Josh's Blog

vSphere 4.1 adds over 150 new features and improvements, many that are in preparation for the the upcoming release of VMware's Cloud offering. VMwware continues to be the innovator and isn't resting on it success in the market. I am very excited about the upcoming VMworld in San Francisco because I am anticipating many big announcement. I hope to be able to provide a blog or two from my sessions out there. Out of the loads of features in 4.1 and the numerous performance enhancements I wanted to highlight a few.

Storage I/O Control:
To me this couldn't come soon enough. I/O Storage control is DRS for Storage, it is a cluster-wide I/O scheduler that works to throttle I/O to ensure that a single VM cannot monopolize a single datastore’s capabilities. Storage I/O control is at the VMDK level for the Storage I/O throttling functionality to be activated, there needs to be some congestion on the datastore for sometime. The default settings require a sustained ~30ms response time before the code is executed.

This is enabled per datastore, and will kick in when latencies are 30 ms or greater by default, though you can adjust the latencies as you see fit via advanced settings. This feature is configured through VMware vCenter, but the ESX servers communicate between themselves via shared headers on each datastore. This preserves the ability for the cluster to continue to operate when the management interfaces are inoperative.

Network I/O Control:
Traditionally I haven't seen much need for Network QOS but with the decreasing cost of 10Gb techonology and also the number of high end applications that can now be virtualized I am glad that VMware added Network I/O control to the Resource control functionality.

There are six types of traffic that are identified:

* VM
* Management
* NFS
* iSCSI
* vMotion
* FT Logging

We now have the ability to apply limits to these types of traffic, to absolutely cap the amount of bandwidth being consumed by each host within a cluster, we also have the ability to put shares that are tied to the different types of traffic that will provide priority for all outbound network traffic.

Another new feature in 4.1 is Load-Based Teaming which is useful for the 1Gb connections. What Load Balanced Teaming does is change the physical NIC being used for a type of traffic when ESX detects that a link is more than 75% utilized over 30 seconds. You can only use these technologies for the v Distributed Switch that is incorporated into the Enterprise Plus version of vSphere.

Memory Compression:
We have been over commiting memory for a long time now, in vSphere 4 began to help us out in a few ways when you got a little too crazy with your memory over commit. First, it used transparent page sharing to try to deduplicate RAM. Second, it used the VMware Tools balloon driver to reduce the amount of RAM actively consumed by a VM. Third, the pages were sent to the physical disk.

Paging to disk is a slow and painful operation, what VMware did was they added another mechanism to stave off the need to page to disk: memory compression. ESX will take a configurable amount of memory and compress it if it needs to. We really do not want to get in this situation but we have the tools to give by us the time to add hosts or memory

vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI):
David went into this feature in his VMware And Its Storage - Faster, Smarter, Stronger... Free? blog

Continuing this trend among us naive open systems types, VMware and a variety of storage partners are working to enable offloading of storage operations to the array. Initially there will be three operations handled by the arrays: full copy, zero-out, and locking. For operations like cloning this means that ESX won’t copy a template out over the SAN or network just to put it right back on the array.

Support for this integration on EMC CLARiiON arrays is due out with the release of Flare 30, I have not heard on release dates from other vendors such as Dell, NetApp, IBM, Hitachi, & HP. This feature is only available to Enterprise and Enterprise Plus licensees.

ESXi:
It is clear the ESXi is the future for vSphere has the Hypervisor. vSphere 4.1 is the last major release to support the classic ESX software with the service console. Future releases will be ESXi only, using APIs to control and configure the host.

VMware has added boot-from-SAN capabilities(Cisco UCS anyone?), scripted installs, enhanced Update Manager to push drivers and other modules, added built-in Active Directory support, and now fully support both local and remote Tech Support Mode.

I know that this is going to freak a lot of people out but I would get used to it because this is the way were are going. I would highly considering installing the ESXi version with this upgrade. I highly recommend checking out the ESX to ESXi upgrade center.

Good bye Service Console you will be missed.

Increased Cluster Limits:
High Availability has had its limits increased, to 32 hosts, 320 VMs per host, and 3000 VMs per cluster.

High Availability has application awareness using APIs. This lets monitoring agents work with HA to do a variety of things, including a full guest restart. This works through the VMware Tools and involves guest to host communication, which may be a security concern in some cases.

vMotion Enhancements
Some tweaks under the hood have been made to improve vMotion performance. Also the limits for number of concurrent vMotions have been increased:

* 1Gbps NICs = 4 Concurrent vMotions
* 10Gbps NICs = 8 Concurrent vMotions
* Datastore (both VMFS and NFS) = 128 Concurrent vMotio

Fault Tolerance (FT):
Not my favorite technology in the fleet, until we see multiprocessor support to the Virtual Machine I will not be on the bandwagon. I was hoping to see SMP support in this release. However, a lot of other restrictions have been lifted.

vCenter:
The biggest change is that it is 64-bit only, but for all you View users you will have to wait until the release of 4.5 since composer is not compatible with x64.

Well I hope I have some exciting news coming from VMworld this year so stay tuned.

My last blog post I rambled on about the Private Cloud and how I think it can be beneficial to IT. When I start thinking about Public Clouds, though, my forecast doesn't look so positive.

I will start by saying all applications and organizations are not equal. I think there are many applications that are a good fit for Cloud applications. If you look at email, it has been in the cloud since almost the beginning of the Internet. I think for many IT organizations it does make a lot of sense to put email in the cloud. If you have ever had to manage an email infrastructure, you have to have dedicated hardware, licensing, spam filters, admins, etc. dedicated to email. The operational and infrastructure costs can cost IT a ton. There is a definite argument that you can reduce costs with the offerings Google, Microsoft Exchange, or VMware's Zimbra.

Okay, that was my pro Cloud pitch. Here is the not-so-positive spin on the Cloud and why I am not on the Public Cloud bandwagon.

The only one you can trust is yourself
The biggest concern/question that I have is when we starting putting secure information that we once had within our own corporate walls into the Cloud is, Do we gain or lose security? It is just like the feeling I got when I hired my son's first babysitter: I know I trusted this person, but do I really trust this person? And are they going to take care of him like I would? With the public cloud we just don't know what we are getting into. We do not KNOW what the methods are that are taken, we just know what we are told.

IT as Utility
This is the conversation that I have had with many of my customers: We just put our applications and data into the cloud, and we've just turned our IT department into Comcast Cable. What happens when the $99 a month triple play promo runs out and we are now paying $180 a month? We now do not know what our early IT utility bill is going to be and as businesses grow so does the IT utility bill. Also, what about customer service? Nobody has the urgency for our applications and data as much as the people who own it—which is a good segway for my final point.

Coming down from the Clouds
The one issue that I see and have discussed with other colleagues in the industry is I am not happy with my current cloud provider and I want to move my data from one cloud provider to another or even back into private infrastructure. How do I move my data? Can I move my data? What will it cost me? How long will it take? The answer is we just don't know yet. VMware is going to be making a push in the second half of this year to be the standard platform for both the Private and Public Clouds, which will help some. But what about the other Cloud providers?

So, yes, I am a bit of a Negative Nancy on the Public Cloud, admittedly not one to jump on the latest buzz or technology that jumps in the game. I tend to be a late adopter of technology and my biggest fear with the Public Cloud is the recreation of the Dot Com Fallout. If we remember back in the late 90's with the explosion of hosting providers and ASPs, how many of those companies are around today? Are we recreating history?

C-L-O-U-D: a four letter word?
These days it seems like all we hear is talk and marketecture around the "cloud.” I can't even count how many times I have been in a room of IT peers and, when the word cloud is spoken, I’ve witnessed eye rolls and gasps of air. The word today seems almost like a four letter word.

I myself have started to warm up to the idea of the private cloud for organizations (public clouds I will cover a little later). My process of warming to the idea was really stepping back and evaluating how could a cloud be used. So what is my idea of the Cloud, you ask?

Private vs. Public Cloud
The Private Cloud to me is creating a pool of resources that provide an infrastructure where applications can easily be deployed in an automated fashion. A Private Cloud also gives organizations the ability to monitor and bill back based on resources that are used. Public Cloud is the ability to take your Private Cloud and push it to a third party to rent or outsource resources.

It's a Journey
Today we see many vendors pushing the "Journey to Cloud"—two of the leaders are VMware and EMC, both of which have emerging technologies that enable organizations to build private clouds. VMware will be releasing their cloud platform later this year, which will be an added layer of automation on top of the vSphere platform.

Storage Challenge
To me one of the bigger challenges to the design/architecture of the cloud in most customers’ environments has been the storage. VMware has enabled organizations to take computing power and put it into a large pool of resources, but storage has been a barrier to the ability to move your resources outside of a single datacenter.

At EMC World last week in Boston, EMC announced the release of their VPLEX platform. Chuck Hollis, EMC Global Marketing CTO, describes it on his blog as “a new platform to build these new storage pools -- big, hardware-agnostic storage pools that can stretch over distances.”

Image courtesy of kevindooley on Flickr

As I recover from my post Thanksgiving food coma and we near the end of 2009 I am thinking where virtualization is going to be and what is next. I think back to September 2007 the biggest buzz at VMWorld was around Virtual Desktops. We had the explosion of Thin Client providers and connection brokers with ESX as the backend technology to run your desktops on. The concept was so exciting to me of the idea of bringing all of your desktop workloads into the datacenter, centralizing data, and eliminating the desktop refresh cycle was just awesome. I remember coming back from VMWorld and ordering and testing various Thin Clients from many manufacturers. My conclusion then was Virtual Desktops just wasn’t ready for prime time, the lack of true multi monitor support and the reliance on RDP provided a disappointing user experience.

Fast forward to today… I truly believe Virtual Desktops is here! I feel that in 2010 we are going to see large scale adoption of Virtual Desktops in the workstation space. The struggling economy and companies tightening budgets on infrastructure and staffing Virtual Desktops really makes sense. Let’s not kid ourselves the upfront cost to get VDI going is not cheap when you include servers, thin clients, and SAN infrastructure but if you start to think forward to the next desktop refresh or the companies upcoming Windows 7 upgrade where many of the PC’s under desks are going to be obsolete it really starts to make sense. What I am already seeing in the industry is customers buying Thin Clients from vendors like Wyse instead of your traditional PC and investing money in server hardware and storage and running VMware View knowing that in three years from now there will no longer be the need for a desktop refresh.

Why Virtual Desktops now you ask? Well I have been waiting on the release of VMware View 4 with all the hype around PCoiP and if it was going to live up to it. In all of my testing of in our Lab of PCoiP with a Wyse R90L and quad monitors has been great. Watching HD videos from You Tube is phenomenal using PCoiP display protocol as opposed to the RDP experience which is mediocre at best. Another previous drawback for me was the multi monitor experience with the inability to deliver more than one monitor without software assisted trickery using applications like SplitView which added to the cost and complexity of the deployment. PCoiP the and ability to deliver the optimal resolution and pivot orientation to each monitor independently is a huge advancement in supplying demands of today’s desktop users. As mentioned in my earlier post about Site Recovery Manager 4, VMware View 4 now also runs on the vSphere platform but you do need to be running the r released vSphere4 Update1. Below is a full list of new features in VMware View 4.

 

• VMware View with PCoiP – PCoiP provides an optimized desktop experience for the delivery of the entire desktop environment including applications, images, audio, and video content for a wide range of users on the LAN or across the WAN. PCoiP can compensate for an increase in latency or a reduction in bandwidth, to ensure that end users can remain productive regardless of network conditions.
• PCoiP includes VMware View Display with support for up to four monitors and the ability to deliver the optimal resolution and pivot orientation to each monitor independently.
• VMware vSphere Support – VMware vSphere 4 support enables improved virtual machine scalability, performance, and management, with continued support for VMware Infrastructure 3.x.
• Enhanced single sign-on – The Log in as current user feature is integrated with Active Directory and smart cards to help simplify the process of logging in to a VMware View desktop.
• Restricted entitlements – Administrators can control user access to virtual desktops based on the View Connection Server being used for authentication.
• Smart card policies – Administrators can set group policies to force desktop disconnection and require reconnection when users remove smart cards.
• Domain filtering – You can use vdmadmin.exe to control the accessibility of domains and traverse trust relationships more quickly.
• You can cleanly delete View desktops using scripts.
• You can log in to View desktops using user principal names (UPN).
• You can explicitly configure IP addresses to override those supplied by the View Agent when accessing a desktop.
• Mixed Active Directory and Kerberos authentication is supported.

 

In my early use of VMware View I have overall been impressed, I have had a few bumps in the road related to getting multiple monitors working. I am also a little disappointed that we did not see any integration into vCenter in this version of View to provide that single management pane of glass. I was also surprised to see that Windows 7 is experimental but I have also read that Q1 of 2010 it will be fully supported.

A true desktop experience—multiple monitors displaying rich media.

So why VMware View 4 and Thin Clients?

 

1. True Desktop experience

   • Multiple Monitors
   • Rich Media

2. Reduction in costs

   • Thin clients last 3x longer than desktops, Centralized Client OS Management
   • Thin client computers use only a fraction of amount of energy that is used by a desktop computer.
   • Reduction in desktop support costs – patching, upgrades, and troubleshooting

3. Ease of management

   • Rapid Client Deployment
   • Centralized Client OS Management
   • Centralized Data can easily be backed up
   • Desktop and Operating Systems refreshes are reduced and eliminated

4. Security and Compliance

   • Data Security – Data is in Datacenter
   • Secure Remote Access Web Portal
   • HIPAA and Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) Compliant

 

Is anyone else thinking this all sounds familiar? Virtualization is creating what I call the “computing circle of life.”  We are going back to the days of dumb terminals and hypervisor computing but this isn’t your father’s compute system as long as we don’t see the return of Token Ring I think everything is going to be alright.  Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks for us showing off VMware View 4 in our EMC VMware Center of Excellence.

The long-awaited release of VMware Site Recovery Manager 4 is finally upon us.  Many have been holding their upgrade plans to vSphere4 until this release of Site Recovery Manager.  In this release, VMware customers start to see a single pane of glass into their Virtual Datacenter using the linked vCenters feature within vCenter4 and Site Recovery Manager.  VMware View 4 will be the next major product offering from VMware to follow.

NFS Support

SRM 4 now offers full support for NFS storage systems.  Previously only the iSCSI and Fiber Channel guys could use SRM’s ease of DR capabilities, well now the NFS guys can reap the benefits of site to site failover.  Here is a link to certified storage systems for Site Recovery Manager 4.

Support for Shared Recovery Sites

You can now take multiple data centers and create disaster plans into one location.  Not all organizations have just two datacenters; a majority of companies have Datacenters dispersed throughout the country that you can now fail individually.  The other scenario is if you have multiple vCenter servers within the same geographic region or even in the same physical space you can now have disaster plans for both, up to ten shared recovery sites are supported.

Full Compatibility with DPM (Distributed Power Management)

Distributed Power Management (DPM) is a VMware mechanism that manages power consumption by ESX hosts.  When DPM and DRS are enabled on a recovery site cluster, SRM temporarily disables DPM for the cluster and ensures that all hosts in the cluster are powered on before recovery begins. After failing back to the primary site DPM is then enabled again at the recovery site.  The advantage is that if you are in DR facility and charged per kilowatt you can prevent being charged for power not be used and also helping the environment by not wasting energy resources.
 
Automated Failback

My personal favorite and one I believe everyone has been asking for is finally here: the ability to hit the big red button to fail to your recovery site, then flip your script and replication and be prepared to failback when needed.  After a recovery plan has been run and the virtual machines are operating at the recovery site, you can reconfigure Site Recovery Manager and run a failback procedure—this migrates the same virtual machines within your recovery plan back to the primary site and prepares both sites for the next recovery or test.
 
So in summary, VMware has continued to build Site Recovery Manager 4 and has listened to their customers by adding new features. If you want to read more about new features of Site Recovery Manager 4 follow this link.