Virtual Geek

My 2 cents on AWS, and also “Now, that’s a heck of a ‘plan B’”

So – first things first, everyone is going on and on about the AWS outage last week.  Here’s my short 2 cents on it:

1. People who say “hey see, public cloud availability is not ‘enterprise ready’!” IMO are being alarmist, and are off base.   For years, many traditional enterprise apps (sadly) dream of the overall availability that many of the cloud services have exhibited for years now.
2. It highlighted that you need to know what you’re doing when using these public cloud services – just because it’s a public cloud doesn’t absolve you from that   Arguably, the app-side folks need to know more (they have to build in app-level resiliency as a core part of their design).   If apps were written to have app-level resiliency and leverage multiple AWS availability zones, they would have been OK.
3. That many people whose use cases demand more (more availability/recoverability/compliance) really weren’t thinking enough.   Man, I HOPE that this thread on the AWS support forums is a gag.  If not, it’s really scary.   https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=241597

I will make one critical statement though – it highlights why I believe the EMC/VMware view of cloud – that being able to federate in and out is VERY important (along with the ability to attest to trust/compliance in the cloud).

My point here is that Amazon going down isn’t the main thing (again, if you had a well-designed app, and planned for the architectural model of AWS, you would have been fine).   But, lets say that it dragged on and on, or multiple availability zones started to fail, or Amazon had a huge breach – or heck, even when out of business (unlikely – but could happen to us all) – if switching is virtually impossible (due to API lockin, app-dev lockin, or the huge problem of getting massive amounts of data out) – now THAT’S a scary proposition…

That’s why I think all the vendor community working towards portability (at every layer), and technologies to make workload and data federation easier is very, very important.   None of us are perfect – but this case really does highlight where that potential “Hotel California” effect Paul Maritz always talks about could become very, very bad.

Switching gears…

EMC World is right around the corner.   If you haven’t registered yet, there’s something wrong with you :-)

So – the hands-on-labs (vLabs) is becoming epic.  This will be very, very cool – check out the link here for details.   At the link you can see a list of all the on-demand labs we will offer, and there is a picture as we stage everything.   All powered by the EMC Demo Cloud.  A big shout out to the team (which spans all of EMC) who is working so hard to make it happen.  

To give you an idea of how epic this will be, here’s a shot of our much, much smaller PLAN B.

The biggest risk for us will be a telecom failure – as all the HoL will be literally powered out of our Demo Cloud which is in RTP.   These travel half-racks have VNXes and UCS C-series rack-mount systems which at a moment’s notice SHOULD be able to jump in if things go horribly awry.   But then again, the risk of a “no net” environment is half the fun :-)

Speaking of “no net” – Chad’s World Live is coming along – will have some very cool demos, and a bunch of customers on stage.   Of course, there are some bits we’re trying to “gag up a bit”.  Here’s a shot of Wade and I crashing Joe Tucci’s office…

And then inevitably getting kicked out by Pam :-)…

Make sure you register!   EMC World is going to be a gas!

Chad’s World–Episode 4 (UIM v2.1 and Operations Center)

Episode 4 is up!   Guest appearances, great EMC/VMware/Cisco partners – demonstration of new products, and sneak peak at products around the corner… Filled with goodness (and lots of stupid stunts) like always!

The new product is EMC Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) Provisioning Center v2.1.  There’s a ton of new stuff, but the biggies are full Vblock family support, vCenter integration (with a single click – everything to provision a vSphere clsuter is done and you’re ready to go in vCenter).

The “sneak peek” is of something we’ll be doing very soon – which is UIM Operations Center. It’s a cool, cool idea.  (and if you look back at VMworld 2009 at this link, you can see it’s something we’ve been working on for a while). 

Check it all out at the link below!

Boston 2011 Marathon

This blog is my personal blog (as I note in the about section), but it tends to be pretty work-centric, which for me, means there’s a lot of VMware and EMC stuff, as well as stuff about my corporate (VMware Affinity) and field teams (vSpecialists).

But, like everyone, I’m a human too.   And while I REALLY like working for EMC, and am incredibly PASSIONATE about VMware and EMC, I LOVE my family.

Today is the Boston Marathon, and my wife Susan is running – with the kids and I supporting from the sidelines.  I’m incredibly proud of her, and humbled by her achievement – to qualify is quite something, and IMO, says something about her focus and execution when she sets her mind on something.  

The race starts in Hopkinton, which is home to EMC HQ – a small, and beautiful New England town.

Throughout the day, I’ll be posting photos and videos – there are many friends/family following along.

GO SUSAN!

Read on for details, videos (short on YouTube, longer ones on Vimeo), pictures which I will be posting throughout the day.

vSphere Changed Block Tracking **on Restore**

This post is going to deep-dive into vSphere’s vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP) Changed Block Tracking on restore – something not yet widely used (though when you see the results, you’ll likely agree that over time, everyone is going to need to leverage it).

The context?  Today – Avamar 6.0 was released.  It’s a huge release.  HUGE.   The core value proposition is amped up – save more, backup and restore faster, flexible restore (in place, with the industries best VMware integration when it comes to backup – and still no agent or client-based cost. 

The high notes (for me) of the release:

• Data Domain Boost and Data Domain management integration.   This is very important for the larger database workloads, or for VM image-level backups of very, very active and very large VMs.  This makes Avamar and Datadomain an “and”, not an “or” – and customers can get the best of both worlds and save even more $ while accelerating backup/recovery.
• Bigger, badder Avamar hardware = denser systems and lower cost.   This means 65% lower power consumption, but also 230% higher max density per rack.  
• Not only was the hardware refreshed, but the “under the covers” architecture went from RHEL to SLES.   Good for VMware alignment to be sure (EMC is as a general statement moving to SLES in a ton of areas), but also more importantly good for customers in that remote patching, update, and upgrades of Avamar nodes is much, much improved.    Likewise, push-based agent deployment (we strive for agentless particularly with VMware, but there are some app-based use cases where app integration demands it).
• Broader and deeper app support.  This always has been an Avamar strong suit relative to the other advanced VMware-focused backup folks, but it got hopped up big time in this release.  
  • Exchange – native mail-level recovery in a single step, and 78% higher throughput.
  • Sharepoint – integrated granular recovery via Kroll Ontrack, and nice new VSS plugin that gives you a full farm-level view.
  • SQL Server – 46% higher throughput.
  • Oracle – with RAC, you just need to point to a single node, and really broad config support
• Huge improvements in end-user self restore.   This is a big deal in VDI deployments.   The users can do self-recovery against a nice, simple portal – and can do it by “search” or by “browse”.   One item of note – this function still requires the in-guest agent, VADP/CBT doesn’t work here – working on it (but remember, dedupe means it doesn’t add material storage costs on top of VM-image level backup, and there is no agent cost).   This is what it looks like to the user:

But.. the BIGGEST new thing (at least in my VMware-centered universe) new thing is Changed Block Tracking based restore.

This is really material as the most common backup/recovery request from customers in the VMware use case goes something like this:

• “I want it to be agentless (at least for the majority of my VMs – I accept and desire agents for app-centric scenarioes).”
• “I want it to save me a lot of $ because I know commonality is really high – so my dedupe expectations are through the roof.”
• “I want it to offload the vSphere infrastructure (network, ESX hosts, storage)”
• “I want it to leverage the fact that they are VMs.  I want vCenter integration.  I want VM image-level backups with no agents – without giving up catalogs, and simple single-step restore.”
• “I want it to be BETTER than the physical world – faster backup, and more importantly, faster recovery.”

There are certain “intrinsic” architectural things that have always made Avamar very popular against this list namely variable-length source-based dedupe = it’s ability to have 99%+ rates of dedupe and to offload the ESX hosts due to it’s source-based nature.   Avamar was also one of the earlier large backup vendor products with deep vCenter integration.

But – the emergence of VADP in vSphere 4, it’s maturing as of Update 2, and expansion in vSphere 4.1 have enabled us to take this to a new level.  

In Avamar 5, use of CBT along with SCSI hot-add, and the VDDK (all parts of VADP) made us able to improve backup times (which were already good) by a factor of 10x, and make single-step file level restore easy.

In Avamar 6, the addition of CBT being used during restores brings that same “order of magnitude” improvement to common restore scenarioes. 

To understand how and why – read on…

Have VMware? An easy way to potentially win an iPad 2

Using VMware?  Wikibon is running a survey looking to determine what you find valuable, what you want more of, and what you hate :-)

Take the survey.  Unload.  Tell ‘em what you think – and, hey you might win an iPad 2 :-)

Wikibon Survey - VMware Storage Integration The Wikibon Project, with it's mission to help IT practitioners learn from each other, is looking for your assistance with a brief survey on storage in VMware environments. Your information will give valuable detail as to how the industry is doing on "The Value of VMware Integration Journey" - see the 2010 research at The Value of the VMware Integration Journey. If you are a company that has installed storage for VMware environments or is in the business of selling/consulting on these environments, we ask you to take this 10-15 minute survey. Click Here to Start:http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5KCSR8K    Survey participants who provide their contact detail will be entered in a drawing. The drawing will take place immediately after the survey is closed. The winner of this drawing will receive an iPad2. Your contact detail will only be used to contact you for the prize or for follow-up if you opt-in. For any questions on this survey, please contact us by clicking here.

Did you know….

EMC/VMware Performance Toolkit

Thanks to all who attended the webcast the past Thursday regarding performance diagnosis/resolution tools and techniques.   Feedback was overwhelmingly positive. 

NOTE + HEADS UP – this thursday’s (April 7th)  session (vSphere Security best practices) is going to be killer – Erin Banks rocks.   April is “Best Practice” webcast month – so the following weeks we’ll be covering backup (14th), EMC Unified storage (21st), and EMC VMAX (28th) best-practices. Register here.

So – the performance webcast covered:

• Good approaches to resolving performance issues.
• Key “must have” tools
• HOWTO use them the most effectively.

In the “must have” tools section, we talked about not only esxtop/resxtop, vscsistats, vcenter reports and EMC array tools but… more importantly – we demonstrated simple, easy powershell tools that help you use these across clusters, to correlate and analyze this data – to get to answers.

This stuff is all provided FOR FREE.   Use it.

The session was recorded, and you can get the recording below (click on the below to watch).

The powerpoint used is also shared in PPT format (for max leverage and reusability).  Of course this means that EMC competitors will use it (I see this all the time – argh – note there is an “EMC copyright” logo in the slide deck), but it’s a small price to pay for the gain for the overall community.

I also REALLY want to highlight Clint Kitson’s powershell work here (thanks Clint – you rock) and also directly link to the “key resources” I mentioned.   As is always the case – the “know where to go for what you don’t know” is often as important as the “what you know”.

“Essentials”

• “vSphere Resource Mangement Guide” (esxtop manual): http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_resource_mgmt.pdf
• “Interpreting esxtop Statistics”: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9279
• “Using vscsiStats for Storage Performance Analysis” (Drummonds): http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-10095
• “vscsiStats: Fast and Easy Disk Workload Characterization on VMware ESX Server” (Irfan): http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-10084

Powershell Toolkits (Kitson)

• ESXtop: https://community.emc.com/thread/117380?tstart=0
• vSCSIstats: https://community.emc.com/thread/116672?tstart=0
• EMC Array: https://community.emc.com/thread/116393?tstart=0
• Monitor (“munge it all together and graph”): https://community.emc.com/message/536505#536505

Performance “places to see”:

• VMware’s Performance Technology Pages http://vmware.com/technical-resources/performance
• VMware’s Performance Blog http://blogs.vmware.com/performance
• Performance Community http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/general/performance
• Irfan’s blog http://virtualscoop.org

Performance “people to follow”:

• @VMwareStorage
• @virtualirfan
• @clintonskitson

vSphere + VNX = Integrated. HOWTO.

The posts that are done with integrated demonstrations are quite popular – these are useful for customers, EMC partners, and EMCers themselves. 

The vSpecialist and VNX teams (big shout out to vSpecialist Joel Sprouse) worked together to create a tight, 15 minute demonstration that shows the highlights of the current VMware/EMC integration capabilities in the VNX platform which are all provided at no additional cost.  It covers:

• vCenter-integrated provisioning (block and NAS) via the VSI 4.1 vCenter plugin + USM module.
• vCenter-integrated visibility (block and NAS) via the VSI 4.1 vCenter plugin
• Automated and simplified path management (for both NMP and PP/vE) via VSI + Pathing module
• Simplified datastore expansion
• Simplified VM-level replication using hardware-acceleration in the VNX
• Simplified VM-level compression in the VNX
• Automated ESX host registration in Unisphere (through embedded APIs in the vmkernel)
• Automated VM-storage mapping in Unisphere (through vCenter API integration)

Remember – there are resources for support (http://support.emc.com) and general info (http://www.emc.com) but if you ever have questions about VMware/EMC together, you can always interact with experts on the Everything VMware at EMC community (http://www.emc.com/vmwarecommunity) – which is monitored and supported by vSpecialists.

Enjoy (and always – follow after the youtube video for high-rez MOV and WMV)

Download the high-rez MOV and WMV files….

EMC World–Prepare for facemelting awesomesauce

In the world of information (and what these days doesn’t fall into that category), EMC World is the premiere event.   This year, it’s in the Venetian, May 9th-12th.  Vegas baby!

We’re hard at work, and there will be tons of new tech, new announcements, demonstrations and hands-on.  Speaking for myself (and I have but a small part), we’re working FURIOUSLY to make it awesome and well worth your precious time.

If you want to come and have drinks on me – on Wednesday there’s an…interesting… keynote (see the keynotes here – it’s REALLY funny – “one of these is not like the others” – see if you can find it).  Suffice it to say the Molson Canadian will be flowing copiously, and we’ll have some fun.

What I’ve always liked about EMC World is that like VMworld – it’s a technical conference.  Sales are kinda excluded.  It’s a place where the engineering teams come out to the forefront.  

One of the things we’re doing this year will be a massive hands-on-lab, competing with our GETO (now IET) counterparts at VMware :-)  We face an extra challenge, which is that making a large-scale on demand (whole environments provisioned in minutes) cloud when you’re working with our breadth of products requires… well… “creative thinking” :-)   If you want to play with the Virtual Storage Appliances of the future (some which haven’t seen the light of day outside EMC yet – come on by…

Here’s a montage of last year to give you a “flavor” of the event…

So…

REGISTER NOW!  

If you’re a customer who is interested in publicly sharing YOUR VMware/EMC story, I have a small number of passes available I can provide (though they are going fast) – please comment on the post, or email me – we’ll hook you up!