VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘storage’

HP is announcing it’s own Converged Infrastructure Architecture with associated services and partner offerings later today which will “integrate existing silos of compute, storage, network, and facility resources with unified management to deliver a virtualized, highly automated technology environment ..”. The timing of this announcement obviously serves as a “us too” response to the VMware, Cisco, and EMC (VCE) vBlock architecture announcement, but more importantly positions HP as the provider of the only private cloud infrastructure solution under a single company logo combining HP servers, storage, and networking.

HP is also announcing availability of new storage virtualization products based on storage pooling features first introduced to me at the HP Tech Days in Colorado Springs, CO, which ultimately become pillars of the Converged Infrastructure Architecture. With HP’s new products, virtual storage pools can be created across multiple storage devices enabling high availability and dynamic adjustment for any workload.

Finally, hidden among the infrastructure product announcements is a high level indication of EVA integration with Hyper-V Live Migration. As of this writing it is not clear to me what this technically means and I am waiting for more information. It was made clear to me that HP is not establishing a competitive stance to the VCE partnership, and HP remains as an active VMware OEM partner.

Look for the official announcements from HP and the links in this post to go live around 9:00 a.m. EST today (Wed 11/4/09). HP lifted the embargo for press, analysts and bloggers as of Thursday 11/04 at 12:01 a.m. EST so I am publishing quick information from an embargoed call I attended Tues (11/3) afternoon with Lee Johns, HP Director of Marketing – Unified Storage, and links found in draft copies of the official press releases.

HP’s Converged Infrastructure Architecture is made up of 4 technology innovations: Read the rest of this entry »

VMware has been running a blogging contest in order to promote the new vSphere Blog. The current contest topic is vSphere Thin Provisioning. A lot has been written on this topic already, but I thought I would point out a storage design conclusion I’ve come up with based mostly from the explanations and recommendations of others about handling what happens when an over allocated, thin provisioned LUN runs out of space.

This post first walks through an basic explanation of the administrative concern caused by thin provisioning and how built in vSphere monitoring and alerting can be used to proactively handle an over allocation issue. I’m using quotes from a few bloggers to help describe the potential for problem and offer ways to handle it. At the end I make a simple LUN provisioning suggestion based on combining the vSphere feature with storage device’s thin provisioning capabilities.  Read the rest of this entry »

Now that HP Storage Tech Day is a few days removed and all the attendees have had more time to digest what we experienced during our day and a half in Colorado Springs, several blog posts have been published worth reading. The event also picked up some mainstream coverage from sites like The Register, TechVirtuoso.com, ITKnowledgeExchange.com, and Tech Republic.

This post lists links some of the blogs from other HPTechDay attendees that I think make some great points or cover pieces I missed regarding what we saw about storage virtualization at HP. I’m adding some of my own opinions to expand on these ideas from a server virtualization perspective.

I’ve also archived 500 of the #HPTechDay tweets into a .pdf report created by Tweetdoc.org. Check the end of this post for that document complete with working links to photos and urls.

First of all, HP’s Calvin Zito (@HPStorageGuy on Twitter) has a master index of all posts and articles from HPTechDay in his post StorageWorks Tech Day – in their words so far…. Check it out for just about everything written on the event.

HP StorageWorks TechDay & SMB Announcements
Simon Seagrave (@kiwi_si)
Read the rest of this entry »

Today I am in Colorado Springs, CO attending Storageworks Tech Day also being referred to as HP Storage Tech Day. It is a day and a half storage virtualization event hosted by HP, and I have the privilege of attending along with several other storage and virtualization bloggers.

The line up includes (with twitternames):

• Nina Buik (@NinaBuik)  Connect Community
• Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett)  http://blog.fosketts.net
• Robin Harris  (@StorageMojo) http://storagemojo.com
• Greg Knieriemen (@Knieriemen)  http://www.storagemonkeys.com
• Ray Lucchesi (@RayLucchesi) http://silvertonconsulting.com/blog/
• John Obeto (@JohnObeto) http://absolutevista.com
• Frank Owen (@fowen)  http://techvirtuoso.com
• Devang Panchigar  (@StorageNerve)  http://storagenerve.com
• Nigel Poulton (@nigelpoulton)  http://blogs.rupturedmonkey.com
• Simon Seagrave (@kiwi_Si) http://www.techhead.co.uk

Calvin Zitto (@HPStorageGuy) is one of the leaders of the event, and he explains our agenda in his Around the Storage Block blog post titled Storageworks Tech Day Starting Now.

“The topics we’ll cover include:

• Storage virtualization for enterprise customers – virtualize infrastructure, not just servers
• Shared storage for virtual servers (SMB-focused)
• Unified storage
• Deduplication
• Converged Infrastructure”

Other attendees have already posted about the event. Be sure to check these posts (along with Calvin’s above):

• StorageMojo off to HP’s Storage Tech Day
• HPTechDay 2009 Day 0: Colorado Springs
• HP Storage Tech Day 2009

The official Twitter hashtag is #HPTechDay, and I’ve created a Tweetgrid after the post break if you would like to watch all tweets using the hashtage roll in live. Another option is a 3 columned Tweetgrid I’ve created for the event available here.

I’m looking forward to meeting the other bloggers and learning about HP’s storage virtualization offerings. Look for more posts on the event on VM /ETC throughout the week.

Read the rest of this entry »

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,
Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most interesting new vSphere storage features in my opinion is the new virtual disk paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI) controller. It has been reported that improved I/O with as much as 18% reduction in ESX 4 host CPU usage can be achieved by switching to PVSCSI. The benefits of PVSCSI performance are twofold:

• Reduced data center power and cooling costs to when you consider the impact of tens of hosts not having to work as hard
• A potential higher VM to host consolidation ratio when more CPU cycles are available

For reference, EMC virtualization guru Chad Sakac provided a post that explains the PVSCSI performance benefits:

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/05/update-on-the-io-vsphere-performance-test.html

However, to take advantage of PVSCSI a VM virtual disk configuration might need to change. Because VMware does not support PVSCSI on the operating system boot partition, VMs will need to be configured with separate virtual disks(.vmdk) for the boot drive and the data drive(s). Note that all the posts and articles referenced mention that PVSCSI works on a .vmdk containing the boot partition. It’s just that VMware officially does not support it.

So, the challenge for using PVSCSI then is to migrate services and applications that exist on VMs that contain both the boot partition and the data on a single .vmdk. Although separate boot and data partitions are the defacto standard for physical servers, the convenience of VMs has lead to a single .vmdk configuration in a lot of IT shops.

Incentive to use PVSCSI therefore actually overlaps with a shift in VM deployment strategy and ultimately supports and provides performance reasons to adopt smaller, dedicated .vmdks for boot partitions. This multi .vmdk design change also has other benefits including optimization of deduplication and DR site replication technologies.

Here are some quick thoughts on deploying and migrating VMs to a multiple .vmdk configuration. 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 »