NetApp - The Virtual Storage Guy

Configuring Role Based Access with the Virtual Storage Console vCenter Plug-in

We have recently published how to enable role based access (RBAC) with the VSC for customers who want to use accounts other than root as the VSC’s ‘service account’. This is the account used to communicate with the Data ONTAP APIs.

I would suggest that RBAC be implemented in environments that have separate administration teams for storage and the Virtual Infrastructure.

In today’s post I’ll cover how to implement RBAC with the VSC. This content is also being added (along with a number of updates) to the next release of TR-3749: vSphere on NetApp storage best practices. The goal of version 1.1 is to be to reduce the size of the document from its current size of 94 to around 60. We believe the release of the VSC, RCU, and NSM demonstrates the simplicity of deploying VMware on any array powered by Data ONTAP with any storage protocol. Maybe page count is a poor metric; maybe I should list the reduction in word count (as I may replace a large amounts of text with images).

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”

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.

vSphere on NetApp Book Available at VMworld

This morning the VMworld bookstore opened and for the first time NetApp customers are able purchase a NetApp technical book! Early reports state that sales have been solid, so if you’re interested in a copy I’d suggest you grab one soon. Should you miss your opportunity to grab one the books will be available for sale in the next few weeks on Amazon.com.

Meet me and the co-authors Mike, Larry, & Peter at the NetApp booth. We are all on hand to answer your most technical questions.

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.

Mike & Scott - Thanks

I’d like to take a minute to personally thank Mike Laverick and Scott Lowe for participating in our preview of the Rapid Cloning Utility 2.1 and the Virtual Storage Console. These technoilogies and more will be on display in the NetApp booth at VMworld.

Neither Mike nor Scott require introductions. Both are respected leaders in the virtualization market and both were kind enough to share their thoughts in online reviews.

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.

EMC: The Storage Most Integrated with VMware?

My apologies for being away from the blog for a bit. I’ve been heads down either meeting with customers or working with my team as we wrap up the final details for our VMworld presentations and demos. Today I’d like to share a true story from these recent customer visits. In a number of these meetings, multiple customers shared a similar story of their EMC sales teams stating that EMC was the storage most integrated with VMware.

I guess if I didn’t work in the storage industry, I’d suspect this claim would seem very plausible. Why wouldn’t it be true? EMC is parent company of VMware and as such they probably have tighter engineering relationship that result in solutions exclusive to EMC… Right?

VCE-101: What's Next with Deduplication?

Welcome to the latest post in our series entitled ‘Virtualization Changes Everything’

In our last post we discussed the CapEx savings provided by data deduplication of both production storage capacity and storage array cache. Deduplication is fundamentally changing the data center and it appears that there’s more on the horizon. I’d like to share with you what I call ‘Data Center Ethernet Acceleration’.

Overview

“"Some call it a software mainframe others call it cloud, it depends on when you were born" – Steve Herrod, CTO, VMware

When discussing multiple applications on a single hardware platform I prefer the term ‘software mainframe’. I think this is due more to my time working with VMware products rather than my age. I still recall my introduction to this concept back in 2001.

A Customer's Findings: VMware on NetApp vs EMC

It must be ‘Brief Post Friday’ as I keep getting pinged with great info to share all the while I have several other deadlines to meet (I guess its another evening of working until midnight).

I have the privilege of sharing with you the following report compiled by a rather large customer which compares the results of virtualization consulting engagements completed by EMC and NetApp.

How Heavy is your ESX Load?

I can’t tell you how often we are asked for tips around optimizing the performance of virtualized applications. Resolving performance related issues can require investigating a number of variables ranging from the virtualized application including the GOS settings and the data layout, and all the way down to the configuration of the ESX/ESXi server itself.

vSphere on NetApp Best Practices Released

I am please to share with you that this morning our new Technical Report, TR-3749: vSphere on NetApp Storage Best Practices, has been released. I’d like to thank Mike Slisinger, Larry Touchette, and Peter Learmonth for all of their assistance in the production of this TR.

I’d like to take a few moments to share some of the core enhancements covered in the report.

VMware Co-Brands TR-3428

There's an update to our VI3 storage best practices technical report. There's no technical content updates to be concerned with, instead I would like to share that TR-3428 version 4.5.2 has been officially co-branded by VMware.

This update is basically a quality assurance seal which states that the engineering teams at VMware and NetApp have reviewed and verified the contents of this technical report and the recommendations included within are truly best practices.

This wasn't always the case as some of the content in TR-3428 were truly ground breaking not too long ago. For example the dual VMkernel network designs had on occasion lead to additional discussions and configuration validations prior to implementation.

Kudos to all involved, now I think we've come to a time to let this document rest and focus on the vSphere TR.

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.

What’s the right LUN size for a VMFS datastore?

I can’t tell you how often we are asked this question and the answer has many variables including the amount of aggregated I/O of the servers being virtualized onto the datastore, the storage protocol used in connecting to the datastore, etc.

Vote for the Top 5 VMware Blogs

Eric Siebert has asked the VMware community to make their voices by submitting their votes in a survey of the top 5 VMware related blogs. If you’re a reader of this blog and you haven’t casted a vote please head over to vSphere-Land and do so, it will only take a minute.

Got an iPhone? Got VMware? Heard of VManage?

Taking a break from the serious posts and stumbling thru the web when low and behold I learn of VManage, which is as far as I know, the first VMware management tool for the iPhone.

I’m sure from the blog posts its easy to tell I’m a bit of a VMware fan; however, my affection for my iPhone may not be as clear. Let’s just say I have a 3GS on preorder waiting to be picked up tomorrow at 8:00 AM EST.

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.

VI3 on NetApp Best Practices Update

Today we've published a minor update to our VMware on NetApp: Storage Best Practices Technical Report TR-3428. After posting the blog announcing version 4.4 I received a number of comments and emails asking to share and comment as we publish future updates, so without further adieu here's the highlights of version 4.5.1...

A “Multivendor Post” to help our mutual NFS customers using VMware

We were quite a bit surprised to see how popular our “Multivendor iSCSI” post was. The feedback was overwhelming and very supportive of industry leaders partnering to ensure customer’s success with VMware. While writing that post, we (Vaughn Stewart from NetApp and Chad Sakac from EMC) discussed following up the iSCSI post with one focused on deploying VMware over NFS. The most difficult part around creating this post is that we couldn’t do it with our iSCSI-focused colleagues.

Since the original post, we’ve been busy assisting our customers and partners. We apologize for the delay, so without further ado we present to you the followup: a “Multivendor NFS” post for our joint customers. One of the goals of this post is to dispel the FUD customers often hear around NFS. Heck, if EMC and NetApp can agree – then you KNOW this post is FUD-Free!

Join Rick Scherer on today’s TechTalk: Virtualizing SQL

Today, May 28, 2009 at 11:00am Pacific Time you have an opportunity to join Rick Scherer of VMwaretips.com and a fellow vExpert for a discussion on how the San Diego Data Processing Corporation overcame server sprawl by successfully implementing SQL Server® on VMware®.

In addition to Rick, experts from NetApp and VMware will host an interactive discussion on best practices that will help you weigh your deployment options.

Topics for today’s call include:

* What You Should Know and How to Get Started
* Gain performance advantages when virtualizing SQL
* Optimize storage utilization without impacting performance
* Implement centralized and cost-effective backup and disaster recovery

You can register for the call here

Enjoy the TechTalk. Rick really knows his stuff and has an enormous amount of valuable information to share.

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.

Site Recovery Manager: It’s Not Just for VMs

A key goal at NetApp is advancing the value of storage in the virtual data center from the traditional model of highly available storage to a more advanced virtual object oriented model. This approach is unified in nature as it provides the traditional functions of high availability, high performance, and the traditional storage provisioning of LUNs and file shares while also expanding into the realm of management of virtualized objects by the virtualization administrative team.

By virtualized objects I am specifically speaking of the objects that a VMware admin care about such as VMs, Datastores, workflow automation tools such SRM or View Manager, etc. For this blog I’d like to share with you an example of the direction NetApp is taking storage virtualization by discussing how to integrate a NetApp NAS file server into a VMware SRM recovery plan.

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.

The Highlight of SNW

I spent today assisting in the setup of our booth at SNW in Orlando. This year one of the NetApp demos is a VMware environment running on a Clariion CX array from EMC and a RAMSAN solid-state array from Texas Memory Systems.

Now you may be asking, “Why would NetApp do this?”

We are want to demonstrate our V-Series storage virtualization technology with heterogeneous storage arrays. See we have taken this VMware environment and reduced its storage requirements to just 10% of what was originally required with traditional and leading edge SSD storage arrays.

It’s an awesome statement that times have changed, technology has advanced, and it is time to virtualize your storage arrays. To emphasize these points, may I ask you to recall what your data center used to look like say three to five years ago?

The inaugural VMware vExpert Award

This was a surprise. This morning I received an email from John Troyer at VMware which began with...

“Congratulations! On behalf of VMware, we would like to thank you for all the work you’ve done giving back to the virtualization community and sharing your expertise with others. We are pleased to present you with the VMware vExpert Award for 2009. VMware is giving this award to individuals who have contributed significantly to the community of VMware users over the past year.”

A “Multivendor Post” to help our mutual iSCSI customers using VMware

Today’s post is one you don’t often find in the blogosphere, see today’s post is a collaborative effort initiated by Chad Sakac (EMC), which includes contributions from Andy Banta (VMware), Vaughn Stewart (NetApp), Eric Schott (Dell/EqualLogic), and Adam Carter (HP/Lefthand), David Black (EMC) and various other folks at each of the companies. Together, our companies make up the large majority of the iSCSI market, all make great iSCSI targets, and we (as individuals and companies) all want our customers to have iSCSI success.

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.

VMworld 2008... less than 100 hours away

Many of you will begin your travel to VMworld 2008 within the next couple of days.  I have to admit I am really excited for this years show.  I’m on my way in tonight, so if you’re in town look me up!  We’ll be working during the day (as NetApp is the storage provider for eight Hands on Labs), but our evenings are free.

I apologize for my absence from the blogosphere, but I’ve been burning the candles at both ends along with the rest of my team as we wrap up our content for the show.  If you’d like to read about what we have in store for you check out Nick’s blog.

I hope to see you there.

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.