated some conversations, which is good. One of the responses was by Aaron Sweemer in which he discusses the new (but not new) “data layer” and expresses a need for infrastructure engineers to be aware of this data layer. I’d agree with a general need for all infrastructure engineers to be aware of the layers above them in the stack; I’m just not convinced that we all need to become application developers.
  • Here’s a great post by William Lam on the missing piece to creating your own vSEL cloud. I’ll tell you, William blogs some of the coolest stuff…I wish I could dig in as deep as he does in some of this stuff.
  • Here’s a nice look at the use of PowerCLI to help with the automation of DRS rules.
  • One of my projects for the upcoming year is becoming more knowledgeable and conversant with the open source Xen hypervisor and Citrix XenServer. I think that the XenServer Design Handbook is going to be a useful resource for that project.
  • Interested in more information on deploying Oracle databases on vSphere? Michael Webster, aka @vcdxnz001 on Twitter, has a lengthy article with lots of information regarding Oracle on vSphere.
  • This VMware KB article describes how to enable centralized logging for vCloud Director cells. This is particularly important for HA environments, where VMware’s recommended HA strategy involves the use of multiple vCD cells.

I guess I should wrap it up here, before this post gets any longer. Thanks for reading this far, and feel free to speak up in the comments!

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Technology Short Take #16

Monday, November 7, 2011 in Networking, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 1 comment

Welcome to Technology Short Take #16. It’s been quite a while since my last Technology Short Take (a month!), and I don’t know if that’s a good thing (so readers didn’t have to listen to my rambling) or a bad thing (readers missing out on what I hope are useful or interesting links). In any case, here’s my latest collection of various data center-related links, articles, and thoughts. Thanks for reading!

Networking

  • A great of my networking-related reading over the last few weeks has been focused on OpenFlow and trying to better understand what it is and how it affects things (both today and in the future). I won’t share all of them here (I’ll probably post a separate collection of all the links I’ve gathered), but I did want to mention that briefly. Of particular interest to me is the interaction/integration between OpenFlow, Open vSwitch, and OpenStack. Any notes/thoughts/ideas there that readers would like to share are welcomed.
  • While this post on NVGRE, VXLAN, and what Microsoft is doing right is a bit slanted in favor of Open vSwitch, I do agree that standardizing the control plane for managing the virtual networking platform is a worthy goal. We all know, intuitively, that we need better orchestration and more extensive automation; providing a standardized control interface is one step closer to achieving that, in my opinion.
  • Ivan has a great treatise on why virtual switches need BPDU guard. As usual, his post is spot on—with one minor exception. Current recommendations for vSphere HA state that, in most cases, isolation response should be configured to leave VMs powered on. Thus, the scenario he describes in which a misconfigured VM might take down all the links on an ESX/ESXi host and then cause the VMs to be rebooted is far less likely to occur. Even so, that’s a minor nit, and the point of the article remains valid and useful.

Servers

  • For a bit of a real-world look at Cisco UCS, read this post by Chris Atkinson, a fairly recent adopter of UCS in his environment.

Storage

  • If you haven’t had a chance to catch up with Rob Peglar’s “Architecture Matters” series of blog posts, I think it’s worth checking out. Part 1 is here and part 2 is here. (Rob, by the way, is the Americas CTO for Isilon.)
  • The “readiness” of FCoE for the enterprise is a topic that has come up once again. Stephen Foskett stirred the waters—something that he seems to be doing more frequently now—with this article. Predictably (and I don’t mean that in a bad way), J Metz has come out squarely on the side of “FCoE is ready” (read his post); Greg Ferro has come out swinging against FCoE (read his post). I can see both sides of the argument; personally, I think that these two sides are operating on different measurements. J Metz is working from the perspective of standards readiness and product availability; Stephen and Greg are working from the perspective of market adoption. Neither is a good indicator alone of enterprise readiness; rather, both need to be taken together.
  • Interested in a bit more detail on how VNX volumes work? Check out this article by Joe Kelly of Varrow.
  • Scott Drummonds has a great series going on titled “The Flash Storage Revolution”. In part 1, Scott discussed why flash is so important in enterprise storage today; in part 2, Scott addressed the factors that companies must consider when deciding how to best use flash in their environments. I’m looking forward to part 3!
  • Brandon Riley has a good couple of posts showing some differences between PowerPath/VE and Round Robin on VMAX (part 1 and part 2). The differences with “out of the box” settings are quite dramatic in favor of PowerPath/VE; with some tuning, Round Robin pulls in much closer. Of course, raw performance is important, but failure behaviors are also important; it would be great if Brandon could incorporate some failure scenario behaviors into his scorecard.
  • Jeramiah Dooley of VCE has a good article examining the value of FAST VP and FAST Cache for service providers. It’s a good read that I’d recommend.

Virtualization

  • It seems that writing a series of articles is all the rage these days; Chris Colotti has a series going titled “vCloud Director Clone Wars” that discusses the considerations around the use of vSphere clones in vCloud Director environments. Have a look at the series: part 1, part 2, and part 3.
  • Want to use PXE with VMs under VMware Fusion? This post shows you how.
  • Interested in running Hyper-V under ESXi 5? It’s possible; this VMware Communities document provides some information. I’d also recommend having a look here as well.
  • While we are on the top of nested VMs, William Lam wrote up how to install the VMware VSA in nested ESXi 5 host.
  • Here’s another article series, this time from Itzik Reich and addressing VMware SRM 5 with EMC Symmetrix (part 1 and part 2).
  • Cisco UCS VM-FEX is the subject of this 3-part series from Joe Keegan at Infrastructure Adventures (part 1, part 2, and part 3).
  • More nesting madness: running Virtual PC inside Hyper-V? Ben Armstrong discusses the need for MAC spoofing in that scenario.
  • Want an opportunity to win a $50 gift card? Go supply your VDI read/write IOPS data statistics over at Andre’s site.
  • It’s no secret that I’ve been discussing stretched clusters for quite some time (as far back as last September with this presentation, and then again here and here), so it’s great to see other people in the virtualization community talking about the subject as well. Duncan posted an article focusing on failure scenarios and Chad Sakac posted an article on the new stretched cluster HCL category. This December at the Brisbane and Melbourne VMUG events, I’ll be presenting some new content on stretched clusters, so stay tuned for that.

I guess it’s time to wrap up now. Thanks for reading, and feel free to share any useful or pertinent links in the comments below.

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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!

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VMworld 2011 Monday General Session

Monday, August 29, 2011 in Virtualization by slowe | 4 comments

This is the session blog for the Monday general session. I’m fortunate enough to have arrived in time to get a seat at the blogger/press/analyst tables. While the network connectivity is good, the power is—unfortunately—not so good.

The general session started with an impressive lightshow across the front of the conference that depicts the change of computing with the advent of virtualization and cloud computing. It was visually appealing and interesting.

At the conclusion of the visual show, Rick Jackson, Chief Marketing Officer for VMware, takes the stage to kick off the general session. Rick indicates that there are about 19,000 people here at VMworld 2011 this week; attendance is down, understandably, due to Hurricane Irene’s effect on the East Coast of the United States and the resulting impact on air travel.

Rick indicates that the Hands-On Labs for VMworld 2011 are completely hosted on public clouds: Switch SuperNAP, Colt, and Terremark all provide public cloud services for this year’s labs. The labs are built on vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5. Both Paul Maritz and Carl Eschenbach will be speaking later in this session; and tomorrow morning VMware CTO Steve Herrod will be doing a technology keynote to demonstrate what VMware’s working on.

Rick also confirms that VMworld 2012 will be back in San Francisco (yay!), being held from August 27 to 30, 2012. At this point, Rick introduces Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware, and gives him the stage.

Paul gives some statistics:

  • One VM being deployed every six seconds (that’s faster than babies being born in the US)
  • 20 million VMs running on VMware vSphere
  • More VMs in flight using vMotion than there are aircraft in flight
  • Greater than 800,000 vSphere administrators (that’s the population of San Francisco)
  • Greater than 68,000 VMware Certified Professionals (across 146 countries)
  • More than 1,650 ISV partners and more than 3,000 apps certified on VMware

So, given all this success, where does VMware go from here? This sets Paul up to give VMware’s vision and explain the various forces that are at work in the transformation of IT in this “unfolding cloud era.” Paul takes us on a journey from his early days in IT and how the industry transformed during the client-server era and now into the cloud era. For the most part, this is the same material that we’ve seen in previous conferences, but with one notable addition: a strange focus on data fabrics (the relational database, for example). Maritz says that the relational database as a data fabric simply cannot handle the scale of traffic that the cloud era demands.

Maritz spends some time talking about the tasks that need to be completed to help us move into the cloud era, and ties that to vSphere versions that have been delivered by VMware in recent years (4.0 in 2009, 4.1 in 2010, 5.0 in 2011). The delivery of vSphere 5 is a key part of the first task to be completed: modernize infrastructure and operations.

VMware is also aggressively target public cloud-based services running on vCloud Director, and Maritz announces a couple new vCloud partners. Not leaving out the sizable SMB market, Paul Maritz also described VMware’s commitment to that marked with a new release of vSphere Essentials, and he touches base on VMware Go, a SaaS-based service to assist in getting their infrastructure setup and running.

The second task we must address to move into the cloud era is to handle the migration or transition of existing apps to new and renewed apps. This is the core of VMware’s vFabric push: to build new frameworks, provide new platforms, and supply new data fabrics that are capable of handling the scale and volume that the new cloud era needs. SQLFire takes the extraordinary scalability of GemFire and enables people to use it with the more traditional SQL query language. VMware is also announcing vFabric Data Director, a new way of automatically provisioning and managing databases on vSphere. The first “example” or “implementation” of vFabric Data Director is vFabric Postgres, a vSphere- and vFabric-optimized version of Postgres to be used with vFabric Data Director and vSphere. The third aspect of vFabric and VMware’s push to modernize applications is CloudFoundry, a new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. CloudFoundry supports node.js, Ruby, and Spring. Scala support has been added by the open source community. To help with adoption, VMware has created a local version of CloudFoundry that can run on a local laptop.

The third task to move into the cloud era is addressing end-user access. To that end, VMware is announcing VMware View 5.0, with improvements in bandwidth usage, greater availability of View clients (clients for just about any device), and greater integration with VoIP/unified communications providers and services. View is, of course, only part of the strategy; there’s also Horizon, VMware’s offering to manage users and applications across traditional applications and “cloud era” applications. Horizon is no longer a single product, but a collection of products that allow IT to associate information and applications to people instead of devices. Maritz also makes references to MVP, VMware’s Mobile Virtualization Platform. Virtual phones? We shall see.

At this point, Carl Eschenbach is brought onto the stage to transition into a discussion about moving to the cloud era from the perspective of three different customers who have made this journey themselves.

My battery is now running down, so I’m wrapping up this session blog.

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VMware’s Launch Event

Tuesday, July 12, 2011 in Security, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 20 comments

Today was a big day for VMware. I’m going to provide some summary coverage of the products launched today, but only a quick recap; I’ll have more in-depth analysis and information on the products and their key features and improvements in future blog posts. No doubt there is going to be plenty of other coverage on the launch as well, and I’ll likely produce a special “Short Takes” episode with a summary of some of the related links, so look for that as well.

Now, on to the product announcements!

vSphere 5

As fully expected, VMware today announced VMware vSphere 5, the next generation of their virtualization suite. VMware continues to drive virtualization “higher” in the data center as they target even the most mission critical applications, so vSphere 5 offers support for massive VMs (up to 32 vCPUs and 1 TB of RAM per VM). With vSphere 4, there were only a few instances where a mission critical application couldn’t be supported because of resource constraints. That already-slim window shrinks even more now with vSphere 5.

Also in the vSphere 5 release, VMware has added a lot of features to help simplify and automate the virtualization layer. This is fully expected and a natural part of vSphere’s continued maturation. Some of the features that VMware packed into this release for improved administration and management include:

  • vSphere Auto Deploy: VMware now offers a fully supported PXE boot solution that offers completely stateless ESXi hosts. Need to deploy a new ESXi host? No problem, with Auto Deploy it can be done in minutes. Need to deploy a new ESXi image? Change a few rules in the Auto Deploy engine and reboot your host—and you’re done. It’s pretty powerful stuff, in my opinion.
  • Storage DRS: vSphere DRS is the darling of many data centers, transparently moving VMs around to keep cluster workloads balanced. vSphere 5 introduces the same concept for storage, called Storage DRS. (Just as a side note, I’m not clear if the “DRS” in “Storage DRS” still stands for “Distributed Resource Scheduler,” since that’s not really applicable to storage. Anyone know?) Using information on storage capacity usage and (optionally) I/O response times, Storage DRS can shift virtual disks for VMs from datastore to datastore—using the concept of a datastore cluster—to keep storage utilization balanced. Like vSphere DRS, Storage DRS also performs initial placement, simplifying the VM storage provisioning process. This is something that has been in the works for years (I first heard about it from VMware in 2008), and it’s great to see it finally make it’s appearance.
  • Profile-Driven Storage: This is another killer feature. Building on the vSphere Storage APIs for Storage Awareness (more popularly known as VASA), profile-driven storage allows administrators to define VM storage profiles that describe the features or attributes that storage must possess in order to satisfy the requirements of the VM (RAID type, disk type, capacity, protection level, replication, snapshots, etc.). Then, based on VM storage profiles, when you create a new VM, perform a Storage vMotion, or clone a VM or template, vSphere will use the VM storage profile to show you which datastores are compatible (compliant with the profile) or incompatible (noncompliant with the profile). This provides a huge benefit to the vSphere administrator in ensuring that VMs are stored on the right storage with the right support.

Of course, that’s not all that vSphere 5 has to offer; there’s also a laundry list of other new features:

  • VAAI v2, which includes hardware offloads for NFS and new thin provisioning awareness
  • All-new framework for vSphere HA, which eliminates the primary/secondary model and provides significant new features
  • A new vSphere Storage Appliance, to turn local (DAS) storage into shared storage in environments where a dedicated SAN isn’t possible and performance is not the key consideration
  • A new version of VMFS that offers datastores up to 64TB in size without the use of extents
  • Significant performance enhancements for Storage vMotion, and the ability to relocate snapshots
  • Improvements in NFS to support scale-out NAS
  • Software FCoE initiator (only supported on Intel X520 NICs at initial release). I have a couple of the Intel X520 NICs that I’ll be doing some additional testing with against vSphere 5, so look for those results on this site soon.

As you can see, it’s quite a significant release. But wait, there’s more…

vCloud Director 1.5

VMware also announced vCloud Director 1.5, which offers a number of new features:

  • New APIs: vCloud Director will offer broadened “southbound” APIs, so that solutions like vCO, UIM, and others can provide further automation in highly virtualized environments
  • Linked Clone support: vCD 1.5 will support linked clones, so that deploying new workloads will happen faster and with less storage consumption.

Site Recovery Manager 5

In addition to vSphere 5 and vCD 1.5, VMware also unveiled SRM 5, with new features like:

  • Built-in automated failback: While vendors such as EMC provided failback plugins, those plugins didn’t provide the full functionality of SRM when performing a failback. SRM 5 now provides full failback support, a key feature that many organizations have been requesting.
  • Workload mobility workflows: SRM starts adding support for workload mobility workflows, to move workloads cold between sites. (Hmmm…think about VPLEX plus SRM workload mobility workflows…give you any ideas?)
  • vSphere host-based replication: vSphere 5 can now offer replication on a host-based level, for environments where array-based replication isn’t possible due to constraints (budgetary or otherwise). Naturally, there’s a trade-off in using host-based replication versus array-based replication, but it’s a nice feature to add for lower-end customers.

vShield 5

Last, but not least, VMware announced vShield 5. vShield 5 brings improved management to the table as well as some new features:

  • Static routing functionality in vShield Edge: This provides vSphere and vCloud Director administrators greater flexibility in modeling network topologies.
  • New product offering in the form of vShield Data Security: This is an integration of technology from RSA DLP (Data Loss Prevention), that offers administrators the ability to discover and report sensitive data in virtual machines.

All in all, VMware unveiled a lot of new functionality today that is targeted at driving the further adoption of virtualization and addressing concerns over virtualizing mission critical applications.

As I mentioned earlier, look for more in-depth articles on some of the new features and functionality in the coming days and weeks. Thanks!

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Technology Short Take #12: Networking Edition

Monday, May 16, 2011 in Networking by slowe | 4 comments

Now that I’ve published the Storage Edition of Technology Short Take #12, it’s time for the Networking Edition. Enjoy, and I hope you find something useful!

  • Ron Fuller’s ongoing deep dive series on OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization) has been great for me. I knew about the basics of OTV, but Ron’s articles really gave me a better understanding of the technology. Check out the first three articles here: part 1, part 2, and part 3.
  • Similarly, Joe Onisick’s two-part (so far) series on inter-fabric traffic on Cisco UCS is very helpful and informative as well. There are definitely some design considerations that come about from deploying VMware vSphere on Cisco UCS. Have a look at Joe’s articles on his site (Part 1 and Part 2).
  • Kurt Bales’ article on innovation vs. standardization is a great read. The key, in my mind, is innovating (releasing “non-standard” stuff) while also working with the broader community to help encourage standardization around that innovation.
  • Here’s another great multi-part series, this time from Brian Feeny on NX-OS (part 1 here, and part 2 here). Brian exposes some pretty interesting stuff in the NX-OS kickstart and system image.
  • I’ve discussed LISP a little bit here and there, but Greg Ferro reminds us that LISP isn’t a “done deal.”
  • J Metz wrote a good article on the interaction (or lack thereof, depending on how you look at it) between FCoE and TRILL.
  • For a non-networking geek like me, some great resources to become more familiar with TRILL might include this comparison of 802.1aq and TRILL, this explanation from RFC 5556, this discussion of TRILL-STP integration, or this explanation using north-south/east-west terminology. Brad Hedlund’s TRILL write-up from a year ago is also helpful, in my opinion. All of these are great resources, in my mind.
  • And as if understanding TRILL, or the differences between TRILL and FabricPath weren’t enough (see this discussion by Ron Fuller on the topic), then we have 802.1aq Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) thrown in for good measure, too. If it’s hard for networking experts to keep up with all these developments, think about the non-networking folks like me!
  • Ivan Pepelnjak’s examination of vCDNI-based private networks via Wireshark traces exposes some notable scalability limitations. It makes me wonder, as Ivan does, why VMware chose to use this method versus something more widely used and well-proven, like MPLS? And isn’t there an existing standard for MAC-in-MAC encapsulation? Why didn’t VMware use that existing standard? Perhaps it goes back to innovation vs. standardization again?
  • If you’re interested in more details on vCDNI networks, check out this post by Kamau Wanguhu.
  • Omar Sultan of Cisco has a quick post on OpenFlow and Cisco’s participation here.
  • Jake Howering of Cisco (nice guy, met him a few times) has a write-up on an interesting combination of technologies: ACE (load balancing) plus OTV (data center interconnect), with a small dash of VMware vCenter API integration.

I think that’s going to do it for this Networking Edition of Technology Short Take #12. I’d love to hear your thoughts, suggestions, or corrections about anything I’ve mentioned here, so feel free to join the discussion in the comments. Thanks for reading!

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Technology Short Take #5

Saturday, October 9, 2010 in Networking, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 1 comment

Welcome to Technology Short Take #5, the latest collection of data center technology-related links, articles, blog posts, thoughts, and ideas. Some of this might be useful, some of it might not be helpful, but hopefully it will prove handy to someone out there. Enjoy!

  • Brian Norris (of Going Virtual) recently posted a couple of useful “gotchas” about EMC Avamar and VMware Site Recovery Manager with EMC CLARiiON arrays. The issue with Avamar involves renaming the Default Virtual Machine Group and is a known issue that will be addressed in a future release; for now, the workaround (as also described by Brian) is either to not rename the Default Virtual Machine Group or not use it. The second issue involves an issue with the EMC Solutions Enabler, which is a required component for a number of EMC software solutions. In this particular case, Brian needed to use the x86 (32-bit) version of Solutions Enabler, not the x64 (64-bit version). As Brian mentions, be sure to double-check the release notes for the product in question to see which version of the Solutions Enabler is required (if it’s require at all). Good posts, Brian!
  • I don’t think I’ve pointed this post out yet, but if I have I apologize. Duncan Epping (of Yellow Bricks, although you probably already know that) recently produced this blog post on the allocation of memory to the Service Console in VMware ESX. As Duncan points out, the allocation of RAM to the Service Console is actually dynamic and is based on the amount of memory installed in the host. Duncan also links to an updated VMware KB article that also describes this behavior. Unfortunately, aside from Duncan’s article, there is no official document that describes the algorithm VMware ESX uses to determine how much memory to assign.
  • If you’re interested in more details on NetIOC, this document is a good place to start.
  • The “traffic trombone” (a term coined by Greg Ferro aka Etherealmind and used again by Ivan Pepelnjak of Cisco IOS Hints and Tricks) is something that I discussed during my Denver VMUG presentation on stretched VMware clusters. As originally described by Greg here and then revisited again by Ivan here, the “traffic trombone” is introduced when you use a technology such as long-distance vMotion but the rest of the network is not/can not be aware that a particular VM has now migrated. I suspect that this is going to be a growing concern as long-distance vMotion (and supporting technologies, like Cisco OTV, EMC VPLEX, or NetApp MetroCluster) see continued adoption. If this isn’t something you’re factoring into your data center and network designs, then you’ve overlooked a key consideration. I’m scheduled to have a call with a few networking gurus very soon and I plan on discussing this issue and potential workarounds; I’ll post more here when I am able.
  • As a quick follow-up to Greg Ferro’s article that coined the term “traffic trombone”, the focus of that article is actually centered around “vFabric” (later revealed as vChassis), which was VMware’s loose vision for a future network architecture. If indeed VMware is thinking along the lines that Greg envisions, then VMware themselves might provide the fix to the “traffic trombone” as part of their vChassis vision. Discussions of the “traffic trombone” also don’t (yet) incorporate vCloud Director networking concepts. Hmmm….I might need to jump on that before any of the growing number of talented vCloud bloggers do!
  • And speaking of talented vCloud bloggers, Hany Michael had two good posts in the last few days centered around vCloud. First was a revision to his vCloud Director in a Box setup, which was followed by a post on how to change or renew the SSL certificates on vCloud Director cells.
  • VMware vCloud Director also continues to see attention from other bloggers as well. Duncan posted vCD Networking Part 3; and David Hill posted both an article on how to un-install the vCD agent through the vCloud Director UI as well as Part 2 of vCloud Director Q&A.
  • Brian Feeny posted a good article comparing methods of combining FCIP tunnels, Ethernet port channels, and FC port channels. All in all, it sounds like using FC port channels built with multiple FCIP tunnels is better. (Brian also recently posted an errata list for the MDS SAN-OS 3.x CLI command reference. Handy!)

In addition to the links mentioned above, here are some additional links you might find interesting or useful:

Installing VMware vShield App fails with the error: Previous installation of host services encountered an error (thanks Itzik)
Cannot Remove a vSphere host from vCenter
VMware vCenter 4.1 Upgrade/Migration Gotchas
VMware KB: Cisco Nexus 1000V drops packets when Mac Pinning
How Hyper-V responds to disk failure
Boot a VM from iSCSI? Yes. We. Can!
Lights, Camera, Replication : UBER SRM Video Guide

Well, that ought to do it for this time around. Trying to get these things published is difficult sometimes because there’s just so much material out there! I’m already collecting for Technology Short Take #6…

Thanks for reading!

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