VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘netapp’

David Davis (@davidmdavis vmwarevideos.com) recorded the 2:30pm vExpert Panel session from the recent Carolina VMware User Group (VMUG) Summit 2010. The session occurred on Friday June 11, 2010 in the Charlotte Convention Center and featured the following vExperts:

@sakacc Chad Sakac

@vstewed Vaughn Stewart

@scott_lowe Scott Lowe

@mike_laverick Mike Laverick

I was lucky enough to get to moderate the discussion, and along with excellent help in the form of several questions from the VMUG crowd (my co host for the event), I am extremely pleased with the conversation that resulted. We touched on VCE vBlock architecture, Secure Multi Tenancy, vStorage API for Array Integration, FCoE, and a few other virtualization related storage topics

in the 60 minutes we were given. In fact, the end result turned out much like a live version of both the Virtumania and Infosmack podcasts.

One of my personal goals for this session was that the everyone in the audience did not have be storage gurus in order to get benefits from listening. I’m proud to say that I feel we achieved this goal, and so I am embedding Davis’ video below so more VI admins can tune in to what these guys have to say about the future of storage and virtualization!

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The week of June 7 through June 11 is going to be five fun days for me spread across two events in the South East US. If any VM /ETC readers or VIRTUMANIA listeners will be attending either Microsoft TechEd 2010 or the Charlotte VMUG’s annual Carolina VMware Users Summit 2010 please stop by the Veeam booth and say "Hi".

Here’s a quick summary of what I’ll be doing at each event.

Managing VMware At TechEd?

No we are not advocating the first square off between VMware and Microsoft of the conference season. On the contrary, The Veeam nworks Management Pack helps those who use Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) better monitor, manage, and report on their VMware Infrastructure. We actually help VMware admins and Microsoft Operations teams get along!

I’ll be in the booth with @vmdoug, @dsiles, and others from @veeam. If you’ll be in New Orleans Monday June 7 through Weds June 9 so please stop by.

Charlotte VMUG Summit vExpert Panel

On Thursday that week I’ll be jetting back to Charlotte,NC for the VMUG Summit on Friday June 11. As a Gold Sponsor Veeam will obviously have a table / booth in the vendor area in which I’ll be working, but we will also be presenting in our own 1:30 pm “Image-Level Backups You Can Count On” session.

The high light for the VMUG Summit will definitely be the vExpert Panel at 2:30 pm. We are still ironing out the exact topics to cover, but the panel will feature Scott Lowe, Chad Sakac, Vaughn Stewart, Mike Laverick, and possibly others in a open discussion on virtualization and storage. I’m honored to be invited as a moderator for this discussion, and it’s sure to be an informative and entertaining session.

Register for the Carolina VMUG Summit here.

Here are links to other posts from the panel members on the Charlotte VMUG Summit

• Carolina VMware Users Summit 2010 (scottlowe.org)
• Charlotte VMUG – will be a doozy… (virtualgeek)
• Charlotte VMUG Annual Conference – a mini VMworld? (virtualstorageguy)

I’m definitely looking forward to seeing everyone in New Orleans and Charlotte in a few weeks!

Episode 8 of the VIRTUMANIA Podcast was great! Marc and I team up again with Rick Vanover for a conversation with Vaughn Stewart of  NetApp. The following is the podcast summary:

VIRTUMANIA Podcast Episode 8 – Barbecue SMT Architecture Plate. Hosted by Rich Brambley (@rbrambley) of VMETC. Marc Farley (@3parfarley) of 3Par and StorageRap.com co hosts with guests Rick Vanover (@rickvanover www.rickvanover.com) and Vaughn Stewart (@vstewed http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualstorageguy/) of NetApp. After some general fun about Infosmack’s activities at SNW last week and the upcoming NetApp vs EMC debate scheduled for this year’s Charlotte VMUG in June, the conversation segues from the different types of regional barbecue in the Southeastern U.S. to Secure Multi Tennancy Architecture. Various technologies that make up SMT from VMware, Cisco, NetApp, and even other storage company’s solutions that can create similar multi tennancy scenarios are touched upon. An example is developed of an IT department responsible for various barbecue “departments” on a secure, isolated, but consolidated virtual infrastructure. This episode is sure to leave you hungry for more! Thanks to Greg Knieriemen (@knieriemen) for this Infosmack Production.

Farley gets Greg Knieriemen to laugh again and wins 1,000 VIRTUMANIA Bucks. Rick needs help securing the Rickatron.com domain, and the whole crew doubts my reference to Alabama BBQ styles.

Listen to the podcast with the embedded player or subscribe to get a weekly copy so you can listen when convenient

Check out the VM /ETC VIRTUMANIA Page to listen to past episodes as well as all the episodes of Infosmack.

The following links offer more information on some of the SMT Architecture topics mentioned in VIRTUMANIA Episode 8:

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After talking with NetApp at their booth on the VMworld 2009 Solutions Exchange floor I came to the conclusion that the Rapid Cloning Utility (RCU) does way more for VDI implementations then the tool’s name implies. Available for free to customers that already own NetApp’s file and volume cloning  features, RCU can create automated and customized virtual desktops more quickly and with better storage efficiency while still integrating the administrative convenience and control available in vCenter and VMware View. RCU has been elevated in my mind as a “must use” tool for VDI implementation using NetApp storage.

I went to their booth with a purpose. It was obvious to me that RCU would automate the mass creation of virtual desktops by cloning a volume that contained a template desktop image. Although that’s a great time saver available when you deploy a solution based on NetApp storage,
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vSphere has introduced several new features for storage performance enhancement. Most of the new features build on already accepted vSwitch standards and designs. An important example is the new Round Robin MPIO path policy for VMFS LUNs. However, based on what is the common vSwitch design today, the new iSCSI configuration needed for Round Robin multi-pathing may cause some admins to look twice.

I was motivated to write this post by 2 recently published storage vendor documents that both recommend the same basic iSCSI vSwitch with Round Robin MPIO configuration: create a single iSCSI vSwitch, assign 2 physical NICs, and then create as many as 8 VMKernel Portgroups each with their own ip address. The documents I am referring to are:

• NetApp TR-3749 – NetApp and VMware vSphere Storage Best Practices http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3749.pdf
• Dell Equallogic CONFIGURING VMWARE VSPHERE SOFTWARE ISCSI WITH DELL EQUALLOGIC PS SERIES STORAGE – http://www.equallogic.com/resourcecenter/assetview.aspx?id=8453

To give a visual of the recommended configuration (in case you are still doing a double take) here are screen shots of the configured vSwitch from: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s inevitable. If you are a virtual infrastructure administrator, architect, or blogger you will eventually talk about VMware VMFS and virtual disk alignment. I’m not going to try to explain the concepts in this post. My goal is to discuss whether to align VMware virtual disks (VMDKs) and what options are available for performing the alignment.

Bottom line is that if you are deploying new VMs from a template you should do so from an aligned master, but VMs created from physical to virtual migrations (P2Vs) present some practical challenges and don’t have to be treated as urgently.

Recommendations

First things first. My interpretation of VMware’s stance on alignment is that they do not advocate aligning every P2V-ed VM to the VMFS due to the administrative effort, disk space requirements, potential VM down time, and in most cases a nominal VM performance increase. On the other hand, it is crystal clear that VMware does recommend always formatting VMFS LUNs with the VI Client and always taking the time to align Gold Image templates so new servers deployed will automatically be aligned.

For reference here’s VMware’s PDF on the topic:

I’ll admit my perspective as a consultant may be a bit different than the normal VI admin. After all, I am mostly involved in the Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of companies are using NFS as the preferred protocol to shared storage for VMware Virtual Infrastructure. In my personal experience, The administrative options and convenience of NFS is unmatched, and the virtual machine (VM) performance is surprising.

For example, I recently helped migrate a company from ESX 2.X to new a installation of VI 3.5. Since the client did not have any additional space available on their fiber channel (FC) SAN for a new VMFS3 volume, we temporarily used a Windows Server 2003 R2 NFS share to host 2 dozen VMs until the existing FC volumes could be rebuilt and reconnected. The customer actually ran their production environment for 2 weeks in this configuration and was experiencing better performance. Newer hardware for the ESX hosts also contributed to this increase, but the point is that the NFS storage was not a bottleneck.

For those that are considering NFS, I was recently forwarded a list of links that provide sound arguments and testimonials on the unique advantages of using NFS with VMware. Although the published date of some of the posts that are referenced might be a bit dated, the content is still valid. Here is the list with quotes from some of the posts, but be sure to read the all in full for more information. Read the rest of this entry »