Category Archives: VMware

New Book Project: Tweet sized vSphere Design Considerations – Call for Entries

Today I am excited to announce our (Duncan and I) newest project. Over the next 7 days we will be gathering the best vSphere design considerations around and compiling it into a pocket-sized book. The current working title is “Tweet-sized vSphere design considerations”. As this book is created by people from the virtualization community for the virtualization community, this book will be available free of cost.

vSphere Design Considerations
In the vSphere clustering deepdive series we emphasized certain design consideration by calling them out in “Basic design principles” textboxes. Basic design principles provide quick and simple as well as deep and quintessential information to make architectural design decisions.

The technical deepdive books and their basic design principles focus on HA and distributed resource management features but there are a lot of basic design principles for the other elements in a virtual infrastructure.

We approached some of the industry leading minds to contribute their design considerations for various elements of the virtual infrastructure. However we believe that a lot of practitioners in the virtualization community can contribute to make the book a real success.

Time to gather and aggregate them into one single book that can become a pocketbook of inspiration for all virtual infrastructure architects, admins and consultants.

Call for entries
Do you have a design consideration that consistently apply in your customer environment? Here is your chance to share it with the rest of the virtualization community. If your design consideration is selected it will be featured in the book. Your name, title (vExpert, VCDX number) and twitter handle will be listed along your design consideration.

The rules
Each design consideration should be tweet-sized like. 140 characters might be a challenge, therefor we slight adjusted the limitation and we allow a maximum of 200 characters (excluding spaces).

We are looking for design consideration in the following categories:

Host design
Cluster design
vCenter design
Networking and Security design
Storage design

To prevent oversaturation we do not allow more than a total of three design considerations per category. For example, you can provide us with three design considerations for the Host category but you could also choose to provide a single design consideration for each category. It’s up to you to decide which category and how many you want to provide. Be aware that we rather see one excellent design consideration than three mediocre ones.

Level of Quality
There are no requirements for submitting your design decision. You do not have to be a vExpert or VCDX to participate. However we strive to have a consistent level of quality of design considerations featured in the book. Please check out the “basic design principles” in one of the vSphere clustering Deepdive books, these are the level of quality we are looking for.

The selection process
Both Duncan and I encourage simplicity. Simplicity in design usually removes as much overhead as possible, which in turn increases flexibility. To quote Martin Fowler “The cost of flexibility is complexity” and in today’s cloud focused market flexibility is key. Be mindful of that.

Therefore try to aim for simplicity in both design and messaging. Similar to the architectural design try to simplify your message as much as possible. This does not mean that you are requested to dumb down your message. Use clear, clean communication, so that it could not be misunderstood.

The following five bloggers will judge the submitted entries:

Frank Denneman
Duncan Epping
Cormac Hogan
Jason Nash
Vaughn Stewart

Project schedule

Announcement and Call for Entries (Today)
Deadline for Call for Entries (June, 18st)
Deadline selection design considerations by judges (June 30th)
Book design and print process
Book Availability (VMworld 2013)

Once the book is complete we shall publicize the list of people mentioned in the book, we will not share information during the production process of the book.

This book is free!
PernixData generously offered to print the book. If your design consideration is included in the book, you will receive a copy of the book. At their booth at VMworld PernixData will have a copy available for people who submitted a winning design consideration. A limited number of books will be available for the community. More details will follow. After VMworld an E-book version of the book will be made publicly available.

How to enter?
Want to be a part of something cool and unique? Follow this link and share your design consideration with the virtualization community by filling out the form.

Please note, the deadline for call for entries will close at Tuesday 18th June.

Download the vSphere 4.1 and 5.0 clustering deepdive for free

vSphere 5.1 update 1 release fixes Storage vMotion rename “bug”

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vSphere 5.1 update 1 is released today which contains several updates and bug fixes for both ESXi and vCenter Server 5.1.

This release contains the return of the much requested functionality of renaming VM files by using Storage vMotion. Renaming a virtual machine within vCenter did not automatically rename the files, but in previous versions Storage vMotion renamed the files and folder to match the virtual machine name. A nice trick to keep the file structure aligned with the vCenter inventory. However engineers considered it a bug and “fixed” the problem. Duncan and I pushed hard for this fix, but the strong voice of the community lead (thanks for all who submitted a feature request) helped the engineers and product managers understand that this bug was actually considered to be a very useful feature. The engineers introduced the “bugfix” in 5.0 update 2 end of last year and now the fix is included in this update for vSphere 5.1

Here’s the details of the bugfix:

vSphere 5 Storage vMotion is unable to rename virtual machine files on completing migration
In vCenter Server , when you rename a virtual machine in the vSphere Client, the VMDK disks are not renamed following a successful Storage vMotion task. When you perform a Storage vMotion task for the virtual machine to have its folder and associated files renamed to match the new name, the virtual machine folder name changes, but the virtual machine file names do not change.

This issue is resolved in this release. To enable this renaming feature, you need to configure the advanced settings in vCenter Server and set the value of the provisioning.relocate.enableRename parameter to true.

Read the rest of the vCenter 5.1 update 1release notes and ESXi 5.1 update 1 release notes to discover other bugfixes

Awesome read: Storage Performance And Testing Best Practices

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The last couple of days I’ve been reading up on EMC VPLEX technology as I’m testing VPLEX metro with SIOC and Storage DRS. Yesterday I discovered a technical paper called “EMC VPLEX: Elements Of Performance And Testing Best Practices Defined” and I think this paper should be read by anyone who is interested in testing storage or even wanting to understand the difference between workloads. Even if you do not plan to use EMC VPLEX the paper delivers some great insights about IOPS versus MB/s. What to expect when testing for transactional-based workloads and throughput-based workload? Here’s a little snippet:

“Let’s begin our discussion of VPLEX performance by considering performance in general terms. What is good performance anyway? Performance can be considered to be a measure of the amount of work that is being accomplished in a specific time period. Storage resource performance is frequently quoted in terms of IOPS (IO per second) and/or throughput (MB/s). While IOPS and throughput are both measures of performance, they are not synonymous and are actually inversely related – meaning if you want high IOPS, you typically get low MB/s. This is driven in large part by the size of the IO buffers used by each storage product and the time it takes to load and unload each of them. This produces a relationship between IOPS and throughput as shown in Figure 1 below.”

Although it’s primarily focused on VPLEX, the paper helps you understand the different layers of a storage solution and how each layer affects performance. Another useful section is the overview of good benchmark software which describes the basic operation of each listed benchmark program. The paper is very well written and I bet even a joy to read for both the beginner as well as the the most hardened storage geek.

Download the paper here.

Elastic vDC and how to span a provider vDC across multiple DRS clusters

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vCloud director 5.1 provides the ability to create elastic vDC which allows an organization vDC to consume resources from multiple DRS clusters. By having the provider vDC abstract the resources from multiple DRS clusters, its simpler to grow capacity when needed. Before elastic vDC, a new provider vDC and Org vDCs needed to be created when an org vDC wanted to grow beyond the capacity of the provider vDC. With Elastic vDC you just add new clusters when needed and allow the Provider vDC to manage initial placement of vApps.

During research of elastic vDCs I discovered that the way to span a provider vDC isn’t that intuitive. In order to save you some time, here are the steps to create a provider vDC that spans multiple DRS clusters.

Create a Provider vDC, give it a name and select the highest supported hardware version. If you run a homogenous environment with solely 5.1 ESX hosts I highly recommend changing it to Hardware Version 9. If the clusters run different ESX versions, lower the hardware version to the appropriate supported level.

Please note that the provider vDC is responsible for initial placement of the vApp. It will place the vApp on the cluster that contains the most available “unreserved” compute resources and storage resources. It is possible that vApps of the same organization run on different ESX versions.

Select Resource pool. This screen is a little bit ambiguous. The user interface “talks” about resource pools, but that doesn’t mean you cannot select a complete DRS cluster for consumption by the provider vDC. A DRS cluster is in essence a resource pool, the root resource pool for all its child resource pools. So don’t worry if you want to select an entire cluster, in matter of fact, when you select the vCenter it shows the DRS clusters as well as the resource pools.
In this example, the vCenter contains two DRS clusters; vCloud-Cluster1 and vCloud-Cluster2. The DRS cluster vCloud-Cluster2 contains a resource pool called RP1. Unfortunately the user interface does not use any icons to differentiate between clusters and resource pools, but shows a vCenter path notation. As RP1 is the child resource pool of vCloud-Cluster2, the vCenter path is as follows: vCloud-Cluster2/RP1.
Unfortunately the interface only allows to select a single resource pool or cluster, therefor I select the vCloud-Cluster1 and select next.

Select an appropriate Storage profile and click on next. The ready to complete screen displays an overview of your selected configuration. Click on Finish to create the Provider vDC.

At this point in time, the provider vDC maps to only one DRS cluster. To add additional clusters, go to the Manage and Monitor tab and select Provider vDCs.

Click on the provider vDC and select the resource pools tab

Click on the green plus icon to add another DRS cluster. The attach resource pool window is displayed and you can select another cluster from the same vCenter as the primary cluster. Please note that a provider vDC can only span clusters managed by the same vCenter server. Click on Finish to add the DRS cluster to the provider vDC.

The Provider vDC is now able to provider resources from multiple DRS clusters. In vCloud Director 5.1 both the Pay-as-You-Go and Allocation Pool model org vCD are able to consume resources from an elastic vDC. In order to allow the Allocation Pool model to leverage an Elastic vDC changes needed to be made. Massimo Re Ferrè wrote an extensive post about the changes of the different allocation models in vCloud director 5.1.