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Let your storage array do the heavy lifting with VAAI!

I’ve seen a few blogposts recently about storage features in vSphere5 and plenty of forum discussions about the level of support from various vendors but none that specifically address the Netapp world. As some of these features require your vendor to provide plugins and integration I’m going to cover the Netapp offerings and point out what works today and what’s promised for the future.

Many of the vSphere5 storage features work regardless of your underlying storage array, including StorageDRS, storage clusters, VMFS5 enhancements (provided you have block protocols) and the VMware Storage Appliance (vSA). The following vSphere features however are dependent on array integration;

• VAAI (the VMware Storage API for Array Integration). If you need a refresher on VAAI and what’s new in vSphere v5 check out these great blogposts by Dave Henry - part one covers block protocols (FC and iSCSI), part two covers NFS. The inimitable Chad Sakac from EMC also has a great post on the new vSphere5 primitives.
• VASA (the VMware Storage API for Storage Awareness). Introduced in vSphere5 this allows your storage array to send underlying implementation details of the datastore back to the ESXi host such as RAID levels, replication, dedupe, compression, number of spindles etc. These details can be used by other features such as Storage Profiles and StorageDRS to make more informed decisions.

The main point of administration (and integration) when using Netapp storage is the Virtual Storage Console (VSC), a vCenter plugin created by Netapp. If you haven’t already got this installed (the latest version is v4, released March 16th 2012) then go download it (NOW account required). As well as the vCenter plugin you must ensure your version of ONTAP also supports the vSphere functionality – as of April 19th 2012 the latest release is ONTAP 8.1. You can find out more about its featureset from Netapp’s Nick Howell. As well as the core vSphere storage features the VSC enables some extra features;

• Simplified administration
• Monitor and fix storage alignment
• Space reclamation
• Datastore replication. Luke Reed from Netapp has done a good blogpost on using this to duplicate templates between sites.

These features are all covered in Netapp’s popular TR3749 (best practices for vSphere, now updated for vSphere5) and the VSC release notes.

Poor old NFS – no VAAI for you…

It all sounds great! You’ve upgraded to vSphere5 (with Enterprise or Enterprise Plus licensing), installed the VSC vCenter plugin and upgraded ONTAP to the shiny new 8.1 release. Your Netapp arrays are in place and churning out 1′s and 0′s at a blinding rate and you’re looking forward to giving vSphere some time off for good behaviour and letting your Netapp do the heavy lifting…..

Read more…

The VCAP5-DCA exam is a tough nut to crack and will probably consume quite a bit of your time in study and practice (unless you’re a VMware PSO in which case you probably do this stuff all day every day!). Before you get stuck into the blueprint objectives there are some things you should do to prepare;

• Get access to a lab. There are numerous options;
  • Build your own whitebox lab at home
  • Use spare equipment at your work.
  • Rent VCAP-DCA specific lab space on a weekly basis. There are a few of these popping up although I’ve not tried them myself – Optism Training, YourLabTime. You get enterprise grade equipment but at £120p/w upwards a home lab might be the more affordable option….
• Once you’ve got your lab, have a look at AutoLab by @demitassenz. It helps you quickly build a base lab.
• Download the official vSphere5 documentation (there’s a link at the bottom of the page to download a .ZIP of all docs combined). I’d recommend using the Xtravirt documentation downloader as it simplifies the process. Make sure you have the docs to hand as you’ll want to refer to them often.
• Gather additional study materials. This will depend on your budget but I’d recommend;
  • the Trainsignal training (there’s a VCAP4-DCA package and two vSphere5 packages)
  • Scott Lowe’s Mastering vSphere5 book
  • and of course my study guide! (my v4 guide is still 60% relevant)
• Plan your study time. There are 26 objectives so work out how much time you have until you want to sit the exam and work backwards. Be aware of your strengths – some sections you’ll cruise through while you may need to spend longer on the topics you’re less familiar with.
• Book the exam (through Pearson Vue). This may not work for everyone but many people work better with a deadline to adhere to. You can always move the booking provided you do so at least 24 hours before the day. Pick a date which gives you a suitable time to prepare.
• Get involved in social media – the VMTN community forums, Twitter, read and comment on blogs etc. As you’ll see from my study notes a good chunk of the material comes from these sources and having people to answer questions is one of the best ways to confirm your understanding.

Now dive into your studies and good luck!

As with all my VCAP5-DCA study notes, the blogposts only cover material new to vSphere5 so make sure you read the v4 study notes for section 1.1 first. When published the VCAP5-DCA study guide PDF will be a complete standalone reference.

Knowledge

• Identify RAID levels
• Identify supported HBA types
• Identify virtual disk format types

Skills and Abilities

• Determine use cases for and configure VMware DirectPath I/O
• Determine requirements for and configure NPIV
• Determine appropriate RAID level for various Virtual Machine workloads
• Apply VMware storage best practices
• Understand use cases for Raw Device Mapping
• Configure vCenter Server storage filters
• Understand and apply VMFS resignaturing
• Understand and apply LUN masking using PSA-related commands
• Analyze I/O workloads to determine storage performance requirements
• Identify and tag SSD devices
• Administer hardware acceleration for VAAI
• Configure and administer profile-based storage
• Prepare storage for maintenance (mounting/un-mounting)
• Upgrade VMware storage infrastructure

Tools & learning resources

• Product Documentation
  • vSphere Installation and Setup Guide
  • vSphere Storage Guide
  • vSphere Command-Line Interface Concepts and Examples
• vSphere Client / Web Client
• vSphere CLI
  • vscsiStats, esxcli, vifs, vmkfstools, esxtop/resxtop
• vSphere storage profiles on VMwareTV
• Good blogpost on NPIV (though nothing’s changed since v4)
• Chapter 6 of Scott Lowe’s Mastering VMware vSphere5 book
• VMworld sessions: VSP3868 – VMware vStorage Best Practices, VSP2774 – Supercharge your VMware deployment with VAAI
• Gregg Robertson’s study notes for 1.1

With vSphere5 having been described as a ‘storage release’ there is quite a lot of new material to cover in Section1 of the blueprint. First I’ll cover a couple of objectives which have only minor amendments from vSphere4.

Determine use cases for and configure VMware DirectPath I/O

The only real change is DirectPath vMotion, which is not as grand as it sounds. As you’ll recall from vSphere4 a VM using DirectPath can’t use vMotion or snapshots (or any feature which uses those such as DRS and many backup products) and the device in question isn’t available to other VMs. The only change with vSphere5 is that you can vMotion a VM provided it’s on Cisco’s UCS and there’s a supported Cisco UCS Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) distributed switch. Read all about it here – if this is in the exam we’ve got no chance!

Identify and tag SSD devices

This is a tricky objective if you don’t own an SSD drive to experiment with (although you can workaround that limitation). You can identify an SSD disk in various ways;

1. Using the vSphere client. Any view which shows the storage devices (‘Datastores and Datastore clusters view’, Host summary, Host -> Configuration -> Storage etc) includes a new column ‘Drive Type’ which lists Non-SSD or SSD (for block devices) and Unknown for NFS datastores.
2. Using the CLI. Execute the following command and look for the ‘Is SSD:’ line for your specific device;

   esxcli storage core device list

Tagging an SSD should be automatic but there are situations where you may need to do it manually. This can only be done via the CLI and is explained in this VMware article. The steps are similar to masking a LUN or configuring a new PSP;

1. Check the existing claimrules
2. Configure a new claim rule for your device, specifying ‘ssd_enable’
3. Enable to new claim rule and load it into memory

So you’ve identified and tagged your SSD, but what can you do with it? SSDs can be used with the new Swap to Host cache feature best summed up by Duncan over at Yellow Bricks;

“Using “Swap to host cache” will severely reduce the performance impact of VMkernel swapping. It is recommended to use a local SSD drive to eliminate any network latency and to optimize for performance.”

As an interesting use case here’s a post describing how to use Swap to Host cache with an SSD and laptop – could be useful for a VCAP home lab!

The above and more are covered very well in chapter 15 of the vSphere5 Storage guide.

Read more…

IT is a fast moving industry, and the current shift to cloud computing is accelerating the rate of change. With the forthcoming release of the vSphere5 VCAP exams (VCAP5-DCA and the VCAP5-DCD) I’ve been planning to study my socks off to get both exams under my belt. I’m sure I’m not alone in struggling to make study time, particularly as my day job doesn’t tend to cover all of the material either because we’re only Enterprise level licensing or because we don’t use all the features. On top of that I’d like to update my VCAP-DCA study guide which will consume a significant chunk of time.

This serious case of study contention has made me revisit my priorities. The VMware ecosystem has evolved considerably over the last few years and there’s considerable buzz around VMware View and vCloud Director (not to mention the whole Cloud Foundry and vFabric ecosystem). Maybe these would be better areas to focus on? As John Troyer said about certifications “You don’t have to collect them all!” but it does make me wonder – which VMware certs are most likely to benefit career progression?

VCP or VCAP?

First some facts. The VMware platform which evolved into vSphere was launched in 2001, the first VCP exam was available in June 2003 (@susangude is VCP#1), and the first VCAP exams were launched seven years later in August 2010. Nine years on and the statistics are well known – around 60,000 VCPs worldwide and approximately 600 certified in each of the two VCAP tracks (so 50 VCPs for every VCAP!).

Read more…

In the first part of this series I introduced vCOps and it’s requirements before covering the new features in part two. This final blogpost covers the capacity features (available in the Advanced and higher editions) along with pricing information and my conclusions.

The previous trial I used didn’t include the capacity planning elements so I was keen to try this out. I’d used CapacityIQ previously (although only briefly) and found it useful but combined with the powerful analytics in vCOps it promises to be an even more compelling solution. VMware have created four videos with Ben Scheerer from the vCOps product team – they’re focused on capacity but if you’ve watched Kit Colbert’s overview much of it will be familiar;

• New dashboards (9 mins)
• Drilldown and Alerts (14 mins)
• Heat maps and Event Management (9 mins)
• What If scenarios (3 mins)

UPDATE APRIL 2012 – VMware have just launched 2.5 hrs of free training for vCOps!

If you don’t have time to watch the videos and read the documentation (section 4 in the Advanced Getting Started guide) here’s the key takeaways;

• Capacity information is integrated throughout the product although modelling is primarily found under the ‘Planning’ view. Almost every view has some capacity information included either via the dynamic thresholds (which indicate the standard capacity used) or popup graphs of usage and trending.
• Storage is now included in the capacity calculations (an improvement over CapacityIQ) resulting in a more complete analysis. Datastores are now shown in the Operations view although if you’re like me and use NFS direct to the guest OS it’s not going to be as comprehensive as using block protocols.
• the capacity tools require more tailoring to your environment than the performance aspects but provide valuable information
• With vCOps you can both view existing and predicted capacity and you can model changes like adding hosts or VMs.

Read more…

I’m chuffed to say VMware have awarded me vExpert status for 2012 (although it’s for my contribution to the virtualization community in 2011). In a similar fashion to Microsoft’s MVP this is awarded to people who have helped the VMware community through forums, blogs, conferences, podcasts etc but is NOT a certification based on technical ability. This is where VMware’s program differs from the MVP which also counts significant technical expertise as part of the selection criteria. I was included in the Evangelist path as a blogger and yes I know there’s an official vExpert logo but this one suits my mood better right now. I’m a vExperienced vExpert!

When I started my blog nearly two years ago I expected to be an occasional poster as I’m more of a lurker by nature but I’ve found it to be an addictive pastime.There are 436 vExpert’s worldwide this year (compared to over 4000 MVPs) and the vExpert directory (not yet updated for 2012) includes a brief description of everyone and their background.

I find that having someone say ‘thanks’, which is what I consider the vExpert to be, is disproportionately rewarding. I put a lot of effort into my certification last year (VCAP, RHCSA etc) but value the vExpert recognition more highly. I hope it rounds out my CV – when graduating from college employers were looking for ‘value added’ activities – team sports, running a club etc and this is how I view the vExpert.

One potential downside to the vExpert award could be perception – I suspect it’s all too easy for people to perceive vExpert’s as VMware ‘fanboi”s who simply tow the corporate line and are not objective about the technology. We’ve all encountered the open source zealot and the Apple enthusiast and it’s tempting to ignore advice for fear it’s one sided. It’s important to realise that the vExpert is a two way street between ourselves and VMware – let’s hope we do our job as Geek Herders!

So if this award is for last year, what will I do this coming year? I’m glad you asked! I’m planning to continue and hopefully increase my participation in the virtualization community;

• Regular blogposts on www.vExperienced.co.uk
• Update my VCAP-DCA guide to cover v5 of the exam
• Attend and report from VMworld Europe in Barcelona
• Attend vBeers and VMUG groups
• Contribute to online forums (the VMTN communities) and social networks – mainly Twitter (and Google+ if I can work out its value!)
• I’m planning to cover vSphere Orchestrator, vCloud Director and maybe some Hyper-V action later in the year along with the usual smattering of Netapp and alternative storage technologies.

If there’s anything you’d like me to cover, get in touch!

Certification is a never ending treadmill of learning...

Along with others I received an email from VMware last week stating that the VCAP5-DCA exam was due to enter it’s beta testing in the next few weeks, along with the beta blueprint. As with any beta the contents are subject to change and the exam is NOT publically available yet – it’s currently scheduled for release this summer.

The contents of the beta are covered by an NDA so you won’t be hearing any other details from me but Randy Becraft, the senior Program Manager running the beta, has specifically allowed me to post these blueprint details to give candidates more time to prepare.

Before I cover what’s new it’s worth pointing out how much hasn’t changed;

• The bulk of the content (around 60%) is very similar to the VCAP4-DCA blueprint.
• You still need to be VCP5 certified as a prerequisite. The one exception is if you already hold the VCAP4-DCA certification you’re eligible to sit the VCAP5-DCA exam without first passing the VCP5 exam, provided you upgrade within three months of the exam’s release.
• The exam is still a live lab with a time limit of 225 mins (210 for the exam and 15 mins for a survey). There will be roughly 26 tasks to complete (which is less than the 36 for v4) but this can vary for each candidate.
• The exam is booked through Pearson-VUE professional centres.
• There will be a ten day wait for results (approximately)
  
• Will the exam environment include a task switcher or a higher resolution? We can but hope!

…and what’s no longer included (some significant chunks of learning);

• Orchestrator
• vCenter Heartbeat
• vShield Zones
• vCenter Server Linked Mode

There are two recommended courses for this exam;

• VMware vSphere – Fast Track
• VMware vSphere – Optimize and Scale [v5] – not yet available but due summer 2012

This is a change from the v4 DCA exam which listed four courses as ‘recommended’, including both the vSphere Manage for Performance and vSphere Troubleshooting neither of which are available yet for v5. The exam still includes troubleshooting and performance issues on the blueprint but maybe VMware felt that so many course recommendations for a single exam was too much.

It’s interesting to see that this new exam focuses on the core product – the biggest omissions are in the wider ecosystem and I wonder if they’ll reappear in some other, more specialised, certification (VCAP-Security etc). There may also have been practical considerations as the release cycle for these products isn’t aligned with the vSphere releases. This was apparent even with the VCAP-DCA4 release where the exam blueprint covered vShield Zones v1 even though v4 was released just before the exam went public (the Manage for Security course, which was recommended for VCAP-DCA, covered vShield Zones v4 so of limited use!).

VMware have also published extra guidance about the infrastructure you will be expected to work with during the exam, which will consist of two ESXi hosts and a vCenter server. This is similar to the v4 exam but you weren’t given this information in advance.

I’m running a poll on the value of the VCAP exams (to the right of this post) – I’d appreciate your feedback.

As with the VCAP4-DCA I’ll be publishing study notes as I work towards the exam. Watch this space!

Read more…

In part one of Using vCenter Operations I covered what the product does along with the different versions available and deployment considerations. In this post I’ll delve into what’s new and improved and in the final part I’ll cover capacity features, product pricing, and my overall conclusions. I had intended to cover the configuration management and application dependency features too but it’s such a big product I’ll have to write another blogpost or I’ll never finish!

Introductory learning materials

• Watch VMware’s overview of vCOPS video by Kit Colbert, the principal architect behind the product. At 25 minutes it’s a great overview and well worth a watch.
• The evaluation guide (fairly basic and largely covers installation with a few use cases at the end)
• You should also check out the vCOps evaluation site for extra resources

UPDATE APRIL 2012 – VMware have just launched 2.5 hrs of free training for vCOps.

Deep dive learning materials;

• The Advanced Getting Started guide is more detailed than its title would imply and is worth working your way through during the trial
• If you’re planning on using the Advanced or Enterprise product I’d recommend the training materials posted by Ivan Rahabok.
• Check out Ivan’s website,virtual- red-dot for detailed (technical) info about vCOps.

What’s new and improved in vCOps

Monitoring is a core feature and for some people the only one they’re concerned about. As the size of your infrastructure grows and becomes more complex the need for a tool to combine compute, network, and storage in real time also grows. Here are my key takeaways;

• there’s a new dashboard screen which shows health (immediate issues), risks (upcoming issues) and efficiency (opportunity for improvements) in a single screen. The dashboard can provide a high level view of your infrastructure and works nicely on a plasma screen as your ‘traffic light’ view of the virtual world (and physical if you go with Enterprise+). The dashboard can also be targeted at the datacenter, cluster, host or VM level which I found very useful although you can only customise the dashboard in Enterprise versions. There is still the Operations view (the main view in vCOPS v1) which now also includes datastores. This view scales extremely well – even if you have thousands of VMs and datastores across multiple vCenters they can all be displayed on a single screen.
  NOTE: If you find some or all of your datastores show up as grey with no data (as mine did) there is a hotfix available via VMware support.
• Read more…

At VMworld 2011 in Copenhagen VMware unveiled a significant revamp of their management suites, including a new version of vCenter Operations Manager (v5 to align with the vSphere release). vCenter Operations is now a suite of tools which includes vCenter Configuration Manager, the new vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (which I’ll cover in a later blogpost) and vCenter CapacityIQ (which is now fully integrated into vCOps, the standalone CapacityIQ is now end of life).

Although announced at VMworld it wasn’t publicly available until Jan 2012 when VMware formally launched vCOps v5. Coming less than a year after the release of the first version it’s apparent that VMware see this as an important product which is evolving fast. Steven Herrod, VMware’s CIO stated recently at the Italian VMUG (around the 5 minute mark) that vCOps ‘is becoming the most adopted new technology that VMware has ever had’. The vCenter Operations suite is still aimed at infrastructure monitoring as opposed to application monitoring (despite the addition of Infrastructure Navigator) – VMware’s solutions aimed at the application tier belong to the vFabric suite. For a good overview of where vCOps and vFabric Hyperic fit into VMware’s cloud suite read Dave Hill’s blogpost on the subject.

If you aren’t familiar with vCenter Operations here are the kind of problems it aims to address;

• Is your virtual infrastructure healthy?
• What serious problems should I address immediately?
• Is the workload in my environment normal?
• Am I using the resources in my environment efficiently?
• How long do I have before resources run out?
• What impact did a recent change have?

A few people have already posted articles which I’d recommend reading;

• David Davis has a great review including available versions, top 5 new features and his conclusions
• Julian Wood posted a good summary along with his initial thoughts
• VMware’s official blogpost about the new features
  
• My review of the first version of vCOps. A year on it’s still got a few good points and is a good intro to the product

With v1.0 I concluded that it was a great product but there were a few reasons why it wasn’t for me, primarily the lack of email notifications and pricing. In this post I’ll cover the requirements and deployment considerations for the new version and in part two I’ll cover day to day use and new features. The final part will cover the capacity features along with info about pricing and my conclusions.

UPDATE APRIL 2012 – VMware have just launched 2.5 hrs of free training for vCOps.

Read more…

After a course postponement in January (due to lack of attendees) I finally took the VMware Design Workshop (v5) this week, a three day course designed to help you prepare for the VCAP-DCD exam as well as real life solution design using VMware vSphere. If you’ve sat the v4 course there’s very little difference so you can probably stop reading now…

I’ve been responsible for the same vSphere implementation at my company for well over four years now, so unlike contractors or consultants I’m not seeing new infrastructures every week and I’m not redesigning mine week to week either. So why go on the workshop you ask? I hoped that spending some time away from the office thinking about design might allow me a fresh look at how we currently have our environment configured as well as giving me a gauge on my own skillset. There was a select group of four on the course which was a slight shame as I think more people would have increased discussions and added value (everyone does things differently and has different circumstances). Despite the limited numbers we had diverse opinions and experience covering government, army, SME and enterprise environments. Luckily our instructor Paul McSharry (@pmcsharry) is one of those trainers who’s also still consulting/contracting so he was more than able to fill any gaps with real world experience including some great discussions around VMware’s vCloud in particular (although neither vCD nor vCloud are on the blueprint they made for great examples). I’ve was lucky to have Mike Laverick for my ICM course back in 2007 and equally lucky to have Paul, he’s a great trainer.

The workshop is still a three day course with minimal hands on work – it’s all whiteboards and discussions. That in itself is quite refreshing as many courses are ‘heads down’ in a PC racing through labs whereas this course is more social. It also meant I kept my mind off work for the three days as I didn’t have a PC in front of me as a distraction! It looks as if the order of the modules has changed from the v4 course but the content is largely the same;

• Day one – Course introduction, the design process, and storage design
• Day two – Network design, host (compute) design, and virtual machine design
• Day three – Virtual datacenter design, management and monitoring design

I was surprised to see some topics which I expected to be ‘bread and butter’ subjects get minor coverage;

• The section on storage design didn’t cover RAID to any degree and simply states ‘For the majority of VM workloads the RAID level does not matter for performance if the array has sufficient battery-backed cache’ along with ‘Select RAID level based on availability requirements’. As a Netapp guy I agree it generally doesn’t matter – large numbers of spindles are put into aggregates anyway rather than the older RAID group per LUN philosophy of low end MSA arrays etc. The lab exercises didn’t include any IOps, latency or throughput figures either but as Paul rightly pointed out that could overcomplicate the design process given the time constraints, plus it’s a vSphere design course not a specialised storage design.
• The host design section did cover cluster scale up vs scale out but briefly (given the column inches on blogposts!). Without going into vendor specific detail this topic is rather tricky as many companies will have standards to adhere to, preferred choices (personal or corporate) and extra constraints. That’s exactly what the course states – organisational constraints are most likely what you’ll have to contend with.
• There is a single page on licensing which simply states ‘buy the license version that supports the features required in your design’. Thanks for that, great way to gloss over the controversial vRAM!
• I also expected a heavy focus on the new features of v5 (Autodeploy, Storage DRS etc) but while they were covered it wasn’t in depth. On reflection that’s probably correct as there are so many things to consider for the average design that the basics are still the same.

Every vendor course has some ‘best practices’ which you take with a pinch of salt and this course is no different. ‘Always use jumbo frames’, ‘Always buy the fastest CPU you can afford’, ‘Prefer distributed switches’. Keep your questioning hat on!

The lab scenarios didn’t always give enough information but that does at least make them flexible – there’s no reason why you can’t set yourself some constraints. There was no requirement around storage protocol choice for example so I found myself picking NFS but having to justify it based on other elements of the design. Cost wasn’t mentioned in mine beyond ‘it should be cost effective’ so you have to make you own mind up – would vCSHB be worthwhile for example? I decided not and as long as you understand the implications of your choices you’ve achieved your goal.

Overall I found the course very useful although given that I’m not doing design as part of my job I suspect I’ll find the exam very tough. The blogosphere covers a lot of relevant material which the course skims over due to time restrictions – I doubt the workshop alone would be sufficient to pass the exam. Now I just have to hit the whitepapers and the design bible (VMware vSphere design by Forbes Guthrie, Scott Lowe, and Maish Saidel-Keesing) while I wait for the v5 exam to be officially released. Given that the beta has already come and gone I don’t think I’ll have long to wait!

Further Reading

Sean Crookston has a collection of links from other workshop reviews.

The VCAP-DCD forums