NetApp - The Virtual Storage Guy

VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 2 – Going Beyond

This is the second installment of a two-part post focusing on the thin provisioning capabilities native to vSphere. If you haven’t read Part I - The Basics, I’d suggest you do so before proceeding. We've covered a lot of content which you really should have a solid grasp of before proceeding.

In part I, I covered the basics of thin provisioning and how it operates with any storage platform. In part II we are going to expand upon a number of the points introduced in part I with a focus on how the storage virtualization functionality in Data ONTAP enhances VMware's thin provisioning and the over arching goal to reduce both the CapEX and OpEx associated with storage in the virtualization space.

Anatomy of a Virtual Disk

Let’s begin where we started in part I, by reviewing different disk formats. This time let’s consider them with the virtual disks operating at 70% storage capacity.

- The Thick Virtual Disk

Again this is the traditional virtual disk format which we all know rather well. From this image you will notice do not receive any storage savings in the datastore, yet we do receive 30% savings on the storage array.

If you're asking, "how can a thick VMDK consume less storage on the array?"
You'll need to go back and read Part I

- The Thin Virtual Disk

In this image we have the thin provisioned virtual disk and as you can see we are receiving a 30% storage savings in both the datastore and on the array.

- The Eager Zeroed Thick Virtual Disk

In this last image we have an eager zeroed thick virtual disk which provides us no savings at either the datastore or on the array.

VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 1 – The Basics

This week’s VMware Communities Roundtable featured one of my favorite people at VMware, Paul Manning who spoke on thin provisioning. This topic is the inspiration for today’s VCE post. Reducing storage costs is top of mind and it's gonna take some time covering thin provisioning so let’s begin!

Virtualizing a Datacenter

I am not exaggerating when I share with you that every customer I meet with has elaborate plans to virtualize most, if not all, of the Intel based servers within their data center, yet deploying this new architecture is challenged to move from a portion to a majority of the footprint due to storage costs (both CapEx and OpEx). I'd like to summarize the message from these meetings for you, which goes something like this…

“We love server virtualization! With VMware we’ve reduced our server footprint and are targeting more systems to virtualize.”

“We love converged Ethernet! With Cisco we’ve reduced our port counts and are targeting to have a single platform for voice, data, and user access.”

“Storage costs are out of control, can you help? Prior to virtualization we roughly ran 20%-30% of our servers on shared storage arrays. Virtualization is forcing every VM onto shared storage. What do we do?”

Now Available: The Virtual Storage Console vSphere Plug-in

Since VMworld 2009 one of the recurring questions posted to me on Twitter has been. “When will NetApp release the VSC?” – Wait no longer, the VSC is available for download via NOW.

For those of you unfamiliar with the VSC, it is a vCenter 4.0 plug-in that simplifies the configuration and management of NetApp, IBM, and Virtualized 3rd party arrays. The VSC supports ESX/ESX 4.0 along with monitoring and reporting only capabilities with ESX/ESXi 3.5.

The Virtual Storage Console is the next generation of the NetApp ESX Host Utilities Kit. Gone are the days on installing the EHU into the service console of ESX or cursing NetApp for the lack of support with ESXi. The VSC adds a NetApp tab into vCenter that enables one to:

• Manage ESX/ESXi storage connectivity

• Report ESX/ESXi storage details

• Accelerate resolving storage connectivity related support cases

• Optimize VM storage options for performance and availability

My I introduce you to the Virtual Storage Console version 1.0…

Mike Laverick on vStorage Plug-in Integration

This morning began with catching up on my VMware related reading. Like many of you I have a list of ‘must reads.’ Over at RTFM Education Mike has shared his PowerPoint presentation on vStorage integration, which he delivered at the 1st Scottish VMware User Group Meeting.

Mike thanks for sharing! This slide deck provides a great overview of the current state of the union and what customers can deploy today (or in the very near future) from NetApp & EMC.

I'd suggest that you check out the PPT and just in case you were afflicted by temporary insanity and have yet to subscribe to RTFM, do so now!

VCE-101: Oracle On VMware Without Limits

After a brief hiatus I am very eager to return to the ‘Virtualization Changes Everything’ series, and today’s post is an impromptu addition to our syllabus. Recently fellow VMware vExpert Steve Kaplan of INX published a rather thought provoking post rallying for the acceleration of the transformation to a 100% virtualized datacenter. Steve waxes poetic advocating acquisition decisions spanning compute, storage and network should be driven by their contribution to data center virtualization success and I would encourage everyone to read it.

In today’s post I’d like to highlight and expand upon the following comment in Steve’s post:

‘Creativity overcomes most obstacles to a fully virtualized data center such as the minority of software manufacturers still refusing to support their applications on VMs. An easy resolution for organizations running vSphere over NFS on NetApp is to FlexClone a Virtual Machine's virtual disk into a LUN and simply present to a physical server. Voila, instantaneous V2P.’

Demos from the HP TechDay 2009 Follow-Up are Live!

My apologies to all for the delay, our original intentions to get the audio and video from the October 6th event were met with multiple challenges ranging from having a high quality video recording without audio, to a crystal clear audio recording containing an audio duplex issue, and being unaware of the YouTube 10 minute limit on the length of videos.

Luckily for us WebEx saved the day by providing an audio and video source, which while not the sharpest, did allow us to share our live (without a net) demonstrations with the storage community.

NetApp Insight Conference 2009

My apologies to all, I had a number of blog related commitments get pushed out due to a scheduling snafu on part. I am happy to announce that I have completed my preparations for NetApp’s Insight 2009 and I now I can address a number of items requiring my attention including a number of unpublished posts!

Insight is our annual conference for storage engineers, architects, and consultants. It allows attendees to network, get up to speed with the latest in advanced storage technologies and integrations, and of course to catch a sneak peak at our future capabilities.

This years events will be held in Phoenix, Arizona and Athens, Greece during the first and third weeks of November respectively.

Members of the NetApp vTME team and I will be presenting a number of the 90+ breakout sessions. As expected our content will dig into the details of virtualization integration technologies and will showcase joint solutions with our platinum sponsors Cisco and VMware.

VMware SRM 4.0 and NetApp SRA 1.4 Details

This week VMware and NetApp released new versions of SRM and the SRA which add support for vSphere and the rapidly expanding NFS install base. I'm sure many have questions regarding this much anticipated release and if you are one of these you are in luck! Yesterday our SRM expert Larry Touchette has published an in-depth post that covers the details, which can be found here.

A Follow-up on HP TechDay 2009 with an Invitation for You!

This week HP demonstrated several of their technology offerings to the storage community, and as a part of this event HP provided a hands on lab where attendees to 'kick the tires' of their storage technology offerings. As a part for this lab attendees were able to complete the same tasks with storage arrays and management tools from EMC and NetApp.

These types of educational experiences can really benefit the community by showcasing one’s enhancements and differentiation. I fully endorse these types of labs, sharing information empowers the user community and raises the bar in terms of what we must develop in order to remain an industry leader… except this isn’t what happened.

According to multiple tweets attendees were stating that tests designed to demonstrate storage integration with Windows systems and VMware were the command line interface and Filerview. This caught my attention as these aren't the tools NetApp recommends for our install base. A quick glance at a few of the sites covering the event confirmed the use of these legacy tools.

In fairness I need to highlight that HP did follow the steps provided in our storage best practices documents for VMware TR-3428 (VI3) and TR-3749 (vSphere). I would like to share with you that we are in the process of updating these documents with a goal of reducing their sizes by approximately 40%.

We hear the VMware community loud and clear - simplicity equates to scaling an environment.

VMware Communities Roundtable iSCSI Podcast is Live in iTunes

If missed joining us for the VMware Communities Podcast featuring the 'iSCSI Super Friends' you missed an excellent podcast. John shared with us that episode #66 set a new Communities Podcast record in terms of the number of attendees on the call.

Thru the magic of the 'interweb' you can can catch (and even subscribe to) the podcast via iTunes.

Major props to my partners in crime for making this podcast and accompanying blog post a reality: John Troyer and Andy Banta (VMware), Adam Carter (HP/Lefthand Networks), Eric Schott (Dell/EqualLogic), and Chad Sakac (EMC).

Run Everything Virtualized and Deduplicated : aka Chuck Anti-FUD

Last night I got caught in what I would classify as a tweet-fight with several of my chums over at EMC on the role storage arrays play within a virtual datacenter. The conversation was pretty intense and at one point I posted the following string of tweets…

@sakacc @chuckhollis – Guys EMC & NetApp just look at virtualization differently. Allow me to explain…

@sakacc @chuckhollis - VMware allows customers to share CPU, memory, and network ports among multiple VMs allowing a reduction in servers

@sakacc @chuckhollis - Cisco allows customers to share ports among multiple connection protocols thus reducing network and storage switches

@sakacc @chuckhollis - NetApp allows customers to share disk capacity at a sub VM level among multiple VMs which reduces total storage

@sakacc @chuckhollis - EMC provides shared disk access to multiple VMs. Shared access is not shared resource usage; this is not virtualized

@sakacc @chuckhollis – VMware, Cisco, & NetApp want customers to purchase less hardware. What is EMC’s plan to reduce their HW footprint?

As you can see my premise is clear, for customers to be successful in their virtualization efforts, they must virtualize the entire datacenter this includes servers, networks, and storage.

Who decided that server and network hardware should be reduced while the shared storage footprint is permitted to grow uncontrollably?

VMware Communities Roundtable Presents a Multivendor iSCSI Podcast

I am very pleased to share with you that on September 30th, you can join Andy Banta (VMware), Adam Carter (HP/Lefthand Networks), Eric Schott (Dell/EqualLogic), Chad Sakac (EMC), yours truly on the VMware Communities Roundtable Episode number 66 where we will be discussing our recent joint iSCSI blog post.

John Troyer has dubbed this episode ‘iSCSI Super Friends with EMC, NetApp, Dell, HP, & VMware’

A “Multivendor Post” on using iSCSI with VMware vSphere

One of the most popular posts we’ve ever done was the original ‘Multivendor Post’ to help our mutual iSCSI customers using VMware that focused on the operation of the software iSCSI initiator in ESX 3.5 with several iSCSI targets from multiple vendors. There’s been a lot of demand for a follow-up, so without further ado, here’s a multivendor collaborative effort on an update, which leverages extensively content from VMworld 2009 sessions TA2467 and TA3264. The post was authored by the following vendors and people: VMware (Andy Banta), EMC (Chad Sakac), Dell/EqualLogic (Eric Schott), HP/Lefthand Networks (Adam Carter), and NetApp.

One important note – in this post (and going forward we’ll be trying to do this consistently) all commands, configurations and features noted apply to vSphere ESX and ESXi equally. Command line formats are those used in when using the VMware vMA, which can be used with both ESX and ESXi. Alternate command line variants are possible when using the remote CLI or service console, but we’re standardizing on the vMA.

This post covers a broad spectrum of topics surrounding the main point (changes in, and configuration of the iSCSI software initiator in vSphere ESX/ESXi 4) including:

• Multipathing using NMP and the Pluggable Storage Architecture

• vmknic/vSwitch setup

• Subnet configuration

• Jumbo Frames

• Delayed Ack

• Other configuration recommendations

If this sounds interesting – or you’re a customer using (or one considering using) iSCSI and vSphere 4 read on!

Coming soon: A New Multi-Vendor Blog Post from NetApp, EMC, HP, Dell, and VMware

I’m not giving away any secrets at this time, but let’s just say you may want to stay tuned. Have a good weekend everybody!

Just like Sam and Ralph - Competitors while on the clock, friends when off!

VMworld 2009 – Thoughts from the show

It’s been two weeks since VMworld 2009 concluded. I believe the show was an overwhelming success for VMware and their ecosystem partners. I believe this year’s event demonstrated that VMware was executing on their strategy to be the leader in the virtualization of the data center through the refinement of numerous technologies, enhancements, and partnerships.

As there has been a ton of coverage on the show, the sessions, the product and partnership announcements, etc… I thought I’d go in a different direction with today’s post and share a theme that was top of mind in nearly every discussion I had with attendees whether they were customers, prospects, partners, analysts, administrators, or executives.

Virtual data centers today are faced with large challenges when it comes to managing their storage.

What seems common in most environments is most of the VMware administrative teams are staffed with individuals who have modest experience with storage architectures and administration. This model has resulted in very successful server virtualization architectures based on unmanageable, hard to troubleshoot, and extremely expensive storage platforms.

One customer labeled their situation as one of “Ever Multiplying Complexity”