Category: Stretched Storage

vSAN ReadyNode Sizer

by pgkeilty, posted in SDS, Stretched Storage, Uncategorized, Virtual SAN, VSAN

If you plan on implementing HCI to support your workloads and are looking to size an environment, the vSAN ReadyNode Sizer tool is the place to go.

vsansizer.vmware.com

There are 3 ways to use this.

  • Don’t log in – use the tool in “Evaluation” mode
  • Login using your My VMware account
  • Login using your Partner Central account

In “Evaluation” mode you’ll be able to create some basic configurations for general purpose workloads but will have no ability to customize or download the sizing results.

If you log in using your My VMware account or Partner Central account, you’ll have a lot more functionality. First, you’ll be asked if you want to configure an All Flash cluster or Hybrid cluster.

vSAN Sizer 1

Previously, the only place to size a Hybrid cluster was using the old vSAN Sizing tool. The ability to configure Hybrid clusters was just added to the new tool so now there is one place to size either option.

Next you’ll be asked if you want to size for a “Single Workload Cluster” or “Multi-Workload Cluster”

vSAN Sizer 2

The Single Workload Cluster provides options to configure for VDI, Relational Databases, or General Purpose workloads.

vSAN Sizer 3

The Multi-Workload Cluster choice is I helpful if you plan to have different types of VM’s and want to input the various workload specifics. There are a ton of customization options including block size, IO Pattern, vCPU/Core, etc. And of course, either option allows you to choose what vSAN protection level and method for each workload. You can even size for stretched clusters.

Our great product team at VMware has put a ton of work into this tool including some complex math to come up with a simple and easy way to configure clusters for vSAN. Check out the tool and see for yourself. But, also, feel free to contact your favorite partner or VMware Systems Engineer to also help. The vSAN SE team has done hundreds and thousands of these configurations and can help make sure you’ll be good to go.

 

 

Replays of Virtual SAN Sessions at VMworld 2016 That You Didn’t Want to Miss

by pgkeilty, posted in HCI, Hyper-converged, Ready Nodes, SDDC, SDS, Software Defined Storage, SRM, Stretched Storage, Uncategorized, Virtual SAN, VMware, VSAN, VxRail

What a great week last week at VMworld 2016. I had many good meetings with customers, participated in 3 breakout sessions, met up with some old friends and met some new ones. If you missed VMworld, well, then you missed a bunch of great sessions. There’s no way you could have seen them all, so, VMware has made them available here: http://www.vmworld.com/en/sessions/2016.html.

I participated in two sessions:

The first one was a customer panel discussion on Tuesday afternoon. I need to thank Glenn Brown from Stanley Black & Decker, Mike Caruso from Synergent, Tom Cronin from M&T Bank, and Andrew Schilling from Baystate Health who all did a fantastic job representing themselves, their companies, and their use of Virtual SAN. We had great interaction from the audience with lots of good questions. For a replay of the session check this out:

Four Unique Enterprise Customers Deployment of VMware Virtual SAN [STO7560]
Glen Brown, System Engineer, Stanley Black and Decker
Michael Caruso, AVP Corporate Information Systems, Synergent
Tom Cronin, Sr. Staff Specialist – Platforms Engineering Group, M&T Bank
Frank Gesino, Senior Technical Account Manager, VMware
Andrew Schilling, Team Leader – IT Infrastructure, Baystate Health Inc.
Tuesday, Aug 30, 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

The other session I was involved in was on Wednesday and repeated on Thursday. I had the good fortune to present with two VSAN Product Managers who are responsible for making VSAN great. Vahid Fereydounkolahi is responsible for driving new features into the VSAN product and Rakesh Radhakrishnan is responsible for making sure all the vendor hardware components are properly qualified for VSAN and for looking out into the future of new technologies like NVMe and RDMA to adopt into VSAN. For a replay of the two sessions check these out:

Peter Keilty, Office of the CTO, Americas Field – Storage and Availability, VMware, Inc.
Rakesh Radhakrishnan, Product Management & Strategy Leader, VMware
Wednesday, Aug 31, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Vahid Fereydounkolahi kicked this one off discussion VSAN features, capabilities, and how it works, I took over in the middle to discuss Day 2 operations, and Rakesh Radhakrishnan finished it off discussing the Ready Node program as well as current and future flash and IO technology that VSAN incorporates or will incorporate.
Virtual SAN Technical Deep Dive and What’s New [STO8246R]

Thursday, Sep 01, 10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Vahid wasn’t able to make this time so I kicked things off talking about VSAN features, capabilities, how it works, and Day 2 operations, and Rakesh Radhakrishnan finished it off discussing the Ready Node program as well as current and future flash and IO technology that VSAN incorporates or will incorporate.
Virtual SAN Technical Deep Dive and What’s New [STO8246R]

In my previous blog post I highlighted the sessions you wouldn’t want to miss. So here, I’ll provide the links to those sessions. A few either haven’t been uploaded yet or won’t because of legal or future looking reasons:

Christos Karamanolis is literally the brains behind VSAN since its inception and our chief visionary for Storage. If you want the whole picture wrapped up in a 1 hour session, this is it.
An Industry Roadmap: From storage to data management [STO7903]
Christos Karamanolis, VMware Fellow – CTO of Storage and Availability, VMware
Wednesday, Aug 31, 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Continue reading “Replays of Virtual SAN Sessions at VMworld 2016 That You Didn’t Want to Miss” →

VMware Virtual SAN at Storage Field Day 9 (SFD9) – Making Storage Great Again!

by pgkeilty, posted in Hyper-converged, SDS, Software Defined Storage, SPBM, SRM, Stretched Storage, Uncategorized, Virtual SAN, Virtual SAN 6, VMware, VSAN, vSphere 6

On Friday, March 18 I took the opportunity to watch the live Webcast of Storage Field Day 9. If you can carve our some time, I highly recommend this.

Tech Field Day‎@TechFieldDay
VMware Storage Presents at Storage Field Day 9

The panel of industry experts ask all the tough questions and the great VMware Storage team answers them all.

Storage Industry Experts VMware Virtual SAN Experts
  • Alex Galbraith @AlexGalbraith
  • Chris M Evans @ChrisMEvans
  • Dave Henry @DaveMHenry
  • Enrico Signoretti @ESignoretti
  • Howard Marks @DeepStorageNet
  • Justin Warren @JPWarren
  • Mark May @CincyStorage
  • Matthew Leib @MBLeib
  • Richard Arnold @3ParDude
  • Scott D. Lowe @OtherScottLowe
  • Vipin V.K. @VipinVK111
  • W. Curtis Preston @WCPreston
  • Yanbing Le @ybhighheels
  • Christos Karamanolis @XtosK
  • Rawlinson Rivera @PunchingClouds
  • Vahid Fereydouny @vahidfk
  • Gaetan Castelein @gcastelein1
  • Anita Kibunguchy @kibuanita

 

The ~2 hour presentation was broken up into easily consumable chunks. Here’s a breakdown or the recoded session:

VMware Virtual SAN Overview

In this Introduction, Yanbing Le, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Storage and Availability, discusses VMware’s company success, the state of the storage market, and the success of HCI market leading Virtual SAN in over 3000 customers.

What Is VMware Virtual SAN?

Christos Karamanolis, CTO, Storage and Availability BU, jumps into how Virtual SAN works, answers questions on the use of high endurance and commodity SSD, and how Virtual SAN service levels can be managed through VMware’s common control plane – Storage Policy Based Management.

VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 Features and Enhancements

Christos continues the discussion around VSAN features as they’ve progressed from the 1st generation Virtual SAN released in March 12, 2014 to the 2nd, 3rd, and now 4th generation Virtual SAN that was just released March 16, 2016. The discussion in this section focuses a lot on data protection features like stretched clustering and vSphere Replication. They dove deep into how vSphere Replication can deliver application consistent protection as well as a true 5 minute RPO based on the built in intelligent scheduler sending the data deltas within the 5 minute window, monitoring the SLAs, and alerting if they cannot be met due to network issues.

VMware Virtual SAN Space Efficiency

Deduplication, Compression, Distributed RAID 5 & 6 Erasure Coding are all now available to all flash Virtual SAN configurations. Christos provides the skinny on all these data reduction space efficiency features and how enabling these add very little overhead on the vSphere hosts. Rawlinson chimes on the automated way Virtual SAN can build the cluster of disks and disk groups that deliver the capacity for the shared VSAN datastore. These can certainly be built manually but VMware’s design goal is to make the storage system as automated as possible. The conversation moves to checksum and how Virtual SAN is protecting the integrity of data on disks.

VMware Virtual SAN Performance

OK, this part was incredible! Christos laid down the gauntlet, so to speak. He presented the data behind the testing that shows minimal impact on the hosts when enabling the space efficiency features. Also, he presents performance data for OLTP workloads, VDI, Oracle RACK, etc. All cards on the table here. I can’t begin to summarize, you’ll just need to watch.

VMware Virtual SAN Operational Model

Rawlinson Rivera takes over and does what he does best, throwing all caution to the wind and delivering live demonstrations. He showed the Virtual SAN Health Check and the new Virtual SAN Performance Monitoring and Capacity Management views built into the vSphere Web Client. Towards the end, Howard Marks asked about supporting future Intel NVMe capabilities and Christos’s response was that it’s safe to say VMware is working closely with Intel on ensuring the VMware storage stack can utilize the next generation devices. Virtual SAN already supports the Intel P3700 and P3600 NVMe devices.

This was such a great session I thought I’d promote it and make it easy to check it out. By the way, here’s Rawlinson wearing a special hat!

Make Storage Great Again

 

 

 

XvMotion, Cross-vCenter vMotion, VVols, LVM active/active, LVM active/passive, SRM & Stretched Storage, VAIO Filters

by pgkeilty, posted in Cross-vCenter vMotion, EMC, Enhanced vMotion, LVM, RecoverPoint, SDDC, Software Defined Storage, SRM, Stretched Storage, VAIO Filters, Virtual SAN, VMware, VSAN, VVols, XvMotion

Recently, with the announcement of the availability of VVols in vSphere.NEXT I was asked to give a deep dive presentation to a customer with a focus on what VVols meant for protection VM’s. While at EMC as a vSpecialist I lead a group focused on protecting VM’s so this is something I’ve been interested in for awhile. I’m a big fan of RecoverPoint and am excited about virtual RecoverPoint’s ability to offer continuous data protection for VSAN as I indicated here.   I’m also a huge fan of VPLEX and spent a lot of time during my days at EMC discussing what it could do. The more I dug into what VVols could do to help with various VM movement and data protection schemes the more I realized there was much to be excited about but also much need for clarification. So, after some research, phone calls, and email exchanges with people in the know I gathered the information and felt it would be good information to share.

What follows is kind of a “everything but the kitchen sink” post on various ways to move and protect VM’s. There were several pieces of the puzzle to put together so here are the past, present, and future options.

XvMotion (Enhanced vMotion) – vMotion without shared storage – Released in vSphere 5.1

In vSphere 5.1 VMware eliminated the shared storage requirement of vMotion.

  • vMotion – vMotion can be used to non-disruptively move a VM from one host to another host provided both hosts have access to the same shared storage (i.e. A datastore backed by a LUN or volume on a storage array or shared storage device). Prior to vSphere 5.1 this was the only option to non-disruptively move a VM between hosts.
  • Storage vMotion – this allows VM vmdk’s to be non-disruptively moved from one datastore to another datastore provided the host has access to both.
  • XvMotion – As of vSphere 5.1. XvMotion allows a VM on one host, regardless of the storage it is using, to be non-disruptively moved to another host, regardless of the storage it is using. Shared storage is no longer a requirement. The data is moved through the vMotion network. This was a major step towards VM mobility freedom, especially when you think of moving workloads in and out of the cloud.
  • For more information see: Requirements and Limitations for vMotion Without Shared Storage

Cross-vCenter vMotion – Announced at VMworld 2014, available in vSphere.NEXT (future release)

This new feature was announced during the VMworld 2014 US – General Session – Tuesday.

Continue reading “XvMotion, Cross-vCenter vMotion, VVols, LVM active/active, LVM active/passive, SRM & Stretched Storage, VAIO Filters” →