Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Daily Archives: February 25, 2009
VMWorld Europe Day 2: Wrap-up, a good day despite the curious lack of forks..
Posted by on February 25, 2009
All in a very good and busy day today – excellent keynote and some very interesting sessions; so-far I’ve only managed to write up a couple of them (links below) once I’ve clarified a few points I’ll write up the remainder.
- How VMware IT use VMware internally
- vExpert Award for vinf.net
- Cisco Nexus Switch Answers – vShield too?
- Day 2 Keynote
I discovered the press room today and obtained access via my bloggers pass, it was very handy to take an hour out to write up some of the earlier blog posts in somewhat breathless English,the “virtual firehose” phrase has never been so true there is simply way more to take in that I could ever hope to digest and write up in detail.
Lack of an official vSphere/ESX4 release date at VMworld has been a bit disappointing and I guess VMware will be adopting a “when it’s ready” policy. This is admirable, but surely isn’t helping them in maintaining market share – IT investment in infrastructure, training, projects is all about budget planning and dates and also helps out Microsoft with their looming Windows Server 2008 R2 release; vSphere will move the game on further but Microsoft will continue to gain traction and the longer VMware leave it the more they fuel.
The VMWorld Europe party “Cloud9” was this evening and it was a grand affair – much better than any of the TechEd parties I’ve been to in recent years – VMware do tend to go all-out in making the events great (SF 2007 was amazing) Microsoft always seem to split it by country – whereas VMware group everyone together which makes for a much better event.
There was a a live band, two girls playing electric violins, lots of classic arcade games and lots of drink and food – but curiously, a distinct lack of forks or other such cutlery. They were later discovered hidden away at the far end of the room!
I sincerely hope we won’t have to wait until the next VMworld in September to have a general release date of vSphere, maybe VMware are going all Apple on us 😦
How VMware IT use VMware Internally
Posted by on February 25, 2009
This was a very interesting session, it wasn’t on my printed programme so I assume it was re-organised from somewhere else but as I was in the area I went to it rather than my planned session. The presentation was given by VMware’s CIO and was set to cover how VMware use virtualization internally, to deliver normal business services to it’s internal users.
after some scene setting of what VMware technology can do for consolidation and workload management (would think most people attending VMworld on the 2nd day would know this already.. but) he moved into describing what VMware use internally and how they have been through the same evolution as their customers, their stated goal is to move to cloud services to make their own operations more efficient and flexible (well they would, wouldn’t they :)).
VMware have expanded very rapidly over the last 10 years taking on lots of staff and opening up global offices, data centres and labs; he confessed that often solutions had been put in place in haste and this had led to a growing pain in management and stability.
VMWare run a large ERP system based around Oracle ERP and RAC to run their core business systems as well as a Microsoft Exchange based messaging.
VMware are starting to make heavy use of the VDI scenario with 550 users at the moment, they don’t silo VDI to particular job roles and users are a mix of engineers, sales and administrative staff.
The standard client is a Wyse thin-client with a 24” LCD monitor and this is the CEO’s primary machine 🙂 on the back end the standard hardware configuration is he HP c7000 blade chassis with Cisco 3020 blade switches uplinked into Cisco 3750 L3 switches, storage is provided by an EMC CX3-80.
VMware say this VDI configuration saves them c.$900USD over a typical notebook setup per user.
he confessed that VMware haven’t virtualized 100% of their internal IT (yet) 2 application services still remain on physical servers;
- VMware Capacity Planner – which is due to be virtualized in Q1’09
- Oracle RAC – which is due to be virtualized in Q2’09
I thought it was quite ironic that capacity planner still lives on a physical box but is responsible for the demise of so many physical servers on customer sites 🙂
There were some interesting diagrams on the Blade layout for the Oracle RAC and Exchange systems; which I will try to download and post if allowed, but in the meantime it runs on 2 x HP c7000 blade chassis with 4Gb RAM allocated per CPU core.
VMware also had a physical Exchange 2003 server until last year; as part of a migration to Exchange 2007 they implemented 14 virtualized Exchange 2007 servers; 11 mailbox nodes – mostly in a CCR configuration and the remainder in HT and CAS roles; split across 4 ESX blades (pretty sure he said 4).
Typical mailbox sizes are under 2Gb but it was refreshing to hear that like anywhere else they had some challenging mailbox sizes, particularly the execs 🙂
One government customer has over 750k mailboxes running under virtualized instances of Exchange, which is good to hear.
As part of a general consolidation programme VMware introduced some standardised hardware configurations; HP c7000 series blades and a mix of EMC CX3-80 and EMC DMX4 SAN’s (the latter being for the more demanding enterprise applications like Oracle ERP) – I would expect VMware IT get the luxury of a very healthy staff discount from EMC when designing such solutions:)
They consolidated down from 6 main data centres to 2, a tier 4 primary and a tier 2 DR site; they are implementing SRM for DC failover and relocation.
They have just opened a new 1500 rack “green” data centre in WA (wherever that is..) to host their vast R&D facility which as they need to test builds against lots of vendors kit as well as two internal cloud facilities.
The new DC takes full advantage of hot/cold aisle and passive air cooling and recycled building materials. in-fact due to the climate and cooling tech they only need to run the chillers for 3 months out of the year which vastly reduces cooling and thus power costs. In addition, power comes from a pair of redundant (yes, really!) hydro-electric power stations, I believe he said they were paying c.$0.02 KW/Hr for this “green” energy and are working on certifying it for LEED Platinum – which I assume is some EPA type programme.
In terms of supporting this environment they have achieved a level of 145 virtual machines per system administrator; which is pretty high; in general terms that have realised an overall 10:1 server consolidation ratio and have (honestly) experienced only 1 server crash in the last year which was attributed to VMware ESX.
Nothing like eating your own dogfood I guess, interesting to hear that VMware have been through the same challenges as most other businesses in terms of growth and consolidation – it certainly adds some credibility to their message over and above what they have done with customers. it would have been interesting to have some coverage of how their development and lab and R&D systems work but I guess that could be considered more sensitive in such a competitive market.
I’ve Received a VMware vExpert Award
Posted by on February 25, 2009
I’m pleased to announce that I’m one of a number of virtualization bloggers and community participants that have been awarded vExpert status by VMware.
The official announcement is here, and I don’t know exactly who else has been awarded one but there have been several people mentioning it on twitter since the notifications were sent out in the early hours of this morning (well, European time anyway :)). Scott Lowe and Eric Sloof to name but a few, I’m honoured to be in such distinguished company 🙂
By way of a double reward this site also broke it’s previous daily hits record yesterday!
Thank you all for reading, and I hope to keep up the good work – I’m always open to feedback on what you would like to hear about so feel free to comment away!
Answers on the Cisco Nexus vSwitch – what is it and is vShield the same?
Posted by on February 25, 2009
Just seen this post and was particularly interested in how the Cisco vSwitch works – it is shipped as part of ESX, and enabled/unlocked by a licence key, you need to download an OVF virtual appliance to manage it.
That answers one of the big things I’ve been meaning to find out whilst I’m here; I also attended a session on vShield zones and came away with a mixed bag of thoughts – is it a baked-in part of the next version of ESX or is it run in a virtual machine? – I have resolved to head for the hands-on Labs to try it out for myself; hopefully I will get time.
VMworld Europe Day 2: Keynote
Posted by on February 25, 2009
Well day 2 got underway with the much anticipated keynote session from Steve Herrod who is CTO and VP of R&D or “technical stuff”.
He covered some of the previous announcements and did manage to clarify that vSphere is the implementation of VDC-OS (so it’s the new name for Virtual Infrastructure).
Steve Herrod let on that he was watching twitter during the other keynotes and adjusted his presentation accordingly 🙂
vSphere
There were some examples of Oracle OLTP application scaling that have been done in vSphere;
- <15% overhead on 8 way vCPU VM
- 24k DB transactions/sec
Some example stats of disk I/O were shown that acheiving 250MB/sec of disk I/O took 510 disk spindles to saturate I/O… the point being that you’ll need a very large amount of hardware before you start running into disk/VM bus performance issues, and this is constantly increasing.
Virtualizing Exchange is another area where VM’ing can take advantage of multi-core processors for large enterprise apps; break into multiple virtualized mailbox servers to make best use of multi-core hardware; Exchange doesn’t really use the CPU horsepower of modern kit – it’s more about disk I/O (and as they showed this isn’t a practical blocker).
Steve ran over the components of vSphere again, adding a bit more detail – I won’t cover them again but they are
vStorage – extensible via API, storage vendors write their own thin provisioning or snapshot interfaces that hook into VMware.
vNetwork – Distributed vSwitch maintains network state in vMotion
vSphere = scale, 64TB RAM in cluster
Power thrifty (CPU power management features)
vShield zones follows vm around DRS – DMZ for groups of VMs (demos tomorrow + breakout)
vCenter HA improvements with VC heartbeat, today 60% of people running VC on physical box to isolate management tools from the execution platform, this delivers high availability for them.
vCenter Server heartbeat which provide an Active/passive cluster solution (but not using MSCS) and configuration change replication/rollback; works over WAN or LAN – IP based with floating IP address, efficient WAN transfers.
Monitors/provides HA for the following components;
- vCenter database
- Licencing server
- Upgrade manager
vCenter Scalability; 50% increase in capacity with 3k vms and 300 hosts per vCenter, in addition the VI client can now aggregate up to 10 vCenter servers in a single UI, with search functionality, can report/search.
vCenter host profiles can enforce and replicate configuration changes across multiple hosts and monitor for deviations (profile compliance)– the UI looks much like update manager.
The VI client performance looks much better in the demo 🙂 let’s hope it’s like that in real-life!
Biggest and most useful announcement for me was that vCenter on Linux is now available and shipping as a bet virtual appliance – just download and go – no more dependency on a Windows host to run VC, I will definitely be trying this out and you can download it yourself here.
vCloud
In terms of vCloud, the federation and long-distance vMotion sound a bit like science fiction – but there was the same opinion of vMotion when it was first announced – look at it now, VMware know how to do this stuff 🙂
Long-distance vMotion is the eventual goal but there are some challenges to overcome in engineering a reliable solution, but in the meantime SRM can deliver a similar sort of overall service, automating DR failover with array based replication and an electronic, scripted run-book.
long-distance vMotion has some other interesting usecases, enabling a follow the sun model for support and IT services – I’ve written about this previously here – this is a great goal and I would expand this suggestion to include follow the power, where you choose to move services around globally to take advantage of the most cost-efficient power, local support etc.
VMWare building an extensible and customisable portal for cloud providers based on Lab Manager which is likley to be bundled as a product.
The vCenter vCloud plug-in was demoed, this was more advanced that I had anticipated, with the target scenario being you can use one VI client to manage services across multiple clouds.
It stores auth details for each (cloud accounts) type (vCloud, drop down) works over web services API to provision/change etc
They showed how you can drag and drop a VM to and from the cloud.
this federation allows you to pick different types of cloud, for example providers that offer a Desktop as a Service (DaaS) type cloud, or one that runs entirely on “green” energy sources.
Virtual Desktop
this is another key initiative and focus of investment within VMware, building up the VDI offering(s) and providing centralised desktops as well as offline/distributed scenarios in future via the Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) – some of my more off the wall thoughts on that here
Key points;
- Central management
- Online/offline scenarios
- Linked clone
- Thick client push full VM down to machine
- Patching is challenge – master disk + linked clones
- Thin-app; makes patching/swapping out underlying OS easier as apps are in a “bubble”.
- Leveraging ACE server; lock USB etc.
- CVP – client checks back to central policy server (polling)
- allows for self-destruct or leased virtual desktop, can’t run away with apps/data
VMware are making heavy investment in PCoIP- providing 3d graphics online offline for high-demand apps (video/graphics) Jerry Chan demoed some of the PCoIP solutions they are working to using Google Earth, whilst impressive – Brian Madden has covered these in more detail here but I did notice that Steve said vClient which is the 1st time I have heard that name.
Finally, there was some coverage of the mobile phone VM platform, which whilst I see what they are aiming for and the advantages of it to a Telco (single platform to test apps against), it’s personally of less interest to me. I do hope that VMware don’t go all Microsoft and start spreading themselves into every market just because they can need to have a presence (live search, live everything etc), rather than focusing on good, core products. Whilst they are the 1st people I’ve heard of seriously working on this I don’t know how it will pan out – but will keep an open mind, I suppose a sandboxed, secured corporate phone build with a VoIP app, some heavy crypto and a 3G connection controlled under a hypervisor could be appealing to certain types of govt. “organisations”.
All in, a very good keynote session – much better focused at the main demographic of the conference (techies, well me anyway :)) and there are some good sessions scheduled for today.
More later.
Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between 