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?”

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.

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.

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?

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”

The NetApp $1 Million Dollar Virtualization Challenge

Today we announced the $1 million dollar virtualization challenge contest. In this program we are looking for a non-NetApp customer who is willing to migrate their existing VMware infrastructure to a $1 million NetApp solution, if they are willing to publicly share the results of their migration. The winning submission will make out pretty well as they will receive $850K in storage, $100K in support, and $50K in software at no cost.

Attention CEOs: Pay $75 per Virtual Desktop for Storage

Recently both NetApp and EMC published VDI whitepapers with our mutual partners VMware and Cisco. Both papers are very solid and should result in robust infrastructures; however, the solutions are far from equal and I’d like to take 5 minutes of your time to share with you some interesting points of comparison.

Sure the EMC paper focuses on UCS platform while the NetApp paper focuses on a Nexus infrastrucutre, but that’s not what I want to discuss. Yes, the EMC architecture running on Fibre Channel over Ethernet and the NetApp solution is leveraging NFS, but that’s not what I’d like you to consider either.

The level of differentiation I want to highlight is the cost per desktop in both of these solutions. Why cost? Simple, it is the number one hindrance to virtual desktop adoption.

EMC: The Storage Most Integrated with VMware? – The Conclusion

We here at NetApp have been burning the proverbial midnight oil getting ready for VMworld, and in doing so I have put off posting a number of blog entries.

I trust you will be very impressed with our VMworld line up. If you can’t make the show make sure to hit our Virtualization YouTube Channel, as all demos will be posted there when the show opens.

A week and a half ago I posted the first half of a discussion that started with some recent customer meetings and the claims by a storage vendor that they were the most integrated storage with VMware. This post received a fair amount of discussion and comments for which I am grateful. You may note I closed that original post asking for feedback and fact checking of the data shared.

VMworld 2009 – Storage Integration Sneak Peek

I trust you are as excited as I am with VMworld just around the corner. In case you missed it, we have a lot going on in San Francisco. Brian Gracely has a published number of posts covering the details of our Breakout Sessions and the sessions featuring either NetApp Partners or Customers over at the Virtualization Effect.

For more details click here, here, and here.

If you’d like some insight as to Dave’s plans to present during our Keynote presentation check out this post in the NetApp Communities.

The Storage Most Integrated with VMware

In yesterday’s post I made an effort to clarify the level of integration between VMware and a storage vendor claiming to have the greatest level of integration. While I craft the follow up to that post I’d like to offer you a preview of one of the integration technologies that will be made available and on display at VMworld.

VCE-101: Deduplication: Storage Capacity and Array Cache

Welcome to the first session in a series of blog posts entitled ‘Storage 101 - Virtualization Changes Everything’

Data deduplication was originally introduced in Data ONTAP 7.2 in July of 2006 as a technology that enhanced the NetApp Disk-to-Disk (D2D) backup offerings. Coincidentally VMware released VI3 around the same time in June of 2006, and shortly thereafter customers began using these two technologies together to virtualize their servers and storage footprint.

For today’s post we’re going to dive into the realm of storage efficiency and discuss data deduplication and it’s impact in production storage capacity and storage array cache specifically within a virtual data center.

The Format of this Series

As I stated when I decided to kick off these posts I want to share these topics with a wide audience and in order to do so each session will begin with a high level overview of the technology and its value followed by the technical details.

Storage 101 – Virtualization Changes Everything

Updated July 12th - Syllabus revised

Welcome all to Storage 101, I’ll be brief below is our syllabus and the topics we will cover leading up to VMworld. The format of these posts will begin with a high level introduction to the technology followed by all of the technical gory details. I am hoping that those who want the ‘why’ can be satisfied up front, and these who want the ‘how’ can continue reading.

The Epiphany - I Had One, You Want One?

Recently I was visiting customers and prospects in the North East and during one of our meetings the customer stated, “…what NetApp is doing, in terms of storage virtualization, make us feel like NetApp is much more aligned with the goals of VMware than their parent company…”

This praise was shared while the customer told us how EMC is working to earn back their VMware (storage) business. Apparently the EMC team stating something to the effect that more companies run VMware on EMC than on any other storage platform and that the numbers from these surveys validated this claim.

The customer shared with us that what was very interesting in this data set was that NetApp's gains in market share was much more impressive than EMC's legacy market share.

NetApp: Microsoft’s Storage Solutions Partner of the Year

I apologize as I’ve been traveling today which has led to a delay in getting this post posted. Hopefully you’ve heard today's news that NetApp was announced as Microsoft’s Advanced Infrastructure Storage Solutions Partner for 2009. I’d like to extend congratulations to the Microsoft and NetApp teams for earning this recognition.

I/O Efficiency and Alignment – the Cloud Demands Standards

I was surprised to read in the relatively recent EMC report: VMware ESX Server Optimization with EMC® Celerra® Performance Study that when it comes to aligning the partitions inside of virtual machines EMC has diametrically opposed recommendations based on the storage protocol and storage array which one deploys with VMware. I have to say that such recommendations raise a red flag that I believe needs some additional light shed on it.

VMware Communities Roundtable Podcast #48

Yesterday Chris Gebhardt and I had the privilege of being guests of John Troyer on episode 48 of the VMware Communities Podcast. On the podcast we discussed numerous topics regarding storage with VMware including Multipathing, performance, storage virtualization, DR, and backup and recovery.

vSphere Introduces the Plug-n-Play SAN

With today’s release of vSphere, VMware has introduced numerous new features and technologies all designed to advance the virtual evolution of our data centers. With this release VMware and their storage alliance partners have delivered Plug-n-Play SAN storage connectivity. As you begin downloading the final bits, refreshing your labs and planning your upgrade path to vSphere I’d like to dig into the considerations of and how one can deploy a robust, reliable, and greatly simplified P-n-P SAN architecture with vSphere and NetApp.

Has the World Gone Mad?

This may be the question you are asking around the water cooler this morning if you are a server virtualization vendor or the manufacture of legacy storage arrays.

In the past week VMware & NetApp have raised the stakes in the competitive landscape. In this post I'd like to share with you these announcements. It appears both companies are very serious about accelerating the adoption of virtualization technologies within customers’ datacenters.

Deduplication Guarantee from NetApp – Fact or Fiction?

I stumbled across these blog posts this morning.

NetApp’s ‘Shining’ Moment – its Capacity Guarantee Program &

NetApp’s ‘Shining’ Moment – its Capacity Guarantee Program follow up

 These blogs attempt to discuss the details of the NetApp 50% Virtualization Guarantee Program. This program is one of the many means by which NetApp is helping customers reduce their storage spenditures and carbon footprint by reducing the amount of storage required to run their virtual infrastructures.

The blog’s author, Jim Haberkorn, made the point that the guarantee program includes a requirement that compares NetApp RAID-DP against traditional storage systems running RAID 10.

I believe the point Jim is trying to make in his posts is, 'RAID-DP requires almost half the physical disks as RAID 10 so one should conclude that the NetApp data deduplication technology works poorly and thus the guarantee program is worthless.'

A New Era for Virtual Desktops

We are entering into an interesting time in the industry witnessed by the release of VMware View. View Manager, View Composer, Thin App, and Offline Desktop are well positioned to accelerate the adoption of virtual desktops in datacenters and to remote access devices.

Today I’d like to share some thoughts specific to reducing storage costs with VDI or View.  A major component in VMware View Composer is Linked Clones, which provides the ability to deploy hundreds of virtual desktops from a single desktop image.  In addition to storage savings, customers will be able to update deployed desktops deployed with View Composer by patching the master desktop image.

Recently I have received a number of inquiries as to how View Composer and Linked Clones integrate with NetApp’s storage saving Dedupe and zero cost provisioning FlexClone technologies.  I’d like to take this time to discuss this topic and how VMware and NetApp are engineering the best of breed virtual desktop solutions.

I will caution you in advance, this post is a bit lengthy because we have much to share and discuss.

VMware on NetApp Best Practices Update

As one might imagine

Several of us within NetApp receive a fair amount of feedback around the content in our VMware on NetApp Best Practices Technical Report, TR-3428.  A few of the areas where we receive a large amount of inquiry are related to the frequency of the updates to the document and requests for notification of when updates are posted. I’d like to use this post as my way of saying we hear you, to follow up on these questions and ask for some feedback as we move forward with the document and begin work on our ESX 4.0 on NetApp Best Practices document.

An update has been posted

Version 4.4 went live on November 24th around midnight EDT.  As this is update closely followed version 4.3, which posted in November, I’d like to share with you some of the key updates and additions to the content that have been introduced in the past 30 days.

Need more on VDI, stay tuned…

I want to thank everyone who has contributed to the conversation around VDI. Wow, for a blog which was posted at 8:00 PM EDT on a Friday evening, to attract this much attention in 24 hours, I believe that I may have struck a nerve.

At present time, it appears that my friends at EMC are a bit perplexed as to the capabilities and integration of NetApp technologies with VMware VDI. I noticed in his most recent post that Chad has begun to turn this discussion towards performance. I’m not the least bit surprised that when the conversation around functionality falters the dialog turns to speeds and feeds.

I bring this up because I don’t think we are done with the conversation around manageability and administration of VDI environments. I’d really like to share more with you right now, unfortunately I will have to defer until after we present the NetApp breakout session on VDI Thursday morning (session ID VD2387 @ 9:30 AM PDT).

Adjust your VMworld schedule if seats still remain… looks like we might need a bigger room.

The used car salesman approach

Ever feel like someone is telling you everything you want to hear while their true raison d'être is for their own gain?

Maybe I’m off base here, so I‘ll ask you to help me decide

I believe we all agree that a few of the core goals with implementing VMware are simplifying operations, and to drive down infrastructure costs.  So am I missing something with this post from Chad?

The Challenge of VDI

VDI is a great means to drive down the operational cost associated with providing and servicing an end user environment.  The challenge to VDI is that the environments are very large.  I mean moderate installations are commonly 1,500 seats and at the high end we have customers looking at 50,000 – 100,000 seats.  At this scale it is easy to understand why the storage infrastructure cost can be a large hurdle facing an organization considering the adoption of VDI.

The World is Taking Notice

I am rather excited to see Pushan Rinnen and the good folks at Gartner tackle the subject of storage choices with VMware in their recent report “Choosing Network-Attached Storage for VMware: What You Should Know”  (Gartner report ID G00159391 published July 16th, 2008).

I’d like to share with you a few highlights from this report:

“Gartner found that most adoption of NFS to support VMware infrastructure is driven by ease of management especially when dealing with a large number of VMs”

“The current dominance of FC SANs in a VMware environment is further influenced by the fact that early versions of VMware did not support iSCSI SANs or NFS”

“For those who have decided to adopt NFS for VMware, they should be aware that not all NAS products are created equal and need to carefully evaluate specific NAS products that can cater to their requirements”

The content of the report is spot on with what we have experienced with our customers. Note: there was a wealth of additional information in the report, but you’ll need to leverage your Gartner and check it out for yourself.

Welcome...

We all have friends, family, and coworkers who operate on different social timelines. Some of them arrive to an event early, others right on time, and a few consistently arrive ‘fashionably late’ (like it’s ingrained within their DNA).  I guess I fall into this later category, as today is the first day of the rest of my life in the blogosphere.