Folks – if you’re in that neck of the woods next week (June 6th) – please come join! The Carolinas VMUG has built up a well deserved reputation as one of the best VMUGs – and this one is no exception. Register here. The agenda is chock-a-block of killer content (don’t trust me, read for yourself here).
The morning keynote has none other than Ray O’Farrell from VMware. For those of you that don’t know Ray, he’s the man(technically Senior Vice President, Product Engineering) where the buck stops at most of the core vSphere engineering. He’s the fellow who makes the tradeoffs. He’s the dude where the buck stops. His session: “The Evolution of vSphere, a Look at the Past and Peek into the Future” is sure to be a tantalizing glimpse that will include vSphere.next tidbits. Having been in that position, half the fun is watching someone walk a tightrope over a pit of snarling lawyers :-)
There’s an expert panel it is an honor to participate in entitled: “What is the Future of Virtualization?: My fellow panelists are industry luminaries that include William Lam, Scott Lowe, and Chris Colotti from VMware.
And, I’m going to always try to buck the vendor trend at these things to make your session into a commercial. My session is entitled: “Software-Defined Datacenter: Technology, Roadmap, and Anti-Marketing”. I can’t wait to hear how well I did/didn’t make it not a vendor commercial!
The numbers of these large scale events are amazing. While the most important number is the 15,000+ customers, partners and others who attended – there are some other amazing numbers.
One amazing success this year was the EMC Hands-On-Labs (HoL). Here’s the tale of the tape – the infrastructure behind the scenes, which labs were the most popular, and customer feedback.
I want to put out my THANK YOU to the teams behind this – Simon Seagrave (of http://techhead.co fame) most of all who lead and championed the efforts. We took a different take on the HoL this year – teaming up with the VMware Nee team who have built a killer front-end for these sorts of events. Also, for each station, a team from the engineering team of the products represented and EMC SEs were the content champions and manned the labs. It’s a marathon to produce, and then a marathon to support (with a small number of folks wimping out and bailing, just like in a real marathon). Huge thanks to the VMware Nee team and to all of the lab content champions.
With the exception of Lab #3 (ViPR), the labs are immediately going into vLab. The ViPR lab (which was one of the most popular at the event!) will be up soon, but as we’re going through ViPR builds at the speed of light, will wait a little longer as we approach GA.
So – what goes into something this big and awesome? What are the numbers, the tale of the tape? How many miles did I walk at EMC World 2013? Read on….
While it doesn’t get the airtime that big products/technologies/acquisitions gets – I think that things like tools and support are as important ultimately.
There’s been a ton of work on the EMC Support tools and models that is getting refreshed here at EMC World.
The wave of updates to the EMC Support online portal (http://support.emc.com) is huge (and goes online in June):
Customer, EMC, and EMC Partner access to the Install Base database – this enables the user to examine their inventory, outstanding SRs, and details across their EMC platforms, in one simple easy place. This uses ESRS (best – richest capabilities) and other older vehicles (good – like dial-home) for getting data into the SYR system. ESRS is getting built-in to the platforms more and more (vs standalone gateways) which is good.
For Elite customers, this inventory is mapped onto geographic maps, with push-pins representing sites, and colors indicating open SRs. Over time, the team’s goal is to open this to all customers.
We’ve merged the Primus/Knowledgebase system, the SR system all into the common support portal.
The EMC Support mobile app (on iTunes store here) now has the ability to update SRs. Future updates are targeting cool things like voice-based updates.
This is a REALLY cool demonstration on the power of coupling the network virtualization capabilities of VMware Nicira with storage replication, and specifically VPLEX active-active models.
Imagine this with vVPLEX, or put another way, VPLEX as a software data service in EMC ViPR…
Rather than saying another word, just watch the demo below.
EMC Recoverpoint 4.0 (codenamed “Elarra”) was announced last week to “clear the deck” for EMC World, but is shipping this week, so I held my post back until GA and EMC World. I’d highly encourage people to read Itzik’s blog on it here.
It’s a HUGE release, improving on just great technology. There are a ton of happy Recoverpoint customers – and this will broaden it even further.
Recoverpoint isn’t like how many customers do replication – it isn’t a “point in time copy”, but rather a “Tivo/PVR” like continuous replication technology (can be used for both local and remote uses). It’s architecture always has involved a “splitter” (software that copies off an IO) and Recoverpoint “appliances” (called RPAs) to manage the replication, carry the replication load, present virtual views of volumes, and more.
This architecture has always had good and bad:
Good:
First thing first – Recoverpoint has been, and continues to be SUPER efficient. It does deltas only, which are in turn compressed/block deduped/write folded/prioritized. I laugh out loud whenever a customer tells me that our competitors are describing EMC as only having full SRDF copies these days :-)
Broad platform support vs. “replication built into the platform”. It’s possible to use Recoverpoint with different array types.
Decoupled the replication load from the production array. Customers with very complex replication topologies know that sometimes this can interfere with prod in ways you don’t expect when the replication load isn’t isolated in some way (this is true of EMC and non-EMC arrays). I’m not saying this isolation needs to be “physical”, but until array have robust isolation techniques for storage stacks (think EMC C4 VNXe project – google it – or array-based virtualization approaches like vSphere) as an example – it is tricky topic.
Splitter can live in different places (today, it’s embedded in VNX, VMAX, VPLEX, and host splitters). The VPLEX splitter is pretty handy, as it means the solution can work with any array in effect.
Bad:
If splitter implementation isn’t rock solid (dependencies on splitter, fabric intelligence, and how they tie together), and customers can have problems. In the early days where the splitter was embedded in 3rd party switches – these often were very troublesome. We don’t architect those anymore. Conversely, customer satisfaction for embedded splitters is awesome.
The requirement for physical RPAs means two things: environmental load (space/power/cooling) and cost (outside the array itself).
Beyond the cool new features – Recoverpoint 4.0 goes a long way towards keeping (and expanding!) all the good, while fixing all the bad.
4.0 has huge performance leaps (one example is a 60% bump to 400MBps async replication per consistency group – and the total for a cluster is much larger)
4.0 has huge scale increases (up to 8000 devices and up to 2PB protected by a single recoverpoint cluster).
Important new functionality (one of the most requested things) like fan in (4:1) and fan out (1:4) topologies.
But, there’s even more:
Virtual Recoverpoint Appliances! As Itzik points out in his post, this started as a field/customer initiated effort to make playing with Recoverpoint easier (I remember, I was there). Pat Gelsinger in his former role as the EMC EVP on products (and less important people like me) hinted at all EMC products being made as virtual appliances bit by bit. Here’s one that is super handy. Deploy a 8GB RAM, 8vCPU VM (you can use smaller ones, performance will scale down), and as a Recoverpoint customer – you can deploy as many vRPAs as you want. Each 8GB RAM/8 vCPU vRPA can do around 8500 write IOps to the journal, and can replicate about 80MBps (or ~640Mbps). This makes deploying Recoverpoint simple and easy. You can also imagine all sorts of multi-tenant, and service provider options. We’ve also indicated that we anticipate making Recoverpoint (and VPLEX) data services into ViPR in the future. Here’s a demo from Itzik about how easy it is to install and use!
VMware SRM multiple Point-in-Time recovery! Another huge feature request from customers. As a sophisticated data replication technology, Recoverpoint can recover to any point in time in it’s journal. This is important, as with all replication – it will replicate latent errors. If someone accidentally deletes a table – that gets faithfully replicated to the other side. One needs to either be snapshotting the remote side periodically (do you have the right snapshot?) or use something like Recoverpoint’s continous journal approach. BUT if you use VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) – the APIs and the recovery model has no way to specify a point in time (it uses the lowest common denominator approach in storage land – a sync or async single copy replica). With this release (and a VSI plugin), the VMware admin can – without leaving their console – restore to any point in time. Itzik also recorded a demo of how this works in action…
Recoverpoint can be automated and made programmable via EMC ViPR! This means that there is now a fully automatable, RESTful API compliant, decoupled control plane for remote replication.
Truly, this is software defined in BOTH senses – an abstracted control plane, and a software-implemented data plane.
There’s more to come. Think about the power of a software-based replication engine (vRPA) as kick-a$$ as Recoverpoint, tested at scale, with rich features, and great VMware integration. Then, think of a software based splitter. Where would be a great place to put that splitter?
If you’re in the UK, and use vSphere 5.1 Recoverpoint – please comment. I would love to hear feedback (from anyone), and if you’re in the UK – I have something I want you to try :-)
And so, off come the covers! ViPR = Virtualization Platform Re-imagined = Project Bourne.
Like all things, the story behind the story is half the fun. If you turn back in the way back machine here, about 2 years a couple ideas were bouncing around inside EMC. It’s important to understand that this enhances and extends traditional storage virtualization, doesn’t replace it. To understand why – read the post.
This is a really big idea, and will be a really big blog post. I apologize in advance – but IMO it’s warranted.
If you’re interested (in both the origin story, strategic view, architectural model and what’s next) – READ ON, and please comment!
And everyone was scurrying around like EMCers :-) I was trapped on a delayed flight, but got there there soon enough. The SE Conference is kicking into to high gear also…
What to expect?
The announcements people have come to expect – bigger, faster, more rich functions/APIs. These are always awesome. Will post as they go live..
Some announcements that I think will catch people by surprise – I’ll leave it at that for now. Will post as the cloth is lifted…
Us and 15,000+ friends. I don’t know the exact number – but we’ll land on Vegas this week and make it ours, learn, laugh, and connect.
The inevitable naysayers. Whateva :-)
A huge SE conference. There are about 500 partners joining the EMC SEs this year – and the SE representation is from around the globe. Partners – if you didn’t register in advance, you can join, just expect to sign an NDA before joining the sessions – you’re getting the same deep insider info the EMC SEs get.
All the main EMC World sessions should be streamed – so make sure you follow #EMCWorld and www.emcworld.com
Now – for those of you there – we have a real treat in store – a Hands-on-Lab (HoL) experience that is dialed up to 11. With each year, these get better and better; the team supporting them gets stronger and stronger. A big shout out to the vLab team, the VMware HoL team who helps, and to the EMC SE/Product team combos that worked on each lab.
Join us – it’s the best way to learn, IMO. Plus you can win:
There are 31 labs filled with goodness – and our goal is to make all the labs up in vLab right after the conference. Read on for more, and please comment before/during/after: what was the experience? What could we do better?
VMworld has been, and continues to be (IMO – but I’m biased) the most awesome tech conference (and that’s saying something, considering that EMC World is right around the corner – REGISTER NOW). One thing I’ve always dug is the degree of “community” around VMware.
BTW - I think this sense of VMware community is changing a little – hard to put my finger on it. I think part of it is the magic is moving to other parts of the stack – partially around networking (think of folks like Scott Lowe and Brad Hedlund going to Nicira), partially around new storage models (so much going on here in startup and big company land), partially around automation (whether it’s crazy awesomeness around Puppet, vCAC, or any of a million startups). Part of it is around the “who’s who” changing as people move into new things, new roles, and new stars appear.
While parts of what make up the community may be changing, it is the community that makes VMworld magic. If I think about other conferences, they don’t have the same community submission and voting process. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: in my experience the process is very fair. I’m not always happy with it, but it does tend to be fair.
The community (vendors, customers, partners, VMware folks) all make submissions, and then we all vote.
I’ve put some of my favorites (not just the EMC ones) past the break – check them out, and if you are intrigued, VOTE!
As we keep pushing to be a more transparent company with our core partners – our internal quarterly SE training content has been opened up to all our partners – no edits, everything we provide internally. Click on the link below!
And remember partners – our SE conference is OPEN TO YOU! Get yourself to EMC World, and we’ll see you there (click on below to find out more about the SE conference and EMC World)!
EMC Technical Advisory (or “ETA”) are notices to customers of important fixes or updates. Some are more important than others.
If you go to http://support.emc.com, you can get all the ETAs for your platforms. Shortly, this portal is getting a ton of updates, so customers can see a ton of info for all their EMC solutions in a nice place, with some useful analytics. EMC customers, partners – you can learn more about this at EMC World.
Every once in a while, I see an ETA I think could use extra eyeballs – this is one.
You can get all the info at the ETA link above, but the core issue is that you can have VMDK data inconsistency on the Target of an XCOPY session, while the Symmetrix VMAX storage array does not exhibit internal symptoms indicating data inconsistency.
The symptom is that a VM may not be able to boot after some time following an XCOPY operation.
The Root Cause: This is due to an Enginuity issue. During a WRITE SAME/UNMAP operation for an XCOPY Target volume, the optimization function and an extent overlap can result in data inconsistency.
This problem was introduced with Fix 62776, released in 5876.159.102. This fix was written to optimize the WRITE SAME command in vMotion when data is copied from the Source to Target and the extent is overlapped. Refer also to solution EMC317607. The problem occurs in this optimization for WRITE SAME/UNMAP, when it is issued to an XCOPY Target volume. (TimeFinder/Clone is not affected since it does not perform this optimization.) The optimization skips the background copy on the tracks for which the WRITE SAME/UNMAP command was issued. The problem is that the extents sent to stop the background copy use member-LBA instead of host-LBA. Only Meta devices are affected by this problem.
The fix: Enginuity Fix 66930 addresses the issue and is available via Enginuity Pack at 5876.159.102 and 5876.163.105. Contact your local EMC Customer Service Representative or the EMC Support Center for further information on this issue.
The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by EMC and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of EMC. This is my blog, it is not an EMC blog.
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