Weblog of Mark Vaughn, and IT professional and vExpert specializing in Enterprise Architecture, virtualization, web architecture and general technology evangelism
Have you taken a look at your shared storage lately? If you look close enough, you are likely to begin asking “where did it all go?”. This is a very common situation for many people, finding that their storage bills have gone through the roof. As you start to look around, you will likely find free storage trapped in pockets all over your environment. This storage is not being used to actually store data, it is simply allocated and provisioned based on future projections. In some cases, it is simply poor judgment or bad business practices that have caused these allocations to be grossly overestimated.
Nothing is more frustrating than to be presented with a huge bill for a storage refresh, along side an analysis report showing that you are only using about 1/2 to 2/3 of the storage that you have provisioned. How do you combat this? It is never too late to correct course, and there is a lot that your storage vendor can do to help. Vendors like NetApp, EMC and Compellent have some great product offerings and feature sets to combat this wasted storage, while also helping you streamline your storage tiering and even your overall storage footprint.
For more on this topic, please check out my SearchServerVM article “Storage: Blinded by the virtualization light” at http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/column/0,294698,sid94_gci1520838,00.html
After you read the article, please come back here and leave any comments. There is a lot that can be discussed on this topic.
If you have not had a chance to see the VMware Express, you should stop now and go read up on it HERE. To see it in person, look at the schedule HERE.
This is an amazing vehicle, and the result of a strong commitment by VMware to demonstrate both their own technologies and those of their partners. You have a world class data center on wheels, traveling the country to promote the game changing virtualization technologies VMware has to offer.
Since seeing the data center in a trailer at VMWorld 2008, I have loved the concept of how much processing power and functionality you can pack into a mobile data center with virtualization. As a customer, I was excited when VMware announced the VMware Express several months ago and was checking the schedule for my first chance to actually get inside. Now that I am a partner, I see this as a mobile marketing tool (which it really always was). I am now checking the schedule for opportunities to bring customers to see the VMware Express.
In fact, that brings up a second point. Many partners are working on mobile demo platforms, looking to create platforms that can demonstrate core virtualization functionalities with a price tag and footprint that actually make the unit feasible. To that point, two people have put together some very impressive mobile demo platforms. Simon Gallagher (@vinf_net) has developed the v.T.A.R.D.I.S., and describes it on his blog HERE and HERE. This is a configuration made of two cheap PC-grade desktops, hosting 4 ESXi servers as VM’s and another 60 VM’s running on those hosts. With this, you can easily demo vMotion, DRS, SRM, VDI and many other technologies. At VMWorld, Simon also pointed me to Didier Pironet’s (@dpironet) post on a similar setup using slightly more powerful computers. You can read Didier’s post HERE.
So what is the challenge? What if there was a vehicle with a portion of the VMware Express functionality, in a footprint that was more feasible for partners to use? Maybe utilizing a setup similar to Simon’s or Didier’s, throwing in a wireless network and a Cisco Cius, an Apple iPad and a smaller zero client that could be used for a demonstration anywhere in the range of the wireless network. Maybe even throw in one wireless repeater for a little boost. Imagine showing a nice SRM or VDI demo, then saying “And all of this is running from that small vehicle out the window.”
I would recommend the Mini Club-S, taking out the back seats and leveraging the slightly expanded interior room. Besides, if you are making a miniature version of the VMware Express, why not use a “Mini”? Ladies and gentlemen, I present the VMware Mini-Express concept car.
So, that is the challenge. VMware, could you make a VMware Mini-Express, come up with a good competition and award it to a partner at VMware Partner Exchange next spring? Maybe even create a few additional Mini-Expresses to use in a regional role within VMware sales/marketing. Either way, it would make a great showcase for just how much power you can fit in a small package with VMware technologies. In fact, you could almost fit this in the conference room of the VMware Express trailer for transportation and have them tour together. Now I see images of Knight Rider or Smokey and The Bandit, but that is another blog post all together 😉
If anyone does decide to take up this challenge, even if only for your own use, please let me know. I would love to see the final product!
Since moving to INX, I have been drinking from a fire hydrant. Working in a large enterprise organization, we focused on a few primary vendors and operating in many silos. Now, I represent a wide range of vendors and have a pretty big toolbox I can work with. I have been in vendor training, working on certifications and trying to learn the INX ropes. I am finally beginning to feel like I am catching up and contributing at a decent level. In the meantime, the only posts I have made are in reference to my TechTarget articles for SearchServerVirtualization. That will be changing, and I will be putting up more blog posts.
Much has been going on, and I have some posts in the cue that I hope to publish in the next few days. One, in particular, has me very excited. Don’t give up on me, and please check back for more posts this coming week.
Did I mention that I am loving it at INX? Great people, great partners and great customers. I am waking up every day excited about going to work!
This is a tricky topic, and one that many organizations are getting hung up on. This can be a major contributor to virtualization stall. Virtualization stall is when an organization finds their efforts to virtualize their environments stalling out and forward progress becoming more and more difficult to achieve. This can often occur when the “low hanging fruit” that the organization started with is done, and the tasks involved in maintaining the virtual environment combine with the difficulty of addressing the remaining “difficult child” physical servers that need to be virtualized.
The easy work is done, and now you begin to realize that moving forward may require a different game plan. Everyone may be in the same boat, but they are each rowing in a slightly different direction. The boat is either going nowhere or in circles, but little to no progress is being made. The solution is not to force people to go in one direction, but to educate them on each others roles and help them understand the impact of their actions on everyone else. In doing this, they begin to go in the right direction as a common group with a common goal. In IT, this means breaking out silos and building new groups where every member of the team carries the same goal and will be measured against the same expectations. This change is not nearly as easy as it sounds, and will surely meet a great deal of resistance.
For more on this topic, please read my article “Overcoming virtualization turf wars” at SearchServerVirtualization, then come back here and leave comments.
This is a phrase I am hear more and more of lately, and I love the concept behind it. Virtualization has consolidated servers, and blade servers have consolidated the footprints of those virtualization hosts. Now, blade solutions are beginning to employ even greater efficiencies with creative and flexible wiring strategies. As FCoE and converged networking matures, blade technologies are deploying these to collapse cables and leverage a single cable to provide multiple services (network and both block level and file level storage solutions).
Physical servers are also leveraging this, though blade solutions will often be more efficient in this arena. I also think that Cisco’s UCS has really taken this and run with it, others are catching on and making progress in this arena (i.e. HP’s Blade Matrix technologies). Regardless of your blade solution, this is a concept that you need to get familiar with and evaluate in relation to your future technology goals. In reducing infrastructure, you lower costs, ease administration and provide greater agility. Who doesn’t want that?
Lately, we hear about “cloud” everything. But the cloud is forming, it is available today. I admit, it is still in it’s infancy, but you need to be thinking about the impact it will have on business and IT. How do you plan to take advantage of this technology/service offering?
For many, I think cloud computing technologies and concepts will allow them greater agility and effectively eliminate the barrier of entry into many technology services. A startup can leverage the cloud to quickly deploy an enterprise class infrastructure, and the big players need to be preparing for this as well.
I discuss this in more detail in my article “Public cloud computing levels the playing field” on SerchServerVirtualization. Please take a minute to read the article, then come back here to leave any comments.
You can no longer simply set an alarm on capacity measurements and trust that to keep you clear of capacity problems, especially if you are looking at virtualization and/or cloud computing. Shared resources are a tremendous gain for efficiency, but can be a double-edged sword when it come to managing that shared capacity. It is well worth the extra effort, but you need to know how critical that extra effort is.
You can no longer just know where your capacity is, you have to know how it got there, where it is going, why it is going there, WHEN it is going there, what factors may speed up or slow down that growth rate…I think you get the point. The role of resource/capacity management has just stepped into the spotlight, and you need to adjust your policies and practices to recognize that.
Read more on this topic in the SearchServerVirtualization article “It’s 10p.m. Do you know where your capacity is?“, then come back here to leave your comments. These are big topics, I would love to hear what you think or how you may be adjusting to these changes.
It is very odd to be writing this, I don’t think the reality will set in for a few days. After almost 12 years at The First American Corporation/CoreLogic, I will be moving on. When I came here, I was just a few years out of college and recently married to my junior high crush. While here, we have had two children, I finished my MBA and few IT certs, markets have gone up and down, towers have fallen and the world has changed. This has been a great home, where I found a lot of talented people to work with and some great mentors to help me along the way. While I am confident in my move, it wasn’t easy to walk away from the family I have built here.
The IT world is changing and I want to play a bigger role in what that new landscape will look like. I wanted to be somewhere that would enable me to make a difference, in a role that would allow me to be an evangelist for emerging technologies and to assist people in leveraging those technologies to improve their business. However, it was going to have to be the right opportunity to justify a move.
A few months ago, a friend of mine from the vExpert program was visiting town and we met for dinner. This topic came up, and things began to click. More discussions were had and an opportunity came up that was aligned perfectly with what I was looking for. I guess that I now owe Steve Kaplan (@roidude) a dinner.
I just left The First American Corporation/CoreLogic as a visitor for the first time since 1998, when I came here to interview. Tomorrow, I start as a Consulting Principal for INX. I am sure there will be some initial culture shock as I move from customer to Partner/VAR, but it is a ride that I am looking forward to. INX has been awarded Partner of the Year by both VMware and Cisco for two years in a row, and those are just a few of the many awards that INX has won. I am joining a great team, with a strong track record, and I cannot wait to see where the future is leading.
To my family at First American/CoreLogic, thank you for allowing me to be a part of the team, best wishes for the futures of both The First American Corporation and the newly formed CoreLogic. To my new colleagues at INX, let’s roll!
Just a year after introducing vSphere 4.0, which ushered in dramatic performance gains and increases in configuration maximums, vSphere 4.1 is now available. Once again, the performance gains and increased configuration maximums are big. These are the kind of gains rarely seen in a major release, let alone a minor rev update.
Another notable piece of information about vSphere 4.1…it will be the last release to feature the ESX product. ESXi has long been hailed as the successor to the vSphere throne, and now they have set a date. Well, not a date, but a marker. The next release of vSphere, likely in 2011, will only include the ESXi product. For all of those vendors still relying on the CLI of ESX, wake up and smell the vMA coffee.
A few highlights in the many vSphere 4.1 improvements are:
3x increase in VMs per host
2x to 4x increase in concurrent vMotions (no longer VMotion as of 4.1)
Improvements in the scalability of Linked Mode (I LOVE this feature in vSphere)
Added Memory Compression to provide further gains in efficient memory utilization
DRS VM Host affinity rules (more on this below)
Active Directory integration on the ESX/ESXi Host
Multiple vCPU per virtual socket (think of vCPUs as cores in a virtual multi-core proc)
Host Profiles can now roll out password changes (host profiles are right up there with Linked Mode for me, great new feature in vSphere)
Fault Tolerance (FT) was made a little more forgiving in handling patch level mismatches
Network I/O control to group and manage NIC bandwidth by traffic types (VM, vMotion, FT, etc)
Load-Based Teaming for vNetwork Distributed Switches, to keep the load balanced across all physical adapters (vDS is probably my favorite new vSphere feature)
Hardware Acceleration with vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI – more on this below).
ESXi can be deployed via a new scripted install feature (as a long time Unix/Linux admin, I really like this…but I did not have the time to test it in the beta)
DRS VM host affinity rules are something I was very excited to see in the beta. As I have been implementing vSphere and designing a private cloud environment, a lot of effort has gone into the right methods for determining cluster groupings. Licensing is always a pain point in these discussions. I lose efficiency in creating a two small licensing-driven clusters for applications A and B, while maintaining N+1 within both clusters. If I could create one larger cluster, forcing the appropriate VMs to remain on their licensed group of hosts, I gain efficiency in the N+1 capacity if nothing else. There is also ease of management and a number of other advantages to this.
Now, throw into the mix that application A never allows the instances to run on unlicensed hardware, but application B will allow the instances to temporarily run on unlicensed servers in the event of a hardware failure. The new affinity rules will allow you to state that group A can never run anywhere else, while stating that group B can run somewhere else in an HA event. Now this feature becomes even more valuable.
Another new feature worth dedicating a few lines to is the VAAI. This will allow vSphere 4.1 to offload specific storage operations to compliant storage hardware. Why make vSphere use the less efficient “this copy command will work anywhere” approach for Storage vMotion when NetApp or EMC already have specialized commands on their arrays for these functions and know the most efficient way to carry out the task. This is a true win-win partnership with the storage vendors and one that can yield significant performance gains in your environment. Look for the major storage vendors to all be announcing their support for this within days, not weeks.
Finally, I will part with a list of KB articles passed on to me from our friendly neighborhood Technical Account Manager at VMware. Carl Olafson has always been quick to share information with me at my work, and this particular list is all public info. That being the case, I will pass it on to you:
KB Article: 1022842 – Changes to DRS in vSphere 4.1
KB Article: 1022290 – USB support for ESX/ESXi 4.1
KB Article: 1022263 – Deploying ESXi 4.1 using the Scripted Install feature
KB Article: 1021953 – I/O Statistics in vSphere 4.1
KB Article: 1022851 – Changes to vMotion in vSphere 4.1
KB Article: 1022104 – Upgrading to ESX 4.1 and vCenter Server 4.1 best practices
KB Article: 1023118 – Changes to VMware Support Options in vSphere 4.1
KB Article: 1021970 – Overview of Active Directory integration in ESX 4.1 and ESXi 4.1
KB Article: 1021769 – Configuring IPv6 with ESX and ESXi 4.1
KB Article: 1022844 – Changes to Fault Tolerance in vSphere 4.1
KB Article: 1023990 – VMware ESX and ESXi 4.1 Comparison
KB Article: 1022289 – Changing the number of virtual CPUs per virtual socket in ESX/ESXi 4.1
All that glitters is not gold…sometimes it is simply a distraction. Sometimes, and I have been guilty of this, we let the desire to implement technology get in the way of meeting business needs. It can be very tempting, after evaluating an amazing new technology, to then begin looking for excuses opportunities to use it. Sometimes you find that true win-win scenario where that technology is the exact fit, and sometime you end up making it fit in the hopes that it will show increased value in the future.
Fred Nix hit this point very well with his post on 1/4 inch drill bits. Sometimes we simply need to step back and evaluate why we are looking at a new technology. If you are impressed with a presentation or excited after evaluating a new technology, then make note of that and add it to your toolbox of solutions. Then, when the right opportunity presents itself, reach into your toolbox and pull out the right solution for the problem in front of you.
Read more about this in my article “New IT Trends: Are they right for you?“, then come back here to leave any comments. As always, your thoughts and feedback are encouraged.
