First of a series of Holiday Gifts–UBERAlign

I’ve got a series of blog posts lined up in the giving spirit of the holiday season (which commercially started the moment Halloween ends – in the US they start with Thanksgiving, rest of world starts ramping up the advertising for Christmas and the other many Nov/Dec holidays).

I’ll give away the punchline now – here are the four gift blog posts:

1. UBERAlign from Nick Weaver – a CRAZY awesome tool that everyone VMware Admin should have in the kitbag going fwd – regardless of whether you use EMC storage or not – the rest Nick – thank you!
2. Recordings of many VMworld sessions – and fixes to broken FTP links to the core FTP content – sorry this has taken so long, but have been a busy, busy little beaver on many things – mostly 2012 planning.
3. SRM Survey – have a chance to influence SRM roadmaps – how cool is that?
4. Huge (literally huge!!) “Santa Chad” giveaway contest.   There will be more Iomega devices, more iPads, more VNXe 3300’s than we’ve done in any other giveaway…  Stay tuned for details – will post details early next week.

So – without further ado, a little more on #1, UBERAlign from Nick Weaver…

VMDK alignment is almost ALWAYS messed up at customers in my experience.   It’s the ultimate sign of “operational excellence” to be aligned all over the place, as it’s so easy to miss at some point – and while OK when it’s fast and dirty (labs, etc), it’s important in production.

Why?   Misaligned VMs always have a performance impact.  They don’t lower VM performance per se, but increase the amount of “heavy lifting” your storage array needs to do behind the scenes.  This means you’ll run out of “oompf” before you would otherwise, and THEN it manifests itself in performance issues (array pees all over itself).  How much do you lose?   The answer is it depends.  It depends on the array internals (some affected more than others), and in general how much you are using “layered services” (snapshots/dedupe/compression) features that the array provides (each of which compounds the fundamental extra work being done due to extra internal IOs).

Duncan did a great post on this here I would encourage people to read.   Also, my colleague Vaughn from NetApp and I have been preaching this at VMworlds and VMUGs for some time, as you can see here.

It’s easy to find out if you have/haven’t been aligning your VMs through a variety of techniques – just google it.

So - for a long time the storage vendor community has been telling VMware customers about this, but the answer to “what do I do if I’m not aligned” has been, tough.

Your choices were:

• Home-brew your own (often using GParted).
• Use Quest’s excellent vOptimizer Pro as a commercial product.
• Some people used array vendor tools (often limited in various ways).

Nick Weaver – EMC vSpecialist (hint Nick – you can never STOP being a vSpecialist as it’s a state of mind :-), now part of the EMC Office of the CTO, has been working away at a tool that would be a great solution for the broader community to resolve realignment at scale, and across a BROAD set of use cases, and regardless of your storage vendor.

Beyond that, it can do thick-thin conversion during the process.

Here’s Nick’s UBERAlign feature list:

• Allows for fast alignment checking of virtual machines with detailed logging.
• Can perform alignment to any offset you want. Even the crazy ones that you shouldn’t choose.
• Works with both Windows 2000/XP/2003/2008 (NTFS) and Linux Distros (EXT2/EXT3/EXT4).
• Is able to work on NTFS boot drives perfectly. It does this by rewriting NTFS Metadata (the right way).
• Auto detects Windows 2008 and Windows 7 native installs (alignment not needed). Will not touch a System Reserved Partition (important for Windows 2008).
• Preserves all Windows drive mapping (AFAIK only one to do so). This means no having to remap drive letters and complete support for non “C:\” system drives with some Windows builds (some Citrix stuff).
• Doesn’t trash the NTFS and Boot mirrors like other tools.
• Handles Primary and Extended partitions like it is no big deal on both Windows and Linux.
• Has the ability to handle multiple disks for a VM.
• Multiple disks + Multiple Partitions + Multiple types (primary, logical) + Multiple file systems (NTFS, EXT#) = no problem
• Also allows for optional Space Reclamation on both NTFS and Ext! That’s right: you can choose to do space reclamation at the same time as an alignment or as a option to itself. This means you can retrieve space no longer used on Thin VM’s using UBERAlign.
• Operational model allows for completely CONCURRENCY with processing VMs. You can run up to 6 simultaneous jobs per Console and as many Consoles as your VCenter can handle. This was designed to allow people with big environments to process through a large set of VM’s.
• Options to check, align, or reclaim any choice of disks in a VM.
• Powerful very simple to use graphic console and easy to deploy OVA’s.
• Orchestration for batch operations allowing you to process groups of VM’s with just a couple clicks.
• Getting started is simple with just entering VCenter credentials/IP and pointing at a vAligner.
• Space Reclamation should also help with possibly speeding up defragmentation of some NTFS file systems after. Your mileage may vary.
• Space Reclamation can help you turn a thick VM into a thin one and actually get the space back!
• Does all operations IN-PLACE! My first big goal was this. No more having to copy disks using the ESX command line(especially since ESX is going away). This will process a VM’s disks in-place.
• Automatically makes a snapshot before running for failback. If you turn on your VM to check it and see anything you don’t like you can simply revert to the UBERAlign snapshot and be right back. (You should always have a backup and test also, see prereqs)
• Automatically rolls the snapshots back if it sees an error. UBERAlign has the ability to do health check throughout the jobs and if it sees something wrong it will roll back it’s own snapshots for you.
• Automatically enables CHKDSK scanning on each NTFS volume on the next boot.
• Completely Storage Array agnostic. That’s right: if it connects to vSphere and host storage UBERAlign will work with it. This includes local disks (see prereqs below) and arrays other than EMC. Don’t say that the EMC vSpecialists don’t love all VMware users.
• Completed tested against vSphere 4.1 / 5 environments.

You can check out his post (and get the vApp) here.

Like many of the UBER tools and other tools provided openly to all (think project Orion and our incredible EMC vCenter Operations modules as just a few examples), these are not officially supported.   Ones that are the most useful get slotted into the engineering/product teams to continue to develop and maintain.  You should expect that I’m driving like mad to get the UBER align into our official EMC bag of tools and integrated into the EMC Virtual Storage Integrator.

Comments

[Jonas Nagel]

SRM yadda, yadda! We're awaiting the release of the MirrorView SRA Enabler, else our customers cannot use SRM5. Expedite THIS!

Greetings from the EMC Party (Copenhagen) chat :-)

[Daniel Pfuhl]

The same for us - we are waiting for the GA of MirrorView/s SRA!!

[Chad Sakac]

@Jonas, @Daniel - I know - I'm frustrated too :-) The MV SRA is literally right on the finish line of the cert, and should pop ANY DAY NOW.

I'm all over it.

[Mike]

Chand.. Any update on MV SRA??