What is it?

The HP 3PAR Management Software Plug-In for VMware vCenter is a vSphere vCenter management console plug-in that allows easy identification of HP 3PAR virtual volumes used by virtual machines and datastores.

What does it do?

It can provided a single pane view of the virtual machines and the 3PAR virtual volumes resources they are attached to.  It can show capacity, usage, thin and thick properties on a volume basis and also the disk type the virtual volumes are made up of.  The beauty of this plugin is that you do not need to login to the inform console to view the virtual volumes mapped to your ESXi hosts.

A peek at the interface

This screenshot really does say it all, you can see how much savings you are getting with using the 3PAR thin suite functionality, you can also see the name of the virtual volume that the VMFS is housed on making it easier for administrators to locate and map virtual machines, trouble shoot and provide reports.

And of course, it shows you whether or not you are getting the most out of your EZT VMDKs, by showing the status of the Zero Detection engine on the array ensuring your 3PAR stays thin!

And best of all, the plugin is free!

For more information on this great plugin please visit here or contact me

Here is a draft which discusses the differences between ESX 4.1 and ESXi 5.0 Hardening guidelines.
http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-19056

What is T10 UNMAP?

UNMAP is a SCSI command used to reclaim space from blocks that have been deleted by a virtual machine (OS or application).

In vSphere 5, UNMAP is used for space reclamation of deleted data after common operations

This is particularly beneficial and important in thinly provisioned environments as it allows the storage array to realise these are unwanted or unused blocks and to return them to the free capacity pool.

What makes UNMAP important?

HP 3PAR thrives on the thin suite and it supports UNMAP as of Inform OS 3.1.1, however the first release of vSphere 5.0 had some issues where there were unexpected timeouts when the UNMAP command was issued from the ESXi host during an operation.

So when an operation like storage v-motion or a virtual machine is deleted, a copy or movement of data is kicked off essentially leaving behind deleted blocks, HP 3PAR can only realise this so long as UNMAP is started to reclaim those blocks. Since administrators are using storage v-motion on a day-to-day basis, the impact can be huge.

So what do you do?

Disable it until VMware release a fix – expected in the next patch release.

Use a manual command such as sdelete on Windows or dd on Linux to write zeros at the file system level, The 3PAR’s ASICs will pick these zeros up so long as zero detect is enabled.

This issue is now resolved in ESXi 5.0 Patch 02. For more information, see VMware ESXi 5.0 Patch Image Profile ESXi-5.0.0-20111204001-standard (2009330).

How can UNMAP be disabled?

Support for UNMAP in our storage arrays is enabled by default and cannot be disabled by customers. In vSphere support for UNMAP is enabled by default but can be disabled via the command line interface.

esxcfg-advcfg –s 1 /VMFS3/EnableBlockDelete

Summary

• This issue only affects thin provisioned arrays in the 3PAR family
• UNMAP is a SCSI command standardized within T10 SCSI command set - It is not specifically a vSphere 5 feature
• This Issue only occurs when using ESXi 5.0 and 3PAR arrays that have the latest firmware.
• Customers can still reclaim space without UNMAP using the 3PAR arrays zero detect functionality should they disable UNMAP
• A patch is available that resolves this issue

“Data growth - IDC believes that the Digital Universe will grow by 44 times that of 2009 by 2020. IBM estimates that data and content is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 64% a year or more. (Zettabyte = 1 trillion gigabytes).”

Gartner is an independent provider of IT and research advice, Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Midrange and High-End Modular Disk Arrays assesses storage vendors on their “ability to execute” and “completeness of vision.”  Placing the candidates into one of the four quadrants each representing different definitions.

So what does this mean?

• Leaders execute well against their current vision and are well positioned for tomorrow.
• Visionaries understand where the market is going or have a vision for changing market rules, but do not yet execute well.
• Niche Players focus successfully on a small segment, or are unfocused and do not out-innovate or outperform others.
• Challengers execute well today or may dominate a large segment, but do not demonstrate an understanding of market direction.

And to be selected, the vendor must meet the following criteria:

• The vendor must have midrange and high-end modular disk array storage systems commercially available and have active references that are using them in production scenarios.
• The vendor must generate at least $25 million in annual midrange and high-end modular disk array hardware revenue.
• The vendor must actively market its branded midrange and high-end modular disk array products in at least two major regions (for example, North America and EMEA, or Japan and Asia/Pacific).
• The vendor must sell its branded midrange and high-end modular disk array products to user organizations via its direct sales force or through a reseller partnership sales channel.

from http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/research_mq.jsp

From an HP perspective –  Gartner included the following HP Storage solutions:

• HP 3PAR
• HP LeftHand
• HP Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA)

So let’s dissect this and see what changes have occurred since the last period.

Certainly, there has been massive movement shown in this graph , EMC and NetApp’s gap closed slightly and HP’s ability to execute position increased dramtically as did its position in the visionaries quadrant, this is no doubt due to the acquiring, development and rise of it’s 3PAR platform.
There hasnt been much movement from HDS, Dell seems to have taken a sideways step in some ways, IBM remains static since the last period. Its hard to really say who really leads in this view,  NetApp and EMC are  ”Leaders” and are performing or executing really efficiently  however HP are also leaders and appear to have a better understanding of the market and where it is going.

I look forward to the 2012 version of this research release, it surely shows there is a healthy competitive environment for this area of technology. Well done to the leading four storage Vendors – EMC, NetApp, HP and IBM.

busy…….Please hold…. Life is very busy right not. post to come

For those who care, vExpert 2012 applications are now open.

http://communities.vmware.com/vexpert.jspa for more details.

So being part of the extended HP APJ Storage Consulting team, I wanted to share my thoughts on a preferred way to migrate between 3rd Party arrays and HP.

Having worked with the leading storage vendors in the world, I have seen many methods of migration during my delivery days.  There are obviously industry best practices to which customers typically tend to go for as directed and guided by the storage vendor, but then there are customers who prefer to do it themselves (usually utilising host based methods over array based methods).  There are obvious caveats of this,  host based migration tends to be a lot slower and places loads on the host handling the migration.
There there is SAN based migration, where a customer would have to usually purchase some form of license that gets enabled on the storage array itself,  this tends to be expensive (unless you get a very generous Sales Manager that lends a customer a license for the duration of the migration).

Enter, HP Storageworks MPX200 appliance for migration services.

What is it?

The HP Storageworks MPX200 appliance is a purpose built device that can assist in Database/Storage/Application migration from one storage array to another.

Best of all, it has heterogeneious array data migration capability!

Features

• The MPX200 can have both 1GbE and 10GbE iSCSI connectivity, as well as 4/8Gbps FC, FCIP for SAN over WAN.
• MPX200 includes remote online/offline data migration for support between two data centres and asynchronous replication.
• Disaster recovery (DR) capabilities
• Online/Offline migrations. There are some points to note around this though.
• Schedule migration jobs.
• Supported on heretogenous FC storage arrays – NetApp, EMC, Hitachi, IBM and of course HP.
• Fully supported with Brocade and Cisco FC fabrics – this is because the architecture is built on QLogic FC HBA technology.

Use-Case Scenarios

When to use to migration to HP 3PAR

• Heterogeneous Migrations
• Consistent way to reclaim unused blocks across all major OSs, Space reclamation tools will prepare dirty blocks for Thin Provision

When to use to migration to HP XP

• Convert Thick Luns to Thin Provisioned Luns using Space reclamation tools and MPX200 capability
• Heterogeneous Migrations
• User wants to cut over from old to new after migration is successfully complete

When to use to migration to HP EVA

• Convert Thick Luns to Thin Provisioned Luns using Space reclamation tools and MPX200 capability
• Heterogeneous Migrations

When to use to migration to HP P4000

• Migrate FC storage to P4000 ONLINE/OFFLINE
• Convert Thick luns to Thin provisioned luns

Performance

This is the cool part, you can migrate data online/offline at 4TB/HR with a  single blade and 8TB/HR full chassis between heterogeneous storage arrays using a user friendly data migration GUI.

Offline Migrations

• No downtime required to plan & configure, Migrations up to 4TB/Hr
• Server with less than 1TB storage can be migrated in 1 Hr. application downtime
• Reduces implementation time – saves money

• Insert MPX200 into the Data path without application down time during migration
• Downtime only when cutting over to new storage
• Keeping Source data “Current” through out the migration process – User can always fall back

Licensing
Of course I leave this bit for last, it is really straight forwards and different licenses for different cases.

Capacity or Per-TB Licenses

• “Fills the petrol tank”. Unused capacity will be available for next job
• Can be installed at anytime, adding new license doesn’t overwrite remaining license capacity

Per-Array Licenses

• Unlimited Data migration for a specific array
• Many sources to one target
• One source to many targets

Supported topology One

Supported topology Two 

Example topology for best performance

MPX200 patches into the same fibre channel switch as the source and destination array.

First off, happy new year.  Last year was great and some exciting changes happened:

1) I changed roles/companies.

2) vSphere 5 announced/released by VMWare.

3) All Blacks won the Rugby World Cup.

Here’s to another great year!

Just a short note to say merry christmas and best wishes for the new year to you and your family, thanks for visiting.

Andre

So the topic of what is a cold migration (in VMWare vmotion speak) came up in a conference call today with a customer.

It is a migration strategy when there are CPU compatibility constraints  between certain revisions of CPUs, it basically means there is no path to use v-motion as such so will associated outages.
When does it occur?

As mentioned, cold migration is a strategy or a decision to migrate virtual machines between different revisions of CPU (whether it be manufacturer or models). An example might be going from an AMD chipset to an Intel chip.  There are cases that going from a same vendor CPU requires an outage so cold migration would be an option.  More information on what to check, how to check can be found here

What happens? 

Quite simply, the virtual machine is powered off on the source host and powered on, so there is an outage but as long as both ESXi servers have visibility to the same shared storage, then cold migration can be very fast and the virtual machine downtime kept to a minimum.
The difference to vMotion

Biggest difference, vMotion is (typically) performed without any downtime on the virtual machine where as cold migration requires an outage to power down and power up the virtual machine on the destination host.

Another notable difference it happens at a management network layer and not the VMKernel layer (which vMotion uses)

That is cold migration in a nutshell!

Having recently sat the VCP 5 exam, I thought I would offer some tips and study advice.  Overall, there are 85 multi-choice questions and you have 90 mins to complete and their is a lot more focus on new features, troubleshooting, and configuring than previous versions of the exam which was usually based around limitations and maximums.

Networking

• VMKernel securing – how (and where) to do it.
• Load balancing policies
• Path Selection policies – Quite a few questions on these.
• Traffic shaping
• VDS – Lots on this topic. What features are unique to VDS and what aren’t,
• Promiscuous mode vs forged transmits – About 2 questions involving these
• Restarting management network – how to do it in vSphere 5
• Securing your host – turning off ssh etc.
• Uplinks – what are they and what do they do. Relationship with vSwitches
• CNA – Question around image profiles and driver certification
• ISCSI and implications of changing certain parameters such as CHAP

Storage

• New features: VMFS3 vs VMFS 5, migration to VMFS5 – what changes and what doesn’t. Maximum file size supported
• VSA – How to configure. Valid states of a VSA
• RDM – Physical compatibility vs Virtual
• Storage Profiles – Learn what it does.
• VMKernel interation with storage array, what the array does and what the kernel does
• VAAI – Benefits of VAAI and what the supported array can do.
• Trouble shooting storage performance – What counters to look at

Advanced Features

• HA – What it does.
• FT – Why you would use it – use cases
• DRS – Ports for DRS and HA
• vMotion/EVC – Where to configure and requirements around CPU. NPIV and vMotion compatibility
• Resource Pools, shares, limits and reservations – Lots of questions around these, learn what increasing and decreasing each element does and the effect.
• Performance tuning and troubleshooting – They give you line graphs and ask you to understand and diagnose the issue, scenario based troubleshooting. (I.e Image shows error, what is the cause), ESXtop
• Memory conservation – TPS vs ballooning
• Upgrading from ESX3 to ESXi5 – One question on this, basically you can’t do it.
• Upgrading from ESX4 to ESXi5 – rules, methods and things you need to look out for.
• How to back up a ESXi host before upgrading
• Understanding alarm warnings and alerts and how to configure
• vApps and IP allocations, and what objects they contain.
• Log file configuration. Increasing etc
• vCenter Server – What extra capabilities does it give you over managing a host directly.
• Auto Deploy – Learn Image profiles and how to use.
• VSA – Quite a few on this, how to upgrade from earlier version was one question
• Modifying Users and permissions and the impacts

Hope that helps.

This took me a little while to get my head around the concepts.

But here is my understanding:

Thin In this particular format, the of the VMDK file on the datastore is equal to the amount that is used within the VM itself as it zeros out the space prior to I/O being written, so for example if you create a 200GB virtual disk, and you populate it with 100GB worth of data, the VMDK will be 100GB in size and will grow as more data is added to it.

Thick The VMDK file on the datastore is the size of the virtual disk file that you provisioned but no prezeroing takes place like it does in thin format.  So for example if you create a 200GB virtual disk and write 100GB worth of data to it, the VMDK will still appear as 200GB in size but only contain 100GB worth of data.

Eagerzeroedthick The “truely” thick virtual disk, the size of the VMDK file within the datastore is equal to the virtual disk size that is provisioned. If you create a 200GB virtual disk, and write 100GB worth of data the VMDK will be 200GB and contain 100GB worth of data and 100GB of zero’s. Which format is the best? There are pro’s and cons for each. Thin format requires more monitoring and cant be used with RDM’s where Thick/Eagerzerothick are not as efficient as thin and one might not see as much space savings when implementing this type.

So I had just built a ESXi 5 VM when I wanted to upload some ISO’s into a datastore, alas SSH is turned off by default in ESXI 5

So, first part is to turn it on, you need to be physically at your ESXi box in order to do this part.

At the ESXi console screen

Logon using the root account

Select “Troubleshooting Options” from the menu

In the next menu, select “Enable SSH”, you will notice that it says ‘Disabled’ in the right hand pane

Press enter to change to enable

Thats it!, you can now quit out of there and go onto the next part which is to get the SFTP server running, truth is it is missing by default in ESXi 4

So lets get it

ssh into your esxi box using the root account.

cd /sbin */ Changes to the right directory
wget http://thebsdbox.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/sftp-server.tar.gz */ Downloads sftp-server files
tar xzvf sftp-server.tar.gz */ Extracts file into current directory /sbin
rm sftp-server.tar.gz */ Removes file now that we have extracted it

Log out.. Thats it! You should now be able to SFTP files to and from your ESXi 5 host!

What is it?

HP 3PAR Recovery Manager Software for VMware vSphere enables the protection and rapid recovery of virtual machines and VMware datastores

What does it look like?

<insert image here>

What can it do?

It provides virtual copy management and allows you to take LUN-level snapshots of virtual machines and datastores through the vSphere management GUI by using array-based snapshots that are quick, space efficient, and virtual machine aware.

The plugin makes it possible to create hundreds of virtual copies. The number of virtual copies to retain and the retention period for each virtual copy can easily be specified

This plug-in can do granular restores at the VMFS level, the virtual machine level, or the individual file level.

Neat stuff!

If you want to know more, get in touch and email me or visit http://www.hp.com/go/3PAR

In a nutshell, HP 3PAR Dynamic Optimisation Software is a software license/product enabled on the storage array itself that can provide a non-disruptive way to make changes to storage volumes hosted on the HP 3PAR Storage System.

Storage administrators can move volumes between different drive types or tiers (SSD, Fibre Channel, SATA/Nearline), leveling volumes as new drives are added into the array, all without outages or impacting any hosts that the system is busy serving I/O to.

So how is this good for virtual environments? It can be used to move running VMs between different tiers without impacting what the virtual machines are doing.

Similarly, as new drives are added to the array, the LUN that ESX is using can be striped across the new drives on the fly without taking an outage at the ESX server level. VMWare’s vMotion technology offers somewhat similar functionality, but at the host layer.

Dynamic Optimization works at the storage layer, which can be used to optimize storage service levels while VMware vMotion can be used to optimize CPU utilization across multiple hosts.  Very similar to storage vMotion but all on the array itself!!

Pretty cool!

Thanks to a inadequate web hosting backup strategy, and a person with too much time on their hands.  cloud-land has been hacked through a vulnerability in the wordpress theme I was using. The result is many posts (along with associated files/screen dumps) have been lost.  I have managed to salvage some posts prior to this happening due to writing the actual content into a word document offline I kept before I published on here but still………Grumpy!!!

Having written posts about HP 3PAR and VMWare vSphere integration, I found a  really good (more official) read on VMWare vSphere and HP 3PAR storage:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vmw-vsphere-3par-utility-storage.pdf

Enjoy!

Personally, I love seeing stuff and tests like these.

Whilst other technologist’s from representing companies may be quick to defend why their particular company’s hardware doesn’t get the top score they would of hoped. I try to take another angle on approaching these sort of benchmarks.

Why? I’ll break down the reasons why I think these are good to have.

Competitive - Simply, without some form of benchmark or competitor to design your products to compete with – Then technology wouldnt get as sophisticated as it has. Whilst server virtualization hasn’t been as prevalent or utilised as much as it is over the recent years. This particular benchmarking results show there are some worthy competitors to HP in the server market. It wouldn’t be as fun if it was a one horse race. This keeps the engineering team from Fujitsu, Dell, HP etc returning to the drawing board to make servers better and better.

And for a virtualization geek, this is exciting.

Trending - We can see how well servers do now and compare in five years time, There may be a gradual improvement in scores in the five years, or they may just increase exponentially.

Reviews - Simply put, some-one looking to buy a server for virtualization purposes has a great source of information on best performing models as a starting point to purchasing the right server. It also provides the consumer with an idea of just what elements affect server performance.

Well done to the top four server vendors – Fujitsu, Dell, HP and Cisco

This will no doubt be tweaked over the years to come, but I thought I would share my own personal definition of what the concept of cloud computing is today.

“Cloud Computing refers to a virtual shared IT infrastructure where resources are provisioned as required from a shared pool of computer, storage and network on a pay per use basis via the Internet or WAN.”

Alternatively Wikipedia offers the following definition (Retrieved 5th August 2011 from (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing)  ”Cloud computing refers to the logical computational resources (data, software) accessible via a computer network (through WAN or Internet etc.), rather than from a local computer.”

My employer HP define it as “a delivery model for technology-enabled services that provides on-demand access to an elastic pool of shared computing assets.” from Finding the right cloud solutions for your organization,

Gartner defines cloud computing as a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-related capabilities are provided as a service to customers using Internet technologies (Retrieved August 8th 2011 from http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/cloud-computing/).

So lets dissect these and dig out the common denominator between the three different definitions. The common theme or series of words are

“Shared, Instant, scalable and accessible”.

Behind all these definitions, you’ll see a lot of supporting detail that give a broader understanding of what the cloud really is.  I think the common themes really boil down to:

• Instantly available – services that can be made immediately available
• Scalability & elasticity – both are enablers of resources becoming instantly available. Without the cloud’s scalability, the whole speed aspect of the cloud goes away.
• Shared resources – services that run within a set of shared resources – infrastructure or applications – that gain the benefit of multi-tenancy.
• Accessibility – services that are processed over the Internet to the end user.

Private Cloud A private cloud refers to a cloud computing  environment which offers services within a single enterprise organisation and it’s firewall but may be hosted internally or externally to the organisation.

Public Cloud A public cloud refers to a cloud computing environment made available to the general public using the Internet and is external to the 0rganisation’s firewall that owns the environment

Hybrid Cloud A hybrid cloud refers to a computing environment that combines both private and public cloud computing environments.

Agree? Please comment and share your definitions, I’d love to read! There are more exciting posts to follow this one, particularly around Hybrid Cloud the many cloud offerings that HP have in this space. But for now, we’ll save it for another time