With VMworld 2014 just kicking off, VMware already made an awesome, and somewhat unexpected, announcement being VMware EVO:RAIL!!!
EVO:RAIL seems to be the first product in the EVO family, so it looks like VMware probably got more surprises up their sleeves in the near future.
Let’s take a quick look at this new product range and what it’s first family member RAIL is all about…
Software Defined everything. Still a very hot item in the ever strong developing IT landscape.
In the year 2012 ‘Software Defined’ looked like just another buzzword, but the market is changing direction more and more towards software defined solutions. The Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) is nowadays supported by Software Defined Storage (SDS), Software Defined Network (SDN) and security solutions. All very cool stuff!! I want to take a closer look at SDS in this blog post.
So…What is Software Defined Storage? Everybody has an idea on what it should be. My idea of SDS matches the quote below:
Software-defined storage (SDS) is the process of using software-based techniques to create, deploy and manage storage resources and infrastructure. It enables abstracting or separating storage services from hardware devices by using software or programmatic access to extract and manipulate storage resources
Last week I was working on an environment running VMware vSphere Enterprise licenses. The job at hand was to expand the compute environment with some new blades. Due to the lack of host profiles, I wanted to be able to provision a new host with all the necessary datastores from CSV and all the correct vSwitch settings.
The scripts connects to vCenter, and asks which vSphere host you want to provision using their hostname. I used 2 functions; The first is used to configure the vSwitch settings, the second to configure the NFS advanced settings along with creating the datastores from a CSV file.
This is part 2 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)
SVC split I/O group
It’s time to split our SVC nodes between failure domains (sites). While the SVC technically supports a maximum round-trip time (RTT) of 80 ms, Metro vMotion supports a RTT up to 10 ms (Enterprise Plus license).
You can split nodes in 2 ways; with or without the use of ISL’s (Inter-Switch Link). Both deployment methods are covered in detail in this document.
Deployment without ISL
Nodes are directly connected to the FC switches in both the local and remote site, without traversing an ISL. Passive WDM devices (red line) can be used to reduce the number of links. You’ll need to equip the nodes with “colored” long distance SFP’s.
Source
Last week I had the pleasure of attending an update session by Veeam regarding the new release of Veeam Backup & Replication, version 8. I heard some interesting stuff coming along with the next release of this fine piece of software.
The GA (General Availability) status for v8 is still scheduled for Q3 2014. I can imagine Veeam is planning a release party at VMware’s VMworld which will be held 24-28 of August. The San Francisco version, that is. We’ll have to wait and see if that is going to happen. For now, the only way to check out new features is to test the pre-beta version.
Note that that Veeam Backup Management Suite is to be rebranded as Veeam Data Center Availability Suite in version 8.
New features that caught our attention are of course the NetApp snapshot support, EMC Data Domain Boost support, encryption, explorers for AD /MSSQL and tons of other enhancements. Let’s have a closer look to some of the new features…
This is part 1 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)
Last year I was the primary person responsible for implementing a new storage environment based on IBM SVC and V7000 and building a VMware Stretched Cluster (a.k.a. vSphere Metro Storage Cluster) on top of that. I would like to share some of the experience I gathered, caveats I encountered and other points of interest. This is by no means a complete implementation guide (go read the Redbook 😉 ). I’ll discuss some of the implementation options as well as failure scenario’s, advanced settings and some other stuff I think is interesting. Based on the content, this will be a multi-part (probably 3) blog post.
Stretched Cluster versus Site Recovery Manager
If you’re unfamiliar with the concepts Stretched Cluster and SRM, I suggest you read the excellent whitepaper “Stretched Clusters and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager“, explaining which solution best suits your business needs. Another good resource is VMworld 2012 session INF-BCO2982, with the catchy title “Stretched Clusters and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager: How and When to Choose One, the Other, or Both“, however you’ll only be able to access this content if you’ve attended VMworld (or simply paid for a subscription).
