In June of this year, Niels and I published the vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive, and the community was buzzing. Twitter exploded, and many community members provided rave reviews.
This excitement caught Rubriks attention, and they decided to support the community by giving away 2000 free copies of the printed version at VMworld. The interest was overwhelming, before the end of the second signing session in Barcelona we ran out of books.
A lot of people reached out to Rubrik and us to find out if they could get a free book as well. This gave us an idea, and we sat down with Rubrik and the VMUG organization to determine how to cater the community.
We are proud to announce that you can download the e-book version (PDF only) for free at rubrik.com. Just sign up and download your full e-book copy here.
Spread the word! And if you like, thank @Rubrik and @myVMUG for their efforts to help the VMware community advance.
Get your Free Book at VMworld
At VMworld, the presenters of the following sessions will be giving away free copies of the Host Deep Dive book to the audience.
Saturday
Performance Bootcamp
Mark Achtemichuk
Saturday, Aug 26, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
More information about pre-VMworld Performance Bootcamp
Sunday
An Introduction to VMware Software-Defined Storage [STO2138QU]
Lee Dilworth, Principal Systems Engineer, VMware
Sunday, Aug 27, 4:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. | Oceanside C, Level 2
Monday
A Deep Dive into vSphere 6.5 Core Storage Features and Functionality [SER1143BU]
Cody Hosterman, Technical Director–VMware Solutions, Pure Storage
Cormac Hogan, Director – Chief Technologist, VMware
Monday, Aug 28, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | Mandalay Bay Ballroom G, Level 2
Extreme Performance Series: Benchmarking 101 [SER2723BUR]
Joshua Schnee, Senior Staff Engineer @ VMware Performance, VMware
Mark Achtemichuk, Staff Engineer, Performance, VMware
Monday, Aug 28, 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. | Mandalay Bay Ballroom B, Level 2
Maximum Performance with Mark Achtemichuk [VIRT2368GU]
Mark Achtemichuk, Staff Engineer, Performance, VMware
Monday, Aug 28, 5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. | Reef E, Level 2
The Top 10 Things to Know About vSAN [STO1264BU]
Duncan Epping, Chief Technologist, VMware
Cormac Hogan, Director – Chief Technologist, VMware
Monday, Aug 28, 5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. | Mandalay Bay Ballroom H, Level 2
VMware vSAN: From 2 Nodes to 64 Nodes, Architecting and Operating vSAN Like a VCDX for Scalability and Simplicity [STO2114BU]
Greg Mulholland, Principal Systems Engineer, VMware
Jeff Wong, Customer Success Architect, VMware
Monday, Aug 28, 5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. | Surf E, Level 2
Tuesday
Extreme Performance Series: Performance Best Practices [SER2724BU]
Reza Taheri, Principal Engineer, VMware
Mark Achtemichuk, Staff Engineer, Performance, VMware
Tuesday, Aug 29, 2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. | Oceanside D, Level 2
Wednesday
vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive: Part 2 [SER1872BU]
Frank Denneman, Senior Staff Architect, VMware
Niels Hagoort, Owner, HIC (Hagoort ICT Consultancy)
Wednesday, Aug 30, 8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. | Breakers E, Level 2
Extreme Performance Series: Benchmarking 101 [SER2723BUR]
Joshua Schnee, Senior Staff Engineer @ VMware Performance, VMware
Mark Achtemichuk, Staff Engineer, Performance, VMware
Wednesday, Aug 30, 8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. | Lagoon L, Level 2
vSAN Networking and Design Best Practices [STO3276GU]
John Nicholson, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, VMware
Wednesday, Aug 30, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | Reef C, Level 2
vSAN Hardware Deep Dive Panel [STO1540PU]
Ed Goggin, Staff Engineer 2, VMware
David Edwards, Principal Engineer, Director Solutions, Resurgent Technology
Ken Werneburg, Group Manager Technical Marketing, VMware
Jeffrey Taylor, Technical Director, VMware
Ron Scott-Adams, Hyper-Converged Systems Engineer, VMware
Wednesday, Aug 30, 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. | Mandalay Bay Ballroom D, Level 2
A Closer Look at vSAN Networking Design and Configuration Considerations [STO1193BU]
Cormac Hogan, Director – Chief Technologist, VMware
Andreas Scherr, Senior Solution Architect, VMware
Wednesday, Aug 30, 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. | Mandalay Bay Ballroom G, Level 2
Thursday
Virtual Volumes Technical Deep Dive [STO2446BU]
Patrick Dirks, Sr. Manager, VMware
Pete Flecha, Sr Technical Marketing Architect, VMware
Thursday, Aug 31, 10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. | Oceanside B, Level 2
Book Signing
We will be doing two book signing sessions as well.
At the Rubrik booth #412 on Monday, Aug 28, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
At the VMworld Book store on Tuesday, Aug 29, 11:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Or just feel free to approach us when you see us walking by.
Host Deep Dive Stickers and More
Last week we released the VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive book and Twitter and Facebook exploded. We’ve seen some pretty bad-ass pictures on our Twitter feeds such as this one by Jamie Girdwood (@creamcookie)
It’s always nice to hear some praise after spending more than 800 hours on something. (When writing and self-publish a book, expect to spend over 90 minutes on one page). Thanks!
The top three most often heard questions were:
- When will you release an ebook version?
- Do you have any stickers?
- When is Niels joining VMware?
When will you release an ebook version?
We hope to get the ebook finalized after VMworld. Vacation time is coming up, and we also need to prep for VMworld (vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive: Part 2 [SER1872BU]). It might happen sooner, but that depends on the process of creating an eBook itself. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as sharing a PDF online. Please stay tuned.
Do you have any stickers?
We got you covered. We met up with our designer over at digitalmaterial.nl and explained our wishes. We received a lot of comments on the depth of the book. Such as the one from Duncan’s article Must have book: Host Resources Deep Dive:
As most of you know, I wrote the Clustering Deepdive series together with Frank, which means I kinda knew what to expect in terms of level of depth. Kinda, as this is a whole new level of depth. I don’t think I have ever seen (for example) topics like NUMA or NIC drivers explained at this level of depth. If you ask me, it is fair to say that Frank and Niels redefined the term “deep dive”.
So instead of snorkeling and hovering a bit below sea-level, we help you get into the depths of the material. What better way to express this than a divers helmet. We will bring 250 stickers to VMworld. First come first serve. If you can’t wait, download the 800 DPI PNG here and create one for yourself.
White Background
Transparent Background
I think the design rocks, so much that Niels and I decided to put it on some t-shirts as well. We are not backed by a vendor, so we can’t give away shirts. Similar to the book, we kept the price low. We created two campaigns, one for the US and one for EU.This allows you to get the order as fast as possible. The shirts and hoodies come in various colors.
When is Niels joining VMware?
I don’t know, he should though!
Memory-Like Storage Means File Systems Must Change – My Take
I’m an avid reader of thenextplatform.com. They always provide great insights into new technology. This week they published the article “Memory-Like Storage Means File Systems Must Change” and as usually full of good stuff. The focus of this article is about the upcoming non-volatile memory technologies that leverage the memory channel to provide incredible amounts of bandwidth to the storage medium. I can’t wait to see this happen and we can start to build systems with performance characteristics that weren’t conceivable a half a decade ago.
The article mentions 3D XPoint and Intel Apache Pass is the codename for 3D XPoint in DIMM format. It could be NVDIMM it could be something else. We don’t know yet. This article argues that storage systems need to change and I fully agree. If you consider the current performance overhead on recently released PCIe NVMe 3D XPoint devices, it is clear that the system and the software have the largest impact on latency. The solved the device characteristics pretty much; it’s now the PCIe bus and the software stack that delays the I/O. Moving to the memory bus makes sense. Less overhead and almost five times the bandwidth. For example, four-lane PCIe 3.0 provides a theoretical bandwidth of close to 4 GB/s while 2400 MHz memory has a peak transfer rate of close to 19 GB/s.
This sounds great and very promising, but I do wonder how will it impact memory operations. The key is to deliver an additional level of memory hierarchy, increasing capacity while abstracting the behavior of the new media.
It’s key to understand that memory is accessed after an L3 miss. It can spend a lot of time waiting on DRAM. A number often heard is that it can spend 19 out of every 20 instruction slots waiting on data from memory. This figure seems accurate as the latency of an instruction inside a CPU register is one ns while memory latency is close to 15 ns. Each core requires memory bandwidth, and this impacts the average memory bandwidth per core. Introducing a media that is magnitudes slower than DRAM can negatively affect the overall system performance. More cycles are wasted on waiting on memory media.
Please remember that not every workload is storage I/O bound. Great system design is not only about making I/O faster; it’s about removing bottlenecks in a balanced matter. It’s essential that the storage I/O should not interrupt DRAM traffic.
An analogy would be a car that can go 65MPH. The car in front of him drives 55 MPH. By selecting another lane, the slower car does not interfere anymore, and he can drive the speed he wants. The problem is in this lane cars typically drive 200 MPHs.
The key point for both NVDIMM as Intel Apache Pass is that adding storage on the memory bus to improve I/O latency should not interfere with DRAM operations.
This content is an excerpt of the upcoming vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive book.
vSphere 6.5 Host Deep Dive Update
Maybe you have noticed that no new content has appeared on the site for a while. And the upcoming book “vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive” is to blame for this situation.
Last year, Niels Hagoort and I started working on the companion book of the highly successful vSphere Clustering Deep Dive book. We set out writing this book to refocus on the fundament component of the virtual data center, the ESXi host. Today’s focal point is on upper levels/overlay’s (SDDC stack, NSX, Cloud). These topics are exciting and take IT services to the next level, but we also understand that proper host design and management fabricates the foundation for success.
As a result, this book explores the host resources, CPU, memory, storage, and network in depth. Our goal is to provide you with an in-depth view of the four major host resources. Instead of showing you where to click to achieve a certain configuration, we explain the inner-workings of these components and how various physical and virtual constructs interact with each other.
We believe that this method provides a basis – a foundation on its own – that helps you to design and build the best possible architecture that aligns with the customer requirements each and every time.
As you can imagine, trying to write a fitting companion to the cluster deep dive is no small feat. Research, reverse engineering and reading through a lot of academic papers consume most of our time besides our day-time job, hence the progress is not as fast as we would like. Expect the book to be released between April and May this year.
Working on this book reminds me of the African Proverb “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”. Although Niels and I generate the content, a lot of people are involved ensuring the quality is up to par. Both Niels and I would like to acknowledge the following persons:
Jane Rimmer (has the challenging task of restructure our content into proper English).
Chris Gianos (Lead Engineer of Intel Xeon microarchitecture),
Haoqiang Zheng (Principal Engineer CPU Scheduler VMkernel)
Valentin Bondzio (All-Star Badass GSS VMware)
Duncan Epping (Chief Technologist Storage BU VMware)
Marco van Baggum (Architect ITQ)
Myles Gray (Infrastructure Engineer Novosco)
Rutger Kosters (Solution Architect Rubrik)
Anthony Spiteri (Technical Evanglist Veeam Software)
Joop Carels (Sr. Solution Integrator Ericsson)
We expect to publish the book in print in the April/May timeframe. An ebook version will be scheduled to appear at the end of this year. Throughout the writing process, we update the books’ twitter account (@HostDeepDive) and Facebook page with sneak peeks and interesting reference material such as academic papers. Please subscribe to these channels to receive updates.