Category: VMworld

13-10-15

On By chrisbeckettIn Cloud, NSX, vExpert, VMware, VMworld, vSphereLeave a comment

VMworld Europe Day Two

Today is pretty much the day the whole conference springs to life. All the remaining delegates join the party with the TAM and Partner delegates. The Solutions Exchange opened for business and there’s just a much bigger bustle about the place than there was yesterday.

The opening general session was hosted by Carl Eschenbach, and credit to him for getting straight in there and talking about the Dell deal. I think most are scratching their heads, wondering what this means in the broader scheme of things, but Carl reassured the delegates that it would still be ‘business as usual’ with VMware acting as an independent entity. That’s not strictly true, as they’re still part of the EMC Federation, who are being acquired by Dell, so not exactly the same.

Even Michael Dell was wheeled out to give a video address to the conference to try and soothe any nerves, giving one of those award ceremony ‘sorry I can’t be there’ speeches. Can’t say it changed my perspective much!

The event itself continues to grow. This year there are 10,000 delegates from 96 countries and a couple of thousand partners.

Into the guts of the content, first up were Telefonica and Novamedia. The former are a pretty well known European telco, and the latter are a multinational lottery company. The gist of the chat was that VMware solutions (vCloud, NSX etc) have allowed both companies to bring new services and solutions to market far quicker than previously. In Novamedia’s case, they built 4 new data centres and had them up and running in a year. I was most impressed by Jan from Novamedia’s comment ‘Be bold, be innovative, be aggressive’. A man after my own heart!

VMware’s reasonably new CTO Ray O’Farrell then came out and with Kit Colbert discussed the ideas behind cloud native applications and support for containers. I’ll be honest at this point and say that I don’t get the container hype, but that’s probably due in no small part to my lack of understanding of the fundamentals and the use cases. I will do more to learn more, but for now, it looks like a bunch of isolated processes on a Linux box to me. What an old cynic!

VMware have taken to approaches to support containers. The first is to extend vSphere to use vSphere Integrated Containers and the second is the Photon platform. The issue with containerised applications is that the vSphere administrator has no visibility into them. It just looks and acts like a VM. With VIC, there are additional plug-ins into the vSphere Web Client that allow the administrator to view which processes are in use, on which host and how it is performing. All of this management layer is invisible and non-intrusive to the developer.

The concept of ‘jeVM’ was discussed, which is ‘just enough VM’, a smaller footprint for container based environments. Where VIC is a Linux VM on vSphere, the Photon platform is essentially a microvisor on the physical host, serving up resource to containersa running Photon OS, which is a custom VMware Linux build. The Photon platform itself contains two objects – a controller and the platform itself. The former will be open sourced in the next few weeks (aka free!) But the platform itself will be subscription only from VMware. I’d like to understand how that breaks down a bit better.

VRealize Automation 7 was also announced, which I had no visibility of, so that was a nice surprise. There was a quick demo with Yangbing Li showing off a few drag and drop canvas for advanced service blueprints. I was hoping this release would do away with the need for the Windows IaaS VM(s), but I’m reliably informed this is not the case.

Finally, we were treated with a cross cloud vMotion, which was announced as an industry first. VMs were migrated from a local vSphere instance to a vCloud Air DC in the UK and vice versa. This is made possible by ‘stretching’ the Layer 21 network between the host site and the vCloud Air DC. This link also includes full encryption and bandwidth optimisation. The benefit here is that again, it’s all managed from a familiar place (vSphere Web Client) and the cross cloud vMotion is just the migration wizard with a couple of extra choices for source and destination.

I left the general session with overriding feeling that VMware really are light years ahead in the virtualisation market, not just on premises solutions but hybrid too. They’ve embraced all cloud providers, and the solutions are better for it. Light years ahead of Microsoft in my opinion, and VMware have really raised their game in the last couple of years.

My first breakout session of the day was Distributed Switch Best Practices. This was a pretty good session as I’ve really become an NSX fanboy in the last few months, and VDSes are the bedrock of moving packet between VMs. As such, I noted the following:-

  • DV port group still has a one to one mapping to a VLAN
  • There may be multiple VTEPS on a single host. A DV port group is created for all VTEPs
  • DV port group is now called a logical switch when backed by VXLAN
  • Avoid single point of failure
  • Use separate network devices (i.e switches) wherever possible
  • Up to 32 uplinks possible
  • Recommend 2 x 10v Gbps links,  rather than lots of 1 Gbps
  • Don’t dedicate physical up links for management when connectivity is limited and enable NIOC
  • VXLAN compatible NIC recommended, so hardware offload can be used
  • Configure port fast and BPDU on switch ports, DVS does not have STP
  • Always try to pin traffic to a single NIC to reduce risk of out of order traffic
  • Traffic for VTEPs only using single up link in an active passive configuration
  • Use source based hashing. Good spread of VM traffic and simple configuration
  • Myth that VM traffic visibility is lost with NSX
  • Net flow, port mirroring, VXLAN ping tests connections between VTEPs
  • Trace flow introduced with NSX 6.2
  • Packets are specially tagged for monitoring, reporting back to NSX controller
  • Trace flow is in vSphere Web client
  • Host level packet capture from the CLI
  • VDS portgroup, vmknic or up link level, export as pcap for Wireshark analysis
  • Use DFW
  • Use jumbo frames
  • Mark DSCP value on VXLAN encapsulation for Quality of Service

For my final session of the dayt, I attended The Practical Path to NSX and Network Virtualisation. At first I was a bit dubious about this session as the first 20 minutes or so just went over old ground of what NSX was, and what all the pieces were, but I’m glad I stayed with it, as I got a few pearls of wisdom from it.

  • Customer used NSX for PCI compliance, move VM across data center and keep security. No modification to network design and must work with existing security products
  • Defined security groups for VMs based on role or application
  • Used NSX API for custom monitoring dashboards
  • Use tagging to classify workloads into the right security groups
  • Used distributed objects, vRealize for automation and integration into Palo Alto and Splunk
  • Classic brownfield design
  • Used NSX to secure Windows 2003 by isolating VMs, applying firewall rules and redirecting Windows 2003 traffic to Trend Micro IDS/IPS
  • Extend DC across sites at layer 3 using encapsulation but shown as same logical switch to admin
  • Customer used NSX for metro cluster
  • Trace flow will show which firewall rule dropped the packet
  • VROps shows NSX health and also logical and physical paths for troubleshooting

It was really cool to see how NSX could be used to secure Windows 2003 workloads that could not be upgraded but still needed to be controlled on the network. I must be honest, I hadn’t considered this use case, and better still, it could be done with a few clicks in a few minutes with no downtime!

NSX rocks!

 

 

 

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12-10-15

On By chrisbeckettIn Cloud, NSX, Uncategorized, VCP6-CMA, vExpert, VMware, VMworld, VSAN, vSphereLeave a comment

VMworld Europe Day One

Today saw the start of VMworld Europe in Barcelona, with today being primarily for partners and TAM customers (usually some of the bigger end users). However, that doesn’t mean that the place is quiet, far from it! There are plenty of delegates already milling around, I saw a lot of queues around the breakout sessions and also for the hands on labs.

As today was partner day, I already booked my sessions on the day they were released. I know how quickly these sessions fill, and I didn’t want the hassle of queuing up outside and hoping that I would get in. The first session was around what’s new in Virtual SAN. There have been a lot of press inches given to the hyper converged storage market in the last year, and I’ve really tried to blank them out. Now the FUD seems to have calmed down, it’s good to be able to take a dispassionate look at all the different offerings out there, as they all have something to give.

My first session was with Simon Todd and was titled VMware Virtual SAN Architecture Deep Dive for Partners. 

It was interesting to note the strong numbers of customer deploying VSAN. There was a mention of 3,000 globally, which isn’t bad for a product that you could argue has only just reached a major stage of maturity. There was the usual gratuitous customer logo slide, one of which was of interest to me. United Utilities deal with water related things in the north west, and they’re a major VSAN customer.

There were other technical notes, such as VSAN being an object based file system, not a distributed one. One customer has 14PB of storage over 64 nodes, and the limitation to further scaling out that cluster is a vSphere related one, rather than a VSAN related one.

One interesting topic of discussion was whether or not to use passthrough mode for the physical disks. What this boils down to is the amount of intelligence VSAN can gather from the disks if they are in passthrough mode. Basically, there can be a lot of ‘dialog’ between the disks and VSAN if there isn’t a controller in the way. I have set it up on IBM kit in our lab at work, and I had to set it to RAID0 as I couldn’t work out how to set it to passthrough. Looks like I’ll have to go back to that one! To be honest, I wasn’t getting the performance I expected, and that looks like it’s down to me.

VSAN under the covers seems a lot more complex than I thought, so I really need to have a good read of the docs before I go ahead and rebuild our labs.

There was also an interesting thread on troubleshooting. There are two fault types in VSAN – degraded and absent. Degraded state is when (for example) an SSD is wearing out, and while it will still work for a period of time, performance will inevitably suffer and the part will ultimately go bang. Absent state is where a temporary event has occured, with the expectation that this state will be recovered from quickly. Examples of this include a host (maintenance mode) or network connection down and this affects how the VSAN cluster behaves.

There is also now the ability to perform some proactive testing, to ensure that the environment is correctly configured and performance levels can be guaranteed. These steps include a ‘mock’ creation of virtual machines and a network multicast test. Other helpful troubleshooting items include the ability to blink the LED on a disk so you don’t swap out the wrong one!

The final note from this session was the availability of the VSAN assessment tool, which is a discovery tool run on customer site, typically for a week, that gathers existing storage metrics and provides sizoing recommendations and cost savings using VSAN. This can be requested via a partner, so in this case, Frontline!

The next session I went to was Power Play :What’s New With Virtual SAN and How To Be Successful Selling It. Bit of a mouthful I’ll agree, and as I’m not much of a sales or pre-sales guy, there wasn’t a massive amount of takeaway for me from this session, but Rory Choudhari took us through the current and projected revenues for the hyperconverged market, and they’re mind boggling.

This session delved into the value proposition of Virtual SAN, mainly in terms of costs (both capital and operational) and the fact that it’s simple to set up and get going with. He suggested it could live in harmony with the storage teams and their monolithic frames, I’m not so sure myself. Not from a tech standpoint, but from a political one. It’s going to be difficult in larger, more beauracratic environments.

One interesting note was Oregon State University saving 60% using Virtual SAN as compared to refreshing their dedicated storage platform. There are now nearly 800 VASN production customers in EMEA, and this number is growing weekly. Virtual SAN6.1 also brings with it support for Microsoft and Oracle RAC clustering. There is support for OpenStack, Docker and Photon and the product comes in two versions.

If you need an all flash VSAN and/or stretched clusters, you’ll need the Advanced version. For every other use case, Standard is just fine.

After all the VSAN content I decided to switch gears and attend an NSX session called  Disaster Recovery with NSX, SRM and vRO with Gilles Chekroun. Primarily this session seemed to concentrate on the features in the new NSX 6.2 release, namely the universal objects now available (distributed router, switch, firewall) which span datacentres and vCenters. With cross vCenter vMotion, VMware have really gone all out removing vCenter as the security or functionality boundary to using many of their products, and it’s opened a whole new path of opportunity, in my opinion.

There are currently 700 NSX customers globally, with 65 paying $1m or more in their deployments. This is not just licencing costs, but also for integration with third party products such as Palo Alto, for example. Release 6.2 has 20 new features and has the concept of primary and secondary sites. The primary site hosts an NSX Manager appliance and the controller cluster, and secondary sites host only an NSX Manager appliance (so no controller clusters). Each site is aware of things such as distributed firewall rules, so when a VM is moved from one site to another, the security settings arew preserved.

Locale IDs have also been added to provide the ability to ‘name’ a site and use the ID to direct routing traffic down specific paths, either locally on that site or via another site. This was the key takeway from the session that DRis typically slow, complex and expensive, with DR tests only being invoked annually. By providing network flexibility between sites and binding in SRM and vRO for automation, some of these issues go away.

In between times I sat the VCP-CMA exam for the second time. I sat the beta release of the exam and failed it, which was a bit of a surprise as I thought I’d done quite well. Anyway, this time I went through it, some of the questions from the beta were repeated and I answered most in the same way and this time passed easily with a 410/500. This gives me the distinction of now holding a full house of current VCPs – cloud, desktop, network and datacenter virtualisation. Once VMware Education sort out the cluster f**k that is the Advanced track, I hope to do the same at that level.

Finally I went to a quick talk called 10 Reasons Why VMware Virtual SAN Is The Best Hyperconverged Solution. Rather than go chapter and verse on each point I’ll list them below for your viewing pleasure:-

  1. VSAN is built directly into the hypervisor, giving data locality and lower latency
  2. Choice – you can pick your vendor of choice (HP, Dell, etc.) And either pick a validated, pre-built solution or ‘roll your own’ from a list of compatible controllers and hard drives from the VMware HCL
  3. Scale up or scale out, don’t pay for storage you don’t need (typically large SAN installations purchase all forecasted storage up front) and grow as you go by adding disks, SAS expanders and hosts up to 64 hosts
  4. Seamless integration with the existing VMware stack – vROps adapters already exist for management, integration with View is fully supported etc
  5. Get excellent performance using industry standard parts. No need to source specialised hardware to build a solution
  6. Do more with less – achieve excellent performance and capacity without having to buy a lot of hardware, licencing, support etc
  7. If you know vSphere, you knopw VSAN. Same management console, no new tricks or skills to learn with the default settings
  8. 2000 customers using VSAN in their production environment, 65% of whom use it for business critical applications. VSAN is also now third generation
  9. Fast moving road map – version 5.5 to 6.1 in just 18 months, much faster rate of innovation than most monolithic storage providers
  10. Future proof – engineered to work with technologies such as Docker etc

All in all a pretty productive day – four sessions and a new VCP for the collection, so I can’t complain. Also great to see and chat with friends and ex-colleagues who are also over here, which is yet another great reason to come to VMworld. It’s 10,000 people, but there’s still a strong sense of community.