Virtualization

Careful preparation is a key element to success. If you restart a storage controller, or even the whole storage, you should be very sure that all ESXi hosts have enough paths to every datstore. Sure, you can use the VMware vSphere C# client or the Web Client to check every host and every datastore. But if you have a large cluster with a dozen datastores and some Raw Device Mappings (RDMs), this can take a looooong time. Checking the path state of each LUN is a task, which can be perfectly automated. Get a list of all hosts, loop through every host and every LUN, output a list of all hosts with all LUNs and all paths for each LUN. Sounds easy, right?

Another inconvenience that I noticed during the update process from VMware Horizon View 6.1.1 to 6.2 was, that the automatic screen resizing stopped working. When I connected to a desktop pool with the VMware Horizon client, I only got the screen resolution of the VM (the resolution that is used when connecting to the VM with the vSphere console)), not 1920x1200 as expected. This issue only occured with PCoIP, not with RDP. I had this issue with a static desktop and a dynamic desktop pool, and it occurred after updating the Horizon View agent. The resolution scaling worked with a Windows 2012 R2 RDS host, when I connected to a RDS with PCoIP.

I’m running a small VMware Horizon View environment in my lab. Nothing fancy, but all you need to show what Horizon View can do for you. This environment includes a Windows Server 2012 R2 RDS host. During the update process from Horizon View 6.1.1 to 6.2, I had to update the View agent on this RDS host. This update installation failed with an “Internal Error 25030”, followed by a rollback. Fortunately I had a snapshot, so I went back to the previous state and tried the update again. This attempt also went awry.

With the general availability of PernixData FVP 3.1, PernixData released the first version of PernixData Architect.

One of the biggest problems today is, that management tools are often focused on deployment and monitoring of applications or infrastructure. This doesn’t lead to a holistic view over applications and related data center infrastructure. You have to monitor at several points within the application stack and even then, you won’t get a holistic view. Without proper information, you can’t make proper decisions. At this point, PernixData Architect comes into play.

Important note: It seems that vCenter Server Appliance updates revert the changes. Please check the settings after each update!

The VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) can act as a remote syslog destition for ESXi hosts. This is very handy for troubleshooting and I really recommend to use this feature.  But VMware ESXi hosts can be really chatty and therefore it’s a good idea to keep an eye on the free disk space of the VCSA.

A free StoreOnce VSA, like the well known 1 TB StoreVirtual VSA? That would be too cool to be real. But it is real! Since February, HP offers a free 1 TB version of their StoreOnce VSA. I totally missed this announcement, but thanks to Calvin Zito I noticed it today:

Can you protect your data for free? Introducing the new free 1TB StoreOnce VSA http://t.co/71464n0iZp

— IT Godfather (@CalvinZito) April 19, 2015

The link leads to another blog post from Ashwin Shetty (Can you protect your data for free? Introducing the new free 1TB StoreOnce VSA), in which he provides more information about the free 1 TB StoreOnce VSA.

What a great show by Eric Siebert, David Davis, Simon Seagrave and their special guests Scott Davis from Infinio and John Troyer from TechReckoning! If you missed it, watch the recording!

First, I want to thank Eric for his work. If you read tweets like these, you will get a bad conscience.

https://twitter.com/ericsiebert/status/579867795833233408

https://twitter.com/ericsiebert/status/578746970753269761

This is the seventh year that Eric has organized and conducted the annual Top vBlog contest. He put so much work into this contest and this should be be recognized. I also like to thank the sponsor Infinio for supporting this contest.

Some days ago I talked to a colleague from our sales team and we discussed different solutions for a customer. I will spare you the details, but we discussed different solutions and we came across PernixData FVP, HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimization, HP 3PAR Adaptive Flash Cache and DataCore SANsymphony-V. And then the question of all questions came up: “What is the difference?”.

Simplify, then add Lightness

Lets talk about tiering. To make it simple: Tiering moves a block from one tier to another, depending on how often a block is accessed in a specific time. A tier is a class of storage with specific characteristics, for example ultra-fast flash, enterprise-grade SAS drives or even nearline drives. Characteristics can be the drive type, the used RAID level or a combination of characteristics. A 3-tier storage design can consist of only one drive type, but they can be organized in different RAID levels. Tier 1 can be RAID 1 and tier 3 can be RAID 6, but all tiers use enterprise-grade 15k SAS drives. But you can also mix drive types and RAID levels, for example tier 1 with flash, tier 2 with 15k SAS in a RAID 5 and tier 3 with SAS-NL and RAID 6. Each time a block is accessed, the block “heats up”. If it’s hot enough, it is moved one tier up. If it’s less often accessed, the block “cools down” and at a specific point, the block is moved a tier down. If a tier is full, colder blocks will to be moved down and hotter block have to be moved up. It’s a bit simplified, but products like DataCore SANsymphony-V with Auto-Tiering or HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimization are working this way.

On February 25, 2015 PernixData released the latest version of PernixData FVP. Even if it’s only a .5 release, FVP 2.5 adds some really cool features and improvements. New features are:

• Distributed Fault Tolerant Memory-Z (DFTM-Z)
• Intelligent I/O profiling
• Role-based access control (RBAC), and
• Network acceleration for NFS datastores

Distributed Fault Tolerant Memory-Z (DFTM-Z)

FVP 2.0 introduced support for server side memory as an acceleration resources. With this it was possible to use server side memroy to accelerate VM I/O operations. Server side memory is faster then flash, but also more expensive. With FVP 2.5, the support for adaptive memory compression. was added. DFTM-Z provides a more efficient use of the expensive resource “server side memory”.  Some of you may think “Oh no, compression! This will only cost performance!”. I don’t think that this is fair. ;) The PernixData engineers are focused on performance and I think that they haven’t during the development of DFTM-Z. DFTM-Z is enabled on hosts that use at least 20 GB memory for FVP. With increasing memory used for FVP, the area used for compression in the memory is also increased. So not the whole memory area used for acceleration is compressed, it’s only a part of it. With 20 GB contributing the FVP cluster, the compressed memory region is 4 GB. With more than 160 GB, the region is increased to 32 GB.

A customer of mine had within 6 months twice a full database partition on a VMware vCenter Server Appliance. After the first outage, the customer increased the size of the partition which is mounted to /storage/db. Some months later, some days ago, the vCSA became unresponsive again. Again because of a filled up database partition. The customer increased the size of the database partition again  (~ 200 GB!!) and today I had time to take a look at this nasty vCSA.