| Unique Visitors |
Powered By 
| Unique Visitors |
Some vendors in the storage, hyper-converged, and cloud industries may be playing Russian Roulette with their customers’ data. Solutions are not created equally, some turn off basic data integrity features such as data checksum by default, or when there are performance problems. Some don’t have background consistency checks and scrubbing to protect against silent data corruption or latent sector errors. Others might use consumer grade devices that may have a higher risk of error and higher failure rate. In the age of software defined solutions, the customer has become the storage platform architect. There is enough rope to hang yourself (your data and your platform availability) any number of different ways. Which is why having a software foundation and integrated solution that has been properly validated from end to end, and that contains data integrity and enterprise data protection features at it’s core, should be the highest priority. Return of data, in the form it was originally written, at any scale, while protecting against known data and device risks, is of upmost importance. How important is performance (IOPS, Latency and Throughput) if you can’t even read back the data you originally wrote? Here are the top 10 questions you can ask potential vendors to find out if they really have protecting your data as their top priority.
Before we get started with the questions, it’s always good to have some science and evidence to back things up. Here is one paper – An Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack. Another paper – Characterizing Private Clouds: A Large-Scale Empirical Analysis of Enterprise Clusters. Both papers cover large scale studies. Any study across a small population of devices or a very small sample size is going to be invalid. Any conclusions from something like a 30 drive study isn’t going to be valid when you have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of devices.
Questions to ask your potential solution vendor:
There are plenty more questions that could be asked, but the 10 questions above cover the most common areas of risk in terms of data integrity, data protection and data loss prevention, and that are not always protected against, at least not by default, with some systems.
Final Word
From a Nutanix point of view, as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure, we take data integrity seriously and it’s our top priority. We protect against all of the areas highlighted in the questions above and we have a paper that explains the Infrastructure Resiliency of Nutanix Solutions, which compliments the research paper on enterprise clusters. We also have many hundreds of thousands of devices in production that are proactively monitored from which we can draw real world data, and a very thorough device qualification and QA process, which limits risk. We use similar high standards across all hardware platforms that our software supports. Our software is built based on a philosophy that hardware will eventually fail, so we must deal with these failures gracefully. Your data deserves better protection!
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2018 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
Security is in our DNA at Nutanix. A significant proportion of our business is from sectors of industry that care deeply about security, including Federal Government, State Government, Local Government, Financial Services, Healthcare, Retail and more. This is why we build in security as an automated part of every configuration and deployment and by default it is on, and it is continuously monitored for compliance against the security baselines and Security Technical Implementation Guides. Unlike some vendors in the HCI space Nutanix doesn’t just have a single STIG, we apply multiple STIG’s, automatically, and continuously verify against them. But what is this STIG anyway?
The description of what STIG’s are is available on the Defense Information Systems Agency, Information Assurance Support Environment web site and I quote:
“The Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) are the configuration standards for DOD IA and IA-enabled devices/systems. Since 1998, DISA has played a critical role enhancing the security posture of DoD’s security systems by providing the Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs). The STIGs contain technical guidance to “lock down” information systems/software that might otherwise be vulnerable to a malicious computer attack.”
Not only are these used by the US Federal Government and Department of Defense however, they are also the security configuration standard for many industries that are concerned about security. They can be incredibly comprehensive and run to many hundreds of pages of configuration details. Often each item in a STIG needs to be evaluated independently and the combinations of security settings needs to be tested to ensure they apply the correct hardening, but also do not break the required functionality.
When Nutanix decided to develop our STIG frameworks we decided to do everything in machine readable format to make it easy to maintain, and so that our software could automatically configure itself to a hardened standard. Nutanix automates the regular health-checking of the applied STIG, and if it’s not compliant, will reapply the baseline settings. Once the system is deployed it is hardened, it remains so after deployment, reducing the risk of mis-configurations by system admins. This saves our customers from all the manual configuration and potentially months of testing that comes with a manual process. Reducing latency, from deployment to production ready hardened system, is important when you want to have security as well as agility and lower cost of ownership.
Each component of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform is covered by the relevant STIG’s. This includes Nutanix AHV, as well as the Nutanix Controller VM, Prism Central VM(s) etc.
Let’s first cover the Nutanix Controller VM, Nutanix AHV Hypervisor and Prism Central VM’s. The base STIG that covers all of these main components is the Linux OS SRG or STIG (AHV/AOS up to 5.5). Prior to AHV/AOS 5.5 Nutanix had a more comprehensive custom STIG implementation than standard RedHat Linux v6 due to our user space design. From AHV/AOS 5.5+, Nutanix implements the RedHat Linux v7 STIG, these can be found under the Unix/Linux STIG Index and on the Nutanix Support Portal.
Next the individual components within the above Nutanix components are also covered by individual STIG’s or SRG’s. These include things such as Webserver’s – Apache, Application Server’s – Tomcat (Application Server SRG), and Java/JRE.
A full list of the available STIG’s from A – Z is available here. Sunset product STIG’s and SRG’s are available here.
If you are running VMware as a hypervisor on top of Nutanix you should evaluate the VMware Specific STIG’s, covering vCenter and vSphere. For a Windows vCenter Server you will need to apply the Windows STIG in addition to the vCenter STIG. For the vCenter Database you will need to apply the Windows or Linux STIG, in addition to the database STIG. All STIG’s would need to be applied correctly and tested. Be aware not all VMware products are covered by STIG’s, and not all products comply with the relevant STIG’s. You should seek specific advice from VMware if you have any concerns. If you are running Microsoft Hyper-V on top of Nutanix you should evaluate the Microsoft Windows STIG’s.
Final Word
In the age of increased cyber attacks and data breaches security is critical. You can choose to have manual hardening process and significant testing effort, or you can choose the Nutanix approach with automation, continuous compliance testing and reporting. Vendors should provide secured systems by default so it doesn’t take months to get to a production standard. This is the Nutanix philosophy.
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2017 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
In December 2014 I got an early Christmas present from Dell. They shipped me the latest 40G and 10G S series (Force 10) switches so that I could begin to test, validate and document the integration and reference architectures between Dell Networking and Nutanix. I’m starting with a L2 MLAG (Multi-chassis Link Aggregation Group) configuration and I will work my way through to a full ECMP (Equal Cost Multi-path) L3 configuration including VMware NSX. This will be a journey and I’ll include the different options and their key considerations, and configurations in the eventual white papers that Nutanix publishes. I’ve had a few weeks to configure them and do some initial testing (after the Christmas Holiday break), so I thought I’d write about what I’ve found so far. On the NSX front, you’ll be interested to know that Nutanix already has customers running NSX and that the platforms work extremely well together, as they both scale out linearly and predictably. But we’ll leave NSX specific discussion till another day. This article will contain some highlights without steeling the thunder of the white papers I’m working on.
Traditionally datacenter networks were usually designed with 3 layers, Access – where servers connected, Aggregation or Distribution – where the access switches connected and also normally the L2 demarcation, and Core, where everything was bought together at L3. Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) is enabled and redundant links will be blocked to prevent network loops on the L2 segments. However with this design you are not able to utilize all the links, due to STP, and it can be complex to scale and achieve consistent latency between the different points in the network. However these problems can be solved by taking a leaf and spine architecture approach.
As you can see in the diagram above I have 2 Spine Switches – Dell S6000’s with 32 x 40GbE ports, and 4 Leaf Switches – Dell S4810 with 48 x 10GbE Ports and 4 x 40GbE Ports. The Spine and two of the Leaf Switches are running Dell FTOS (Force Ten OS) 9.6, while two of the Leaf switches are the S4810-ON (Open Networks) model and are running Cumulus Linux 2.5. Check out the details of the Dell Networking Force 10 S series switches.
The reason I like Cumulus Linux, is well, it’s just Linux, but with hardware accelerated switching and routing. If you know Linux (Debian is the distribution it’s based off), then it’s very easy to use. No need for additional training, fits into the same management frameworks, such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible and others. So it’s great to have the choice of this or FTOS on the Dell Networking switches. I found both Cumulus and FTOS easy to use, and the documentation is very good.
The port to port latency on the S6000’s is ~500ns, while the S4810’s are ~800ns (so about 1.3us Leaf to Spine), even when routing. With the overhead in the IP stack of each of the hypervisors and VM’s I’m seeing latency across the network between VM’s of < 90us end to end, this is using standard Intel 10GbE NIC’s, VMXNET3 vNIC and without using the latency sensitive settings or tuning within VMware vSphere 5.5.
The main benefit of using MLAG is that you don’t have to have a whole lot of links disabled to prevent network loops and have STP interfering with it, it’s also very easy to set up. You still have STP enabled to prevent loops during switch boot, but when things are up and running all of the links are available to pass traffic and you benefit from the combined bandwidth. Each switch is managed and updated independently, so doesn’t become a single point of failure, as it could if you’d chosen to stack the switches. Switch stacking might be ok if you needed multiple stacks anyway and the host links to the stack themselves were redundant (you can’t mix stacking and MLAG together). While this does add some slight management overhead, it gains the ability to update the switch firmware independently without causing any disruption. With the standard automation and management frameworks such as Puppet, Ansible, Chef, CFEngine etc, the management overhead is greatly reduced or eliminated in any case.
Here is a diagram of what my lab network looks like at a high level. My lab hosts are directly connected to the leaf switches.
In FTOS an MLAG is called a Virtual Link Trunk (VLT), and in Cumulus it’s called CLAG (Chassis Link Aggregation Group). The process to configure them is fairly similar at a high level.
Configure Out of Band Management Interfaces (after initial switch boot / install)
Create a port channel between the adjacent switches (Spine or Leaf)
Configure Spanning Tree (RSTP)
Create a Peer Link on top of the port channel between the adjacent switches so that inter-switch communications can take place to sync mac addresses etc. Set up a backup address in case the primary fails, this will prevent split brain scenarios.
Configure and enable VLT or CLAGD (examples will follow)
Configure and enable the other port channels, edge ports, VLAN’s, routing etc
FTOS Spine Example:
! Note: Peer Link is recommended to be static port channel not LACP.
!
lacp ungroup member-independent vlt
lacp ungroup member-independent port-channel 100
!
default vlan-id 4000
!
protocol spanning-tree rstp
no disable
bridge-priority 16384
!
vlt domain 1
peer-link port-channel 100
back-up destination xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx <- IP Address of Backup Destination
primary-priority 16384
peer-routing
peer-routing-timeout 1
!
interface Port-channel 10
description Cumulus Leaf-Link
no ip address
mtu 9216
portmode hybrid
switchport
lacp fast-switchover
vlt-peer-lag port-channel 10
no shutdown
!
interface Port-channel 100
description Peer-Link
no ip address
mtu 9216
channel-member fortyGigE 0/120,124
no shutdown
!
interface fortyGigE 0/112
description Leaf1 – Port Channel 10
no ip address
mtu 9216
flowcontrol rx on tx off
!
port-channel-protocol LACP
port-channel 10 mode active
no shutdown
!
interface fortyGigE 0/116
description Leaf2 – Port Channel 10
no ip address
mtu 9216
flowcontrol rx on tx off
!
port-channel-protocol LACP
port-channel 10 mode active
no shutdown
!
interface fortyGigE 0/120
description Peer-Port 1 – Port Channel 100
no ip address
mtu 9216
flowcontrol rx on tx off
no shutdown
!
interface fortyGigE 0/124
description Peer-Port 2 – Port Channel 100
no ip address
mtu 9216
flowcontrol rx on tx off
no shutdown
!
interface Vlan 500
description Host VLAN
no ip address
mtu 9216
tagged Port-channel 1,10
no shutdown
!
interface Vlan 4000
mtu 9216
!untagged Port-channel 100
no shutdown
!
Cumulus Leaf Example with CLAGD:
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5), ifup(8)
#
# Please see /usr/share/doc/python-ifupdown2/examples/ for examples
#
#
# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0
address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/24
broadcast xxx.xxx.xxx.255
# Spine Link
auto spn1-2
iface spn1-2
bond-slaves swp49 swp50
bond-mode 802.3ad
bond-miimon 100
bond-use-carrier 1
bond-min-links 1
bond-xmit_hash_policy layer3+4
clag-id 1
# clag-id needs to be unique on each clag, like a vlt domain id on FTOS
mstpctl-portnetwork no
mtu 9216
# Peer Link to Other LeafSwitch
auto pl
iface pl
bond-slaves swp51 swp52
bond-mode 802.3ad
bond-miimon 100
bond-use-carrier 1
bond-min-links 1
bond-xmit_hash_policy layer3+4
mstpctl-portnetwork no
mtu 9216
# CLAGD Peer Int Config
auto pl.4000
iface pl.4000
address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/30
clagd-enable yes
clagd-priority 8192
clagd-peer-ip 172.16.0.2
clagd-backup-ip 192.168.255.12
clagd-sys-mac 44:38:39:ff:00:01
# Switch Port Interface Configuration
auto swp1
iface swp1
mtu 9216
auto swp2
iface swp2
mtu 9216
auto swp3
iface swp3
mtu 9216
auto swp4
iface swp4
mtu 9216
auto swp49
iface swp49
mtu 9216
auto swp50
iface swp50
mtu 9216
auto swp51
iface swp51
mtu 9216
auto swp52
iface swp52
mtu 9216
# Bridge Configuration
#
auto br0
iface br0
bridge-vlan-aware yes
bridge-ports pl spn1-2 glob swp[1-4]
bridge-stp on
bridge-pvid 1
bridge-vids 500
mstpctl-portadminedge swp1=yes swp2=yes swp3=yes swp4=yes
bridge-mcsnoop 1
mtu 9216
# Bridge VLAN
# Host VLAN
auto br0.500
iface br0.500
address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/23
broadcast xxx.xxx.xxx.255
up ip route add 0.0.0.0/0 via 192.168.1.230
mtu 9216
The above are examples and not complete configs and you can’t just copy and paste it all and expect it to work in your environment. But it could be used as a starting point.
Bringing this all together. The Dell S6000 / S4810 combination allows you to create a scalable network design that provides predictable and consistent low latency and high throughput from end to end in the network. The configuration of the MLAG/CLAG/VLT is straight forward, and it provides management flexibility. You get to choose either FTOS or Open Networking such as Cumulus Linux as your switching software. With Cumulus Linux, it’s just like Linux, but wire speed non-blocking networking accelerated in hardware and fits into the normal management frameworks. For environments, such as Hyper-converged or Web-scale infrastructure, the network scales linearly, as do the systems that connect to it. Each time you grow, you get consistent, predictable and linear performance.
Here is an example of a high level diagram that might be appropriate for a small scale deployment. In this case the Dell S4810’s are used as both Leaf and Spine switches in a VLT configuration, with Dell N3048 or N3024 providing 1G connectivity. With this you could easily start with a single rack and scale to 8 racks. Each rack would have full 10G and 1G redundant connectivity. With say 24 Servers or Hyper-converged nodes per rack you would be able to support 192 servers across 8 racks. 40G QSFP+ ports are used for Peer Links, while the Leaf connects to the Spine using 40G to 10G break out cables.
Here is an example high level diagram of a medium density Nutanix Web-scale Converged Infrstructure deployment with Dell S4810 Leaf switches connected to S6000 Spine, which could be using FTOS VLT or Cumulus CLAG. As you can see this design is capable of scaling to 12 racks (576 nodes) with the S6000 Spine switches, and up to 52 racks and 2496 nodes, with the Dell Z9500 Spine switches. Dell Z9500 supports 128 x 40GbE ports. Both options have spare 40GbE ports still available for Boarder-Leaf connectivity (Cross Datacenter, or Internet routers etc).
If you wanted a higher density design you can combine S6000 in middle of rack or top of rack configuration for Leaf switches with S6000 or Z9500 Spine. This diagram provides a high level example of a high density configuration on a standard 48U rack. In this example the design would support 10 racks with 880 nodes with S6000 Spine, and 48 racks with 4224 nodes with a Z9500 Spine. With enough ports to accommodate the Boarder-Leaf nodes as well.
With densities in the datacenter increasing and the power consumption of the servers decreasing I can see an explosion of 40GbE Top of Rack (ToR) or Middle of Rack (MoR) Leaf switches. This would also provide an option to easily allow different bandwidth oversubscription models, 6:1, 4:1 etc as requirements change.
So far we’ve covered the Dell Networking switches by themselves, with FTOS and Cumulus, and then some examples combined with Nutanix. Dell is an OEM partner of Nutanix software and delivers the Dell XC Series Web-scale Converged Appliances. With Dell XC you have a number of hardware options for different use cases, and you can build a complete solution, including networking.
The following example shows Dell S4810 Leaf switches and Dell S6000 Spine switches with Dell XC series appliances. These appliances are 2U each and contain one node. Dell XC also has 1U options.
Final Word
Those of you who spend time in a modern datacenter will see I’ve drawn the diagrams with the switch ports facing forward, which is actually backwards. I did this to make it easy to draw, and because I like flashing lights. In real world environments the air flow of the switches would be reversed and the back of the switches, where the PSU is, would be facing the front of the rack, so that the cabling can be nice and tidy. In summary, where predictable, low latency, high throughput, linearly scalable networking is required, Leaf Spine architectures are becoming increasingly common (and are simpler than three tier IMHO). Web-scale converged or Hyper-converged Infrastructure benefits from the low latency, high throughput and linearly scalability the Dell Networking switches can provide. As does network virtualization such as VMware NSX. Dell Networking switches combined with Nutanix appliances, or Dell XC series appliances powered by Nutanix can deliver a unified and simplified high performance virtual infrastructure with greatly reduced complexity compared to a traditional three tier architecture. A great foundation for a private cloud or software defined datacenter.
—
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2015 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
CloudPhysics have come up with a great Halloween themed report that has some very interesting insights into what Ghosts and Goblins are lurking in virtual datacenters. I was particularly surprised by the 41% of clusters that don’t have admission control enabled. You can get the full report here. I’ve included the infographic here for your enjoyment.
Also check out the CloudPhysics free community edition that you can deploy into your home labs.
Nutanix Web Scale NoSAN now meets NoDisk. I didn’t know that the band Queen could predict the future of IT when I first listened to their song Flash Gordon. But the lyrics I’ve quoted above seem to suggest they could somewhat predict the future of the storage industry. Flash will undoubtedly have a big impact on IT, even if it is only just starting to penetrate the datacenter now (only a small percentage of total deployed storage is flash). So it is probably no surprise that eventually Nutanix Web Scale Converged Infrastructure platform would include options for all flash. Then on top of that we add Metro Availability, the metro storage cluster type availability that is only a few clicks to set up, and significantly simpler to operate and test compared to traditional metro solutions. So you can have your all flash and you don’t need to compromise on any data services. Of course Metro Availability is just a software feature so is available in any of the Nutanix platforms, it will just take a software upgrade once the new version of the Nutanix OS is available (Available from 4.1). So why all flash?
Scale-Out Storage Processing Power with Your Flash:
Flash requires storage processing power to drive IOPs and performance. Why put all your flash behind two controllers? Dual-controller architectures cannot sufficiently drive large amounts of flash. Each controller has limited performance, plus you need to run at only 50% utilization to ensure performance is available during maintenance and failure. By spreading flash devices across many controllers, you can drive higher aggregate performance. This performance also increases as you scale out the number of controllers, with no technical upper limit. All within a single datastore, namespace, and management domain, and without any single point of failure.
Scale-Out trumps Rip and Replace:
Traditional storage vendors live by a three year rip-and-replace lifecycle. Storage Controllers need to be swapped out in order to take advantage of advancements in Intel x86 processor capabilities. With Nutanix’s revolutionary file system, new and old storage controllers can co-exist in the same cluster, allowing you to immediately employ advancements in Intel computing technologies. More importantly, you can increase performance without a destructive and risky Rip and Replace. You don’t have to wait three years, you can just add a single node at a time, when needed, on demand, without any disruption, and get all the benefits straight away. Being software defined means with a simple software upgrade you also get any new software enhancements and continued investment protection on the same hardware. Your same hardware just keeps getting faster. This is true for all flash as it is for hybrid disk and flash systems.
Put flash next to your VMs with Nutanix’s data-locality:
Data-locality matters. Getting the performance and data closer to your VM’s greatly improves performance and provides performance isolation from noisy neighbours. The Virtual Machine data-locality built into the Nutanix Distributed File System keeps the majority of write and read storage I/O on local flash. Read I/O does not need to traverse the network. This results in an improvement of read latency while also reducing Network bandwidth consumption.
Density, Performance, and Scale:
Up to 32 Nodes of the Nutanix 9040 per rack with 288TB of enterprise grade flash storage, 768 CPU Cores, 16TB RAM. Each node containing up to 9.6TB flash, 2 x Intel Xeon CPU’s (10 Core 3GHz, or 12 Core 2.7GHz), and 512GB RAM. Get all the flash and compute you need to run all of your high performance VM’s. This platform is built for serious workloads that need lots of consistently low latency storage access and high throughput. Especially where software licensing means you want to scale up performance on fewer systems (Like Oracle DB’s and App servers for example). All with < 16KW power consumption per rack!
Final Word
Nutanix is constantly evaluating how we can bring uncompromising simplicity and web scale converged infrastructure to more use cases to meet our customers requirements. We are squarely focused on the future of the software defined datacenter and new storage technologies and we can bring these to market very quickly. This is the first all flash platform, but I’m sure it won’t be the last. No need to compromise on data services, such as metro availability, replication, snapshots and DR to go all flash. From NOS 4.1 you’ll be able to have metro availability with a few clicks of a button on any Nutanix platform.
—
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2014 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
My colleague Magnus Andresson (VCDX-56 and Double VCDX DCV/Cloud) has put together some short videos showing some example solutions with Nutanix and vCloud Automation Center working together. vCloud Automation Center has recently been renamed vRealize Automation also known as vRA (vee Raa! – intentionally not used in the title). I hope you enjoy these videos and it gives you some ideas of how you can integrate vCloud Automation Center into your solutions with Nutanix.
vRA and vRO (vRealize Orchestrator) Use to Report Nutanix Cluster Status:
Creating Nutanix Containers with vRA:
Deploying VM’s on Nutanix using vRA:
—
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2014 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
Another VMworld event is over and it’s hard to believe it’s been a whole 12 months since the last one. Certainly during the keynotes there was a lot of coverage about what VMware has achieved over the last 12 months and it is impressive especially in the end user computing and hybrid cloud spaces. But overall I felt that VMworld USA 2014 lacked some of the sparkle of last year. But I guess it’s hard to top last year considering it was the 10th anniversary. This year seemed much more about building a solid foundation for a software defined datacenter, a software defined enterprise and a hybrid cloud model integrating applications with infrastructure, providing ability and flexibility, but without compromise. Although attendance was flat or a little down on last year the breakout sessions were packed, right up to the last session on Thursday. Instead of having our heads in the clouds this year it was all about the vCloud Air, and we vRealized the product naming is about to be changing. So lets dive into what I think are some of the highlights.
My VMworld started on Sunday with a Nutanix sponsored VCDX study group. Nutanix is a big supporter of the VCDX program for the entire community. The study group was put on for candidates that wanted to know more about the VCDX process and practice the design and troubleshooting scenarios. It was completely vendor agnostic, and it needs to stay that way. Nutanix understands that the only way sponsoring a VCDX study group can be of value is if the content is vendor agnostic and covers a wide range of topics. There were many VCDX helping in the room and giving advice from across many companies. This really is what the community is all about. Everyone helping each other.
Then I moved on to opening acts at VMunderground that was put on by vBrownBag. I was on the storage panel and it was a good discussion around Virtual Volumes, Hyper Convergence and Flash. I even agreed with a traditional SAN vendor that hyper converged appliances will not help SuperDomes and Mainframes, but then again I can always migrate the workloads and processes off those systems, and the Unix mid range systems as well, to a Hyper Converged world. SuperDomes, Mainframes and Unix systems is where the legacy SAN technology will stay for the foreseeable future and it will be a decline over a number of years, just like we’ve seen with the traditional big iron systems themselves. The move away from traditional SAN for x86 connected environments isn’t going to happen over night, but it’s a trend that is starting to take hold, but honestly it’s not even scratching the surface of the potential opportunity yet. The announcements from VMware and EMC around their hyper-converged offerings are just more validation of that. Flash is definitely the way of the future, and it opens up things that were previously not possible. I have a section on flash technology in the storage chapter of Virtualizing SQL Server with VMware.
There were a number of VMware announcements during the keynotes that are worth mentioning. But before I do I have to get something off my chest. vRealise is the worst name ever thought of for anything. My initial reaction to the new name for VMware’s hybrid cloud, vCloud Air was somewhat similar, but at least Air has a cool ring to it, like iPad Air for example. vRealize, just NO! I feel sorry for the sales team who have to try and sell that now. Ok, rant over. The overall themes about this being a brave new world and requiring bravery from all of the customers and the community participants was interesting. I’ve been doing virtualization for a very long time and even for business critical apps it’s a very safe bet. But SDDC and the Software Defined Enterprise going to further reduce silos and this will require some organisational changes and maturity. This is really where the bravery comes in, most of the challenges are not technical.
Two major overall themes were used during the keynotes. Firstly – “Compatibility, Compliance, Choice”, and secondly the “Power of &”. VMware has done a great job of building a partner ecosystem across a number of technologies, including the vCloud Air Network, which has 3900 partners, and the broader ecosystem around the hypervisor and NSX. This is where compatibility, compliance and choice really comes in. Seamless compatibility, compliance with regulatory and industry requirements, and choice of multiple partners and technologies. This is then extended to the OpenStack, NSX and Containers, which can run extremely well in a VMware environment, and this is the Power of &. Have your containers without compromise. Have your OpenStack on a platform easily fit on top of VMware vSphere.
By far the biggest highlight was meeting a lot of people who regularly read my blog and have benefited from the work that I and others in the community have done over the years. This is why we keep doing it. Because it makes a difference. It was also great to meet a lot of people who had bought Virtualizing SQL Server with VMware: Doing IT Right, and had got a lot out of it too. My co-authors, Michael Corey, Jeff Szastak and I were blown away by the stories that were relayed to us about how the book had helped people, especially when it was being used to explain to DBA’s how virtualization works and that SQL is a great candidate for virtualization. The book was so popular that it actually sold out at VMworld, and we had a lot of people come up to us during the meet the authors session and book signing.
Here is a photo of my co-authors and I with the happy customer who purchased the very last copy of our book at VMworld.
Shortly after the above photo was Michael Corey and I recorded an interview with VMworld TV’s Eric Sloof regarding virtualizing SQL Server Databases on VMware.
I was lucky again this year to present a session that was included in the top 10 sessions of VMworld for the second consecutive year – VMworld 2014 SDDC1600 Art of IT Infrastructure Design The Way of the VCDX Panel.
Final Word
It was another great VMworld and a very successful VMworld. I’m very much looking forward to next year. Hopefully we’ll see the return of the Monster VM sessions and some other business critical apps sessions from me in next years VMworld.
—
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2014 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
I’ve always enjoyed visiting Europe and every year when I visit Barcelona for VMworld it is special. It might be a smaller event than VMworld in San Francisco, but it lacks nothing in substance, networking opportunities, or announcements. The excitement level in Barcelona appears to be higher than what it was in San Francisco. This article is my thoughts on the keynotes with close to 9000 people in attendance.
Day One Keynote
Rigid to Liquid, No Status Quo, Disruption, Break Down Silo’s. Over the last decade VMware has given us the tools and confidence to virtualize anything and take the world into an era of brave new IT that can help drive business growth. Pat’s message to the audience was clear, the status quo is being disrupted and the new style of IT will see more cross functional collaboration with fewer silos, in a new more dynamic and agile environment. This message was also quite well integrated into Sanjay Poonen’s message for workspace and end user computing with IT at the speed of life. There is a focus on applications coming through from VMware, and the infrastructure enabling all types of applications. Those applications will be deployed in a more hybrid environment with a mix of use cases on premises and in a cloud environment with vCloud Air or one of the 3900 vCloud Air Network partners. VMware really covers the globe when it comes to cloud requirements, without any need to modify applications and complete choice with where they run.
Build infrastructure to enable apps, free the apps from the infrastructure components, the first strategy the SDDC, on and off premises, seamless and dynamic, with the SaaS offerings from vCloud Air VMware is delivering on the SDDC and Hybrid Cloud vision with vRealize Operations Management. It was good to see continued investment in solutions to make applications integrate seamlessly into the Software-Defined Datacenter and Hybrid Cloud vision. Especially the integration of VMware’s solutions as part of a Software as a Service offering. This is now the world of hybrid cloud.
One of the biggest announcements that may have gone unnoticed was the announcements of vRealize Code Stream. This will be available on-premises, and continuous integration as a service will be available through vCloud Air. This is a clear attack on Amazon’s status quo for developers. This pushes VMware well into the any app, anywhere, and with Horizon Workspace you can get those apps anywhere. Even for OpenStack, being integrated with VMware, which is in Beta. If VMware can take the complexity out of OpenStack it will be of massive benefit to customers that want choice around all the different components in their cloud stacks from an API perspective. To be honest though, nobody I’ve spoken to likes the vRealize branding for the management suites.
VMware continued to validate the hyper-converged infrastructure message, even to the point that vCloud Air will be built upon hyper-converged infrastructure. This proves that the old way of enterprise IT doesn’t work in a cloud environment, a web-scale environment where things are much more dynamic and you need a much better aligned economic model.
VMware has cloud management market share of 20% and is the leader in the space, leads Datacenter automation with 24% market share. This is set to continue as VMware rolls out further product integration across the suites, rather than just being an integrated SKU, but actually integrated products that work well together. This is something that Microsoft has done very well across their stack. VMware must integrate if they want to effectively compete against Microsoft. This is the Power of AND that the SDDC brings, to achieve the No Limits message that VMware had as the theme of VMworld 2014.
From an infrastructure prespective, networking and network virtualization is clearly the next big opportunity for VMware. VMware will be a major threat to Cisco in the Datacenter and Service Provider networking as a result of VMware NSX, which delivers the ability to choose any underlay networking technology at the physical layer and deliver rich networking services distributed at the software layer. This is Software-Defined Networking delivered. One of the key use cases that NSX delivers is to Decrustify the edge of the datacenter security.
VMware announced the Horizon Workspace Suite, which combines all of their End User Computing products, which will make it more easy to purchase and consume these products, although they are still separate products that will likely require professional services to integrate. Project Fargo and the Cloud Volumes addition will have some great benefits in the future for all environments as it will make it much quicker to deploy applications and use them anywhere, and on any device. Apps and end user delivery at the speed of life. So you can work where you want, when you want. Like in my article about The VMware View from the Horizon at 38,000 Feet and 8000 Miles Away.
Day Two Keynote
Here is a great summary of the first part of the Day Two Keynote from Barry Coombs:
@vmworld day 2 keynote: here is my first doodle #vmworld. If this of interest please share #vmworld2014 pic.twitter.com/cS7NlVVlMM
— Barry Coombs (The Doodle Guy) (@VirtualisedReal) October 15, 2014
SAP runs one of the largest private clouds in the world for their internal development. 85% virtualized, 75K VM’s, NSX is up next. If SAP can virtualize 80+% of itself on VMware then anyone can virtualize SAP on VMware. The only reason SAP isn’t more virtualized is that customers are still running many legacy Unix and mainframe platforms. The time is right to move off the traditional Unix platforms to a new more agile private and hybrid SDDC environment.
Vodafone – Moving to a fully Software-Defined Datacenter.
1. Pace the technology changes – 3 yrs time
2. Customer Assistance
3. Listen to Customer#VMworld #Vodafone— Sanjai Kannan (@sanjai2k) October 15, 2014
VMware Integrated OpenStack really is integrated and gives some amazing insights into the applications. VMware has done a great job at integrating OpenStack into the whole VMware ecosystem. Then you can mix and match which partner systems you use, while still getting the benefits of VMware, and the integration and API’s of OpenStack for your applications.
#VMworld VMware integrated OpenStack really is integrated, so much insight. pic.twitter.com/s2eUVndTUB
— Lord WebScale Webster (@vcdxnz001) October 15, 2014
Containers without compromise – Including without compromising performance. The performance on containers within a VM is within 3% of native. Why would you want to miss out on the benefits that virtualization brings for just 3% difference? Complete automation, non-disruptive infrastructure management, higher availability, higher SLA’s.
Docker Containers Performance in #VMware vSphere http://t.co/jGZhS4Mkmg #vmworld pic.twitter.com/M9AV3GbEVZ
— Tony Dunn (@dunntony) October 15, 2014
vRealize Code Stream – Continuous integration and code migration on premises with automation and integration with vRealize Automation. For DevOps and when your managing multiple applications and code migrations paths Code Stream will allow you to automate the migrations, testing and promotion between different environments, without necessarily having to go to a cloud. This allows you to use the app tools you’re used to, including Eclipse, Git, Perforce, Subversion etc. Vladan did a great write up about this here. I really hope the VMware field gets enablement on this product and how to pitch the value to applications teams as this could be a real game changer. Field teams have struggled in the past to pitch the value of VMware tools to applications teams and are much more comfortable talking about infrastructure. This needs to change. You need to be able to talk applications language to applications teams and understand their problems, their workflows, and what solutions they need.
vRealize Management as a Service will be available via vCloud Air, but will it be available via the vCloud Air network? That is the big question. The ability to run your vRealize management tools in vCloud Air to manage both your on premises and hybrid cloud workloads is an important step forward. This is something that I asked about when VMware started talking about Cloud 4 years ago. It’s taken 4 years of hard work to bring this to market.
VVOLS will be important for ecosystem integration, including with the VMware Integrated OpenStack, and all of the management tools. VVOLS will be the language that your VMware tools will use to speak to storage devices of all types and forms. This will increasingly become a must have for storage vendors, rather than a nice to have, which VASA has been up until now. This will be how other storage vendors plug into the VMware Integrated OpenStack, if a customer doesn’t want to use VSAN. VSAN isn’t going to be the only solution, every VMware storage partner, including the hyper-converged partners will have a part to play. I know Nutanix will be playing a big part in this space, especially with it’s web-scale converged architecture advantages.
vCloud Air integration – the biggest problem for Cloud is the cost of network bandwidth required and the explosive data growth that limits portability of systems. So although VMware is brining some great features to vCloud Air you need to be able to consume them. Without 10GbE everywhere it’s unrealistic to have application mobility going everywhere, especially with the explosive growth of data. So Cloud adoption will continue to be appropriate for certain types of applications, or as an interface to end users, while the persistent data may live elsewhere. My view is that while bandwidth may be limited for some time the vCloud Air network gives VMware reach into a lot more places, closer to the consumers of the cloud, and potentially much higher bandwidth at lower prices. This will enable network extension and application mobility to be much more realistic. I think it will be a long time before people are migrated large databases around however.
So Cloud will be limited to the web and app tiers mostly, or configuration DB’s used to run those tiers. Unless the network bandwidth problem is solved, or you’re really just doing hosting or CoLo 2.0. If you’re not going to make regular use of the Hybrid Cloud why would you provision dedicated network links for it also? So that would potentially mean you need to greatly upsize your Internet links, so they can at least be used for multiple purposes, rather than sitting idle until you want to spin something into a cloud. If you’re an enterprise hosting in a large datacenter it’s quite possible that your hosting company may well have their own cloud provisioned across the datacenter floor, or have links to the other larger clouds. This again makes it more realistic to use a Hybrid Cloud. This is something that AWS and Azure have with their direct connect links from large CoLo companies. This makes much more sense.
Final Word
VMware has announced some great technologies, it will remain to see how they are received by the market when they are actually available as GA products. Product announcements and product implementation timeframes have in the past been extremely extended due to the complexity of upgrades, lack of upgrade paths, enterprise project cycles, lack of product integration and other factors.
—
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2014 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
As I type this I’m flying 36,000 feet above Australia on my way to Singapore. It’s great now that Singapore Airlines has Wifi on their flights from New Zealand. I’m connected into my virtual desktop back in Auckland and have some performance tests running on my Nutanix 3450 system, using Oracle RAC. The same system that also happens to host my virtual desktop and all the supporting VM’s. But is my desktop session performance impacted while I’m running a high performance Oracle RAC database test? No. No longer is it necessary to have completely separate silos of resources to support different performance requirements in a virtualized environment. This is the same system that just days ago I upgraded the storage controller firmware and system firmware with a single click, without any downtime at all, without a reboot, without even having to migrate a single virtual machine. This is a new way of operating, a much simpler way, for a new always on world. This is what we at Nutanix call Web-Scale. This new way is even suitable for business critical enterprise applications, such as Oracle databases, even Oracle RAC, which I have been very successful virtualizing for a long time and at large scale. This is a much easier way to implement, manage and run the applications you need to support without compromising SLA’s, functionality, or performance. Now I’ll share with you a demonstration of this capability in action and also some of the best practices, along with where to get the complete best practices guide.
One of the reasons I joined Nutanix was to bring this new web-scale Infrastructure world to enterprise apps. Up until now it has been possible to design apps in a web-scale way, provided you could re-write them from the ground up. But it hasn’t been possible to deliver the benefits of web-scale infrastructure to all the other enterprise applications and databases that are still very important. That is until Nutanix came along.
Running things like Oracle RAC is not easy, even in a physical world, although I argue it is easier in a virtual world (no physical NIC teaming or storage multi-pathing to worry about), what about when it’s deployed on a hyper-converged platform. You really don’t have an enterprise class system unless you can run something like Oracle RAC, and run it well. This is why I chose to use Oracle RAC, one of the most critical enterprise applications, to develop, test, and verify the capability of the Nutanix platform. My thinking was if Nutanix can run Oracle RAC well, there isn’t much that it can’t do (within the limits of performance of the underlying system, which I will also demonstrate). I also wanted Nutanix to be the first hyper-convered platform to demonstrate and test Oracle RAC, including with vMotion, which is not an easy task (just ask your DBA’s).
High Level Benefits of Oracle Databases on Nutanix Web-Scale Infrastructure
Here are some of the high level benefits of Oracle on Nutanix, for more you can see my article Nutanix: The Big Red Easy Button for Oracle Databases – Part 1.
Demonstrating Oracle RAC on Web-Scale Infrastructure
The video below shows a demonstration of an Oracle RAC system running under extreme load conditions. I’m using a load generator to run a high transaction load to put stress on all resources of the Nutanix platform, such as storage, CPU, RAM, Network, and then I’m using vMotion at the same time to stress the network even more. This combined workload puts every component under pressure, including the Hypervisor, vSphere 5.5. You can see that even under extreme 100% CPU load, using Monster Oracle RAC VM’s, doing 6,000 – 10,000 IOPS, and 30 Gb/s on the network not a single user session is interrupted or lost, no IO errors occur. It just keeps asking for more.
This not only demonstrates the robustness of the Nutanix storage system, but also the robustness of VMware vSphere as a hypervisor suited to running mission critical systems, even while doing maintenance. All of this achieved in a mid-range Nutanix platform that consists of a single 2U appliance (4 nodes) connected to 2 x 10GbE switches. Enterprise class in a very small physical footprint. Only consuming around 1.2KW of power. It only gets better the more you scale the environment, the more nodes you add to it, all the time adding capacity and performance. This isn’t even the Nutanix 8150 node that is purpose built for virtualizing business critical applications.
What makes this even more challenging is that all network traffic, including vMotion, user sessions, database interconnect traffic, and the Nutanix storage traffic is going over the same 2 x 10GbE NIC’s per host. Even with this, it all worked. Thanks in part to VMware vSphere’s Network IO Control capability and dynamic network load balancing using Load Based Teaming. This shows that even under the most extreme conditions, which you wouldn’t normally have in a production environment, the Nutanix platform is rock solid and continues to service the applications, without disruption.
Oracle On Nutanix Web-Scale Infrastructure Best Practices
At Nutanix we put the hard work in, so you’ll wear the Nutanix grin. Part of my job was to test and validate Oracle on Nutanix, and then document the best practices. This takes the guess work out of deploying Oracle on Nutanix and getting the best out of it. It also helps us to develop our platform and to ensure our system is as robust as possible. I used the best practices and the results of my testing to produce the video above. I also included in the best practice guide all of the OS tuning that I did, and all of the scripts I used to set up the test environment. This is so you may do the same testing and achieve similar results (trust but verify). We like to be transparent about what we do, and give you the real data, not some markatecture. Below are just some of the best practices for you to use, for the full document you can download the Oracle Databases on Web-Scale Infrastructure: Best Practices document. You’ll notice many of these apply any Oracle database platform.
Final Word
I hope you get a lot out of both the video and also the Oracle Databases on Web-Scale Infrastructure Best Practice guide. Nutanix is an Oracle Gold Partner and is working with Oracle on initiatives to better support enterprises that wish to run Oracle applications and databases on Web-Scale Infrastructure. We will also be releasing best practices for Oracle Databases running on Microsoft Hyper-V and in conjunction with SAP in the future, so watch this space. Your comments and feedback are always welcome.
—
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2014 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
Although my Monster VM panel was in the top 10 sessions of VMworld 2013 and we did a Monster VM and Business Critical Apps panel for TAM day this year neither session will be included at VMworld in the USA or Europe. But not to worry. There is plenty of great content at VMworld for everyone to enjoy and I’ll be there to talk about Monster VM’s on vSphere as always, but mostly at the Nutanix Booth #1535. This doesn’t mean you have to miss out on all the Monster VM goodness though, you can grab it all online right now, for free, thanks to VMware opening up the session catalog to some great sessions online through VMworld TV. So below I include two great panel discussions from VMworld 2013 that you can review now, and get a better understanding of how to virtualize critical apps and Monster VM’s.
This first video is from TAM day and includes myself and a number of leading experts discussing virtualization of business critical apps and taking questions from the audience. The topics covered are broad from Microsoft apps such as SQL, Exchange, AD to Unix applications and migrations from Unix systems to vSphere, Oracle, SAP and Java.
This second video is from my Monster VM Software Defined Datacenter Design Panel, which was one of the top 10 sessions for VMworld 2013. We cover sizing, tuning, and scaling, as well as answering all the questions from the audience. When you get 5 VCDX in the room talking about performance and monster VM’s at the same time it’s got to be good.
Final Word
Even though we don’t have a Monster VM panel at VMworld this year there is no reason you should miss out. Come and visit the Nutanix Booth #1535 and I’d be happy to discuss everything Monster VM related, and also how the Nutanix platform can make it uncompromisingly simple. I will have copies of the book Virtualizing SQL Server with VMware: Doing IT Right (VMware Press), that I co-authored with Michael Corey and Jeff Szastak that we’ll be signing. If you can’t make VMworld in the USA and you’d like to go to VMworld in Barcelona then you might be in luck. VMTurbo has started a competition and will be giving away free tickets to VMworld Europe. VMTurbo started the vendor trend to give away free tickets to the VMworld events and I think it’s a great thing. As always your feedback and comments appreciated.
—
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2014 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.