Tag: vVols

VMware VVOLs potential performance problems

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, FC, Server virtualization, Storage, Storage architecture, Storage performance

We discussed vSphere 6 VVOLs (Virtual Volumes) on this month’s GreyBeardsonStorage (GBoS) podcast with Howard Marks (@DeepStorageNet) and Satyam Vaghani (@SatyamVaghani, “Father of VVOLs”, CoFounder & CTO of PernixData).

VVOLs queue depth problem?

One performance problem from my perspective is that all VVOL FC IO is now funeled through a single Protocol Endpoint (PE) LUN for a single storage system. There may be some potential queue depth issues, but Satyam and Howard both said that queue depths have been greatly increased over the last decade or so and this shouldn’t be a problem, as long as you’re configured properly.

What about VVOL PEs on ALUA storage?

In an ALUA (Asymmetrical Logical Unit Access) Active/Passive, dual controller storage system, a set of LUNs is assigned to  one controller, the “active” side of an Active/Passive ALUA storage system. Many ALUA vendors now support “Active/Active” configurations such that 1/2 the LUNs are assigned to one side and the other 1/2  assigned to the other sider, for an Active/Passive & Passive/Active pair or Active/Active configuration.

So, ALUA storage systems have a LUN “allegiance” to a controller. If this continues to be the case under VVOLs,  then a PE would only be processed by one side of an ALUA dual controller system, effectively reducing the horse power to process VVOL IO to 1/2 of an ALUA storage system.

Now just because there is a LUN allegiance in ALUA storage doesn’t necessarily mean that all internal IO processing for a LUN is done on only one controller. But historically that has been the case. For instance, during an ALUA system non-disruptive code update, an “active” ALUA side must “failover” its LUNs to the other side to provide continuous IO activity, while the formerly active ALUA side taken down and updated with new code.

Potential solutions to ALUA PE performance?

One way to get around the VVOL ALUA performance problem is to have multiple PEs in a single storage system for the same vSphere Cluster VVOLs. I don’t know anything that would inhibit a storage system from supporting multiple PEs today, they already need to support multiple PEs for multiple vSphere clusters. Also, a VMware vSphere cluster must support multiple PEs for multiple storage systems.

I am also not aware of any VASA 2.0 requirement that restricts the number of PEs for a storage system’s support of a single vSphere cluster. But I could be mistaken here. So there should be nothing to inhibit multiple PEs from the same ALUA storage system to the same vSphere cluster.

Of course, this means an ALUA storage VVOLs would need to be divided across ALUA PEs.

Another solution is to eliminate any LUN allegiance for ALUA controllers. This requires shared memory between controllers to hold IO state and this is what non-ALUA storage does already.

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It’s just like Howard said on the GBoS podcast, “there’s going to be good and bad implementations of VVOLs” and telling the difference between the two will need to be done.

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Photo Credit(s): Passport Please by Oren Levine

VMworld 2014 projects Marvin, Mystic, and more

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, Cloud services, Clustered storage, data protection, desktop virtualization, Disk storage, Distributed computing, Mobile computing, Networking, Object storage, Server virtualization, Software Defined Network, Storage, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategy, Systems

IMG_2902[This post was updated after being published to delete NDA material – sorry, RL] Attended VMworld2014 in San Francisco this past week. Lots of news, mostly about vSphere 6 beta functionality and how the new AirWatch acquisition will be rolled into VMware’s End-User Computing framework.

vSphere 6.0 beta

Virtual Volumes (VVOLs) is in beta and extends VMware’s software-defined storage model to external NAS and SAN storage.  VVOLs transforms SAN/NAS  storage into VM-centric devices by making the virtual disk a native representation of the VM at the array level, and enables app-centric, policy-based automation of SAN and NAS based storage services, somewhat similar to the capabilities used in a more limited fashion by Virtual SAN today.

Storage system features have proliferated and differentiated over time and to be able to specify and register any and all of these functional nuances to VMware storage policy based management (SPBM) service is a significant undertaking in and of itself. I guess we will have to wait until it comes out of beta to see more. NetApp had a functioning VVOL storage implementation on the show floor.

Virtual SAN 1.0/5.5 currently has 300+ customers with 30+ ready storage nodes from all major vendors, There are reference architecture documents and system bundles available.

Current enhancements outside of vSphere 6 beta

vRealize Suite extends automation and monitoring support for a broad mix of VMware and non VMware infrastructure and services including OpenStack, Amazon Web Services, Azure, Hyper-V, KVM, NSX, VSAN and vCloud Air (formerly vCloud Hybrid Services), as well as vSphere.

New VMware functionality being released:

  • vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.8 – provides self service DR through vCloud Automation Center (vRealize Automation) integration, with up to 5000 protected VMs per vCenter and up to 2000 VM concurrent recoveries. SRM UI will move to be supported under vSphere’s Web Client.
  • vSphere Data Protection Advanced 5.8 – provides configurable parallel backups (up to 64 streams) to reduce backup duration/shorten backup windows, access and restore backups from anywhere, and provides support for Microsoft Exchange DAGs, and SQL Clusters, as well as Linux LVMs and EXT4 file systems.

VMware NSX 6.1 (in beta) has 150+ customers and provides micro segmentation security levels which essentially supports fine grained security firewall definitions almost at the VM level, there are over 150 NSX customers today.

vCloud Hybrid Cloud Services is being rebranded as vCloud Air, and is currently available globally through data centers in the US, UK, and Japan. vCloud Air is part of the vCloud Air Network, an ecosystem of over 3,800 service providers with presence in 100+ countries that are based on common VMware technology.  VMware also announced a number of new partnerships to support development of mobile applications on vCloud Air.  Some additional functionality for vCloud Air that was announced at VMworld includes:

  • vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud On Demand beta program supports instant, on demand consumption model for vCloud services based on a pay as you go model.
  • VMware vCloud Air Object Storage based on EMC ViPR is in beta and will be coming out shortly.
  • DevOps/continuous integration as a service, vRealize Air automation as a service, and DB as a service (MySQL/SQL server) will also be coming out soon

End-User Computing: VMware is integrating AirWatch‘s (another acquisition) enterprise mobility management solutions for mobile device management/mobile security/content collaboration (Secure Content Locker) with their current Horizon suite for virtual desktop/laptop support. VMware End User Computing now supports desktop/laptop virtualization, mobile device management and security, and content security and file collaboration. Also VMware’s recent CloudVolumes acquisition supports a light weight desktop/laptop app deployment solution for Horizon environments. AirWatch already has a similar solution for mobile.

OpenStack, Containers and other collaborations

VMware is starting to expand their footprint into other arenas, with new support, collaboration and joint ventures.

A new VMware OpenStack Distribution is in beta now to be available shortly, which supports VMware as underlying infrastructure for OpenStack applications that use  OpenStack APIs. VMware has become a contributor to OpenStack open source. There are other OpenStack distributions that support VMware infrastructure available from HP, Cannonical, Mirantis and one other company I neglected to write down.

VMware has started a joint initiative with Docker and Pivotal to broaden support for Linux containers. Containers are light weight packaging for applications that strip out the OS, hypervisor, frameworks etc and allow an application to be run on mobile, desktops, servers and anything else that runs Linux O/S (for Docker Linux 3.8 kernel level or better). Rumor has it that Google launches over 15M Docker containers a day.

VMware container support expands from Pivotal Warden containers, to now also include Docker containers. VMware is also working with Google and others on the Kubernetes project which supports container POD management (logical groups of containers). In addition Project Fargo is in development which is VMware’s own lightweight packaging solution for VMs. Now customers can run VMs, Docker containers, or Pivotal (Warden) containers on the same VMware infrastructure.

AT&T and VMware have a joint initiative to bring enterprise grade network security, speed and reliablity to vCloud Air customers which essentially allows customers to use AT&T VPNs with vCloud Air. There’s more to this but that’s all I noted.

VMware EVO, the next evolution in hyper-convergence has emerged.

  • EVO RAIL (formerly known as project Marvin) is appliance package from VMware hardware partners that runs vSphere Suite and Virtual SAN and vCenter Log Insight. The hardware supports 4 compute/storage nodes in a 2U tall rack mounted appliance. 4 of these appliances can be connected together into a cluster. Each compute/storage node supports ~100VMs or ~150 virtual desktops. VMware states that the goal is to have an EVO RAIL implementation take at most 15 minutes from power on to running VMs. Current hardware partners include Dell, EMC (formerly named project Mystic), Inspur (China), Net One (Japan), and SuperMicro.
  • EVO RACK is a data center level hardware appliance with vCloud Suite installed and includes Virtual SAN and NSX. The goal is for EVO RACK hardware to support a 2hr window from power on to a private cloud environment/datacenter deployed and running VMs. VMware expects a range of hardware partners to support EVO RACK but none were named. They did specifically mention that EVO RACK is intended to support hardware from the Open Compute Project (OCP). VMware is providing contributions to OCP to facilitate EVO RACK deployment.

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Sorry about the stream of consciousness approach to this. We got a deep dive on what’s in vSphere 6 but it was all under NDA. So this just represents what was discussed openly in keynotes and other public sessions.

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Storage changes in vSphere 5.5 announced at VMworld 2013

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, Cloud storage, DAS, Disk storage, Object storage, Server virtualization, SSD storage, Storage, Storage virtualization

Pat Gelsinger, VMworld2013 Keynote, vSphere 5.5 storage changesVMworld2013 is going on in San Francisco this week. The big news is the roll out of network virtualization in NSX and vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) but there were a few tidbits in the storage arena worth discussing.

  • Virtual SAN public beta – VSAN was released as a public beta and customers can now download a copy of VSAN from www.vsanbeta.com. VSAN will construct a pool of storage out of local attached disks and flash across two or more hosts. It uses the flash as a read-write cache for the local disks. With VSAN customers can elect to have multiple tiers of storage be supported within a single VSAN pool, as well as support different availability (replication) levels, and some other, select characteristics. VSAN can easily scale in performance and capacity by just adding more hosts that have local storage. Now all that stranded local storage and flash server level resources can be used as a VM storage pool. VMware stated that they see VSAN as usefull for tier 2/tier 3 application storage and/or backup-archive storage uses. However they showed one chart with a View Planner application simulation using a 3-host VSAN (presumably with lots of SSD and disk storage) compared against an all-flash array (vendor unknown). In this benchmark the VSAN exactly matched the all-flash external storage in performance (VMs supported). [late update] Lot’s of debate on what VSAN means to enterprise storage but it appears to be a limited in scope and mainly focused on SMB applications.  Chad Sakac did a (real) lengthy post on EMC’s perspective on VSAN and Software Defined Storage if you want to know more check it out.
  • Virsto – VMware announced GA of Virsto which uses any external storage and creates a new global storage pool out of them. Apparently, it maps a log structured file system across the external SAN storage. By doing this it sequentializes all the random write IO coming off of ESX hosts. It supports thin provisioning, snapshot and read-write clones. One could see this as almost a write cache for VM IO activity but read IOs are also by definition spread across (extremely wide striped) across the storage pool which should improve read performance as well. You configure external storage as normal and present those LUNs to Virsto which then converts that storage pool into “vDisks” which can then be configured as VM storage. Probably more to see here but it’s available today. Before acquisition one had to install Virsto into each physical host that was going to define VMs using Virsto vDisks. It’s unclear how much Virsto has been integrated into the hypervisor but over time one would assume like VSAN this would be buried underneath the hypervisor and be available to any vSphere host.
  • vSphere Flash Read Cache – customers with PCIe flash cards and vCenter Ops Manager, can now use them to support a read cache for data access. vSphere Flash Read Cache is apparently vmotion aware such that as you move VMs from one ESX host to another the read cache buffer will move with it. Flash Read Cache is transparent to the VMs and can be assigned on a VMDK basis.
  • vSphere 5.5 low-latency support – unclear what VMware actually did but they now claim vSphere 5.5 now supports low latency applications, like FinServ apps. They claim to have reduced the “jitter” or variability in IO latency that was present in previous versions of vSphere. Presumably they shortened the IO and networking paths through the hypervisor which should help.  I suppose if you have a VMDK which ends up on an SSD storage someplace one can have a more predictable response time. But the critical question is how much overhead does the hypervisor IO path add to the base O/S. When all-flash arrays now sporting latencies under 100 µsecs, adding another 10 or 100 µsecs can make a big difference. In VMware’s quest to virtualize any and all mission critical apps, low-latency apps are one of the last bastions of physical server apps left to conquer. Consider this a step to accommodate them.
  • vVols – VMware keeps talking about vVols as an attempt to extend their VSAN “policy driven control plane” functionality out to networked storage but there’s still no GA yet. The (VASA 2 or vVol) spec’s seem to be out for awhile now, and I have heard from at least two “major” vendors that they have support in place today but VMware still isn’t announcing formal availability yet. Unclear what the hold up is, but maybe the spec’s are more in a state of flux than what’s depicted externally.

Most of this week was spent talking about NSX, VMware’ network virtualization and vCloud Hybrid Services. When they flashed the list of NSX partners on the screen Cisco was absent. Not sure what this means but perhaps there’s some concern that NSX will take revenue away from Cisco.

As for vCHS apparently this is a VMware run public cloud with two now expanding to three data centers in US, that customers can use to support their own hybrid cloud services. VMware announced that SAVVIS is now offering vCHS services as well as VMware with data centers in NY and Chicago.  There was some talk about vCHS offering object storage services like Amazon’s S3 but there was nothing specific about when. [Late update] Pat did mention that a future offering will provide DR-as-a-Service using vCHS as a target for SRM. That seems to be matching what Microsoft seems to be planning for Azzure and Hyper-V DR.

That’s about it as far as I can tell. Didn’t hear any other news on storage changes in vSphere 5.5. But this is the year of network virtualization. Can’t wait to see what they roll out next year.

vSphere 5.1 storage enhancements and future vision

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, Cloud storage, Clustered storage, DAS, Disk storage, Distributed computing, File Storage, Networking, Server virtualization, SSD storage, Storage, Storage architecture, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness

We discussed last year’s vSphere 5 storage changes in a previous post.  And at last week’s VMworld2012 in San Francisco, VMware announced a few new enhancements for vSphere 5.1 but showed more on their vision for the future of storage in VMware environments.

vSphere 5.1 storage enhancements were not as significant as last year’s enhancements.  Specifically, vSphere 5.1 storage oriented changes include:

  • VDP – vSphere Data Protector is a new agentless, deduplicating backup solution from VMware (and EMC) which is now bundled into vSphere and comes free for all users at the Essentials+ level and above. VDP is based on EMC’s Avamar Virtual Edition and provides a new integrated data protection management tab in vCenter Operations Manager GUI.  VDP replaces VDR.
  • vMotion changes – vMotion now supports non-shared storage and specifically, VSA storage environments.  To do this vMotion will now perform a standard storage vMotion to the targeted host before the VM vMotion takes place to move the data to the new location.
  • vSphere replication auto-failback with SRM – SRM 5.1 now supports vSphere replication service automated failback. SRM 5 supported storage array based replication automated failback but had no support for the then announced new VMware, host based replication service. This has been rectified with SRM 5.1.
  • SRM packaging changes – SRM standard now comes at no additional charge with the vCloud Suite Standard license option.  And a new entry level SRM (for 6 CPUs, 3 hosts) comes with Essentials+ to match and provide DR services for VSA environments.

VMware storage vision

VMware took the opportunity to discuss their vision for future offerings in the storage arena.  Specifically,

  • vSphere volumes (vVols) –  vVols will become the new defacto standard unit of granularity and abstraction for storage systems, providing a new allocation unit behind VMDKs and eliminating VMFS.  vVols are intended to define a new interface between vSphere and networked storage systems so that VMDKs can now be replicated, snapshot, cloned, etc.  alone without impacting other VMDKs on the storage system.  vVols are intended to replace LUNs and/or files used as previous holding containers for VMDKs.  vVols -should eliminate the mess of having to define 1000s of LUNs required to support VDI or cloud data centers implementations
  • Virtual flash – VMware’s first internal support for server side flash.  VMware will now be able to partition and allocate the flash on PCIe cards to VMs executing in the ESX server just like physical memory and vCPUs are today.  Also VMware will be able to copy flash cache contents when vMotion-ing VMs to other physical servers.  The intent is to fully support PCIe flash cards for vMotion by warm starting the flash in the target server and bring fast access storage closer to VMs.
  • VSAN – also called distributed storage, takes VSA like services and scales it out to support many more hosts/CPUs and networked storage.   The ultimate goal here seems to be to provide a shared, mid-tier, distributed storage system based on VMware DAS, which will better support vSphere execution and high availability.  VSAN will provide compute and storage within the same host.  It’s intended that VSAN be easier to configure, deploy and manage than current VM shared storage solutions.

Where are they going with all this?

I believe VMware is signaling an intent to get more involved in the storage arena.  Last years move with VSA now seems like just the beginning.

If examined together with their other thrusts for the virtual data center, it all starts to make sense. When these three future storage capabilities are in place, VMware should be better able to configure and support virtual cloud data centers (VCD) built out of commodity servers, commodity storage and commodity networking gear.  With all this in place VCDs should be better able to compete with AWS and other cloud service providers.

The end of enterprise storage, …

I was talking with one IT analyst, Dr. Kevin McIsaac with IBRS in Australia who feels when these three capabilities start rolling out, it signals the beginning of the end of enterprise storage as we know it.  He compares  this to what happened to specialized Unix servers (from HP, Sun, IBM, etc.) prominent at the end of the last century and early this century with the introduction of VMware and commodity high-performance, Intel servers/microprocessor chips.  Although these proprietary Unix servers still exist they are no longer growing market share.

In Kevin’s view, VMware is just following that playbook again, only this time it’s enterprise storage in their sights.  Of course, the other side of this is the enterprise networking that starts to be commoditized by all the virtual networking capabilities VMware is rolling out in VxLAN and Nicira integration as well. (Perhaps subject for another post).

… Not quite yet.

I understand his point and can’t help but agree with parts of it at least at the low end and potentially mid-tier storage.  IMHO however, enterprise storage vendors have a viable defense to all this but it involves providing even more functionality, performance and capabilities than they available today in their systems.

I see it every time I look at my performance charts, anytime you start getting over 300 disk drives, storage sophistication matters more to performance, than just throwing more hardware in the mix.  For an example of this effect checkout my last post on SPC-2 performance correlations.

And of course, VMware might be straining their very profitable relationship with storage vendors today such as Dell, HP, IBM, NetApp, EMC, etc. all of which today highlight and push their virtualization solution throughout their partner community.   If they decide to stop recommending VMware and start focusing on other virtualization offerings this might also stall VMware’s vision.

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In the end I can’t help but feel that in VMware’s view their challenge, in the long run will come from AWS, Google and other cloud service providers. Whatever they can do to better prepare to compete with this gaggle of cloud purveyors, the better they succeed for their enterprise customer. And ultimately that means more business for VMware.  If enterprise networking and storage vendors have to adapt to that vision, then so be it.

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