Silicon Valley Tour

Silicon Valley Tour

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As mentioned in our previous post, we had have the opportunity to visit a couple of very interesting companies located in silicon valley prior to VMworld US.

Rubrik

We started off on Thursday at Rubrik. Chris Wahl, John Koo and Arvind Nithrakashyap (aka Nitro 🙂 ) were kind enough to welcome us at Rubrik HQ. We also had the pleasure to shake hands with Rubrik’s CEO Bipul Sinha!

20150827_111716 IMG-20150827-WA0008

 

We had a preview on Chris his upcoming VMworld presentation and discussed the vision and strategy of Rubrik as we went along. Some very interesting statements there about converged data management. As far as we can tell, Rubrik is bringing simplicity and infinite scaling into backup and recovery. The ease of deployment and their idea to create SLA domains to protect your data is really something that impressed us.

Attending VMworld 2015

Attending VMworld 2015

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This August Rutger Kosters & myself will attend VMworld 2015 US where we will represent our employer YaWorks. We will fly in a bit early (on Wednesday the 26th of August) to check on the Valley before we will head to downtown SFO. We will hook up with a (near) local who is quite familiar with the Valley and SFO surroundings. 😉

Update 1: Our befriended near local inhabitant (Frank Denneman) arranged visits to some of the most interesting vendors out there. We will meet-up with the clever minds of the following vendors in their HQ prior to VMworld!

Flights booked, straight from Amsterdam to San Francisco. Some pretty cool residences booked in Palo Alto (first few days) and SFO. Gotta love Airbnb! Ford Mustang > check!!
Needless to say we are pretty damn pleased, to say the least, with the support from our employer who made this all possible for us. 😀

vmworld2015-sfo

Cloudfix colleague Robert Verdam will, almost certainly, attend VMworld 2015 EMEA in Barcelona. We will try to make it to Barcelona also… Time will tell.

Update 2: Robert and myself are among the few of many vExperts to have received a blogger-pass by VMware for VMworld Barcelona!! Rutger will wander the streets of Barcelona during day hours and will be available for dinner and parties! 😀

 

Exploring Hedvig

Exploring Hedvig

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We had the chance to sit down and have a chat with the Hedvig EMEA guys last week. They gave us a very good presentation on what Hedvig can bring and what they are working on. As we recently got to know Hedvig and their software defined storage solution, we were pretty amazed with their view on SDS and their long list of supported platforms and enterprise storage features and services. Although it is pretty hard to explain all the goods Hedvig brings in one post, we will give it a try! 🙂

 

hedvig-cloudfixNot too long ago, Hedvig Inc came out of stealth after a period of developing since June of 2012. They are opting for a slightly different approach with the general availability (GA) status compared to other SDS start-ups. When their software will be GA with version 1.0, it will be a fully developed, full feature solution which is already running production at several enterprise early adopter customers! It is likely version 1.0 is released next week (week 23)!!

Okay, so let us focus on what makes Hedvig unique. They introduce themselves using the quote below.

Put simply: Hedvig gets better and smarter as it scales. Hedvig defies conventional wisdom, transforming commodity hardware into the most advanced storage solution available today. Hedvig accelerates data to value by collapsing disparate storage systems into a single platform, creating a virtualized storage pool that provisions storage with a few clicks, scales to petabytes, and runs seamlessly in both private and public clouds.

VMTurbo? VMTurbo!

VMTurbo? VMTurbo!

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I have to admit I never used VMTurbo before. Heard a lot about them, read a fair deal about them, but never actually deployed their solutions myself. Let’s change that! And while I’m at it, let me write down my 2 cents on VMTurbo in this post…

vmturbo

So, VMTurbo first launched it’s offering in August 2010 and kept growing steadily. Their solution providing you the tools you need to utilize your virtual infrastructure at a much more efficient way compared to the resource monitoring and management your hypervisor brings you by default.

It will bring you great advantages like; less effort needed from your administrators to manually monitor and configure resources for your virtual infrastructure running your applications. And, it will create a more predicable performance for your applications! You will also benefit from being able to serve more workloads on your virtual infrastructure with less compute resources.

 

Quick deployment

Needless to say, I’m testing VMTurbo on a vSphere cluster. My homelab to be exact.
Using the OVA template, you should be up and running within minutes. I had to tone down the resources, used by the appliance, a notch. By default it’s willing to claim 4 vCPU’s and 16GB memory. No worries there in a common cluster, but within my lab environment, memory is scarce. 🙂

VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 benchmark

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Last week I was going through ‘What’s New: VMware Virtual SAN 6.0‘, it seems like VSAN 6.0 is bigger, better and faster. The latest installment of VMware’s distributed storage platform provides a significant IOPS boost, up to twice the performance in hybrid mode. The new VirstoFS on-disk format is capable of high performance snapshots and clones. Time to put it to the test.

 

Disclaimer: this benchmark has been performed on a home lab setup, components used are not listed in the VSAN HCL. My goal is to confirm an overall IOPS and snapshot performance increase by comparing VSAN 5.5 with 6.0. I did so by running a synthetic IOmeter workload.

VMware has a really nice blogpost on more advanced VSAN performance testing utilizing IOmeter.

 

Hardware

My lab consists of 3 Shuttle SZ87R6 nodes, connected by a Cisco SG300.

 Chipset  Z87
 Processor  Intel Core i5-4590S
 Memory  32 GB
 NIC 1  1 GE (management)
 NIC 2  1 GE (VSAN)
 HDD 1  Samsung 840 Evo (120GB)
 HDD 2  HGST Travelstar 7K1000 (1TB)

 
 

ESXi/VSAN versions

  • ESXi 5.5 Update 2 (build 2068190)
  • ESXi 6.0 (build 2494585)

Stretched Cluster on IBM SVC (Part 3)

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This is part 3 of the VMware Stretched Cluster on IBM SVC blogpost series.

PART 1     (intro, SVC cluster, I/O group, nodes)
PART 2     (split I/O group, deployment, quorum, config node)
PART 3    (HA, PDL, APD)

 

I explained how a SVC Split Cluster reacts to certain failure conditions in part 2. Now that we know how the storage layer behaves, let’s take a closer look at how this all ties in with the VMware layer. This is by no means a complete guide to every setting/configuration option involved, more of an excerpt of the ones I consider to be important. This post is based on vSphere 5.5.

VMware Stretched Cluster isn’t a feature you enable by ticking some boxes, it’s a design built around the workings of HA, DRS and a couple of other mechanisms.

First, I would like to briefly explain the concepts APD (All Paths Downs) and PDL (Permanent Device Loss).

 

APD

In an All Paths Down scenario, the ESXi host loses all paths to the storage device. The host is unable to communicate with the storage array. Examples of failures that can trigger APD are a failing HBA or a failing SAN.

APD All Paths Down

figure 1. APD