Musings of Rodos

Came across an interesting item on the vSphere training course earlier this week. In vSphere when you create a disk you are asked if you want to thin provision it or use it with Fault Tolerance (FT). If you select you want FT it will not let it be thin provisioned. But it makes you ask the question, what does it do different to the virtual disk if you do or do not check the FT option.

We dug until we got an answer. It eager zeros the disk, which you only used to be able to do through the command line. Eager zero means it pre-zeros out all of the blocks in the disk. This is rather than zeroing the block the first time its read, aka lazy zero which is the default.

One then wonders why FT wants this. The answer is that FT use multi-writer mode to access the disk. Formats other than eager zero have metadata which changes dynamically and this could create metadata consistency issues between the primary and secondary. Eager zeroed disks are static once the disk is initialized and hence there can be no consistency issues.

What if you don't tick the box when you create the disk? No problem. When you turn on FT for the VM it gives you a warning and converts the disk first.

Rodos

With the release of vSphere there are many supporting elements to come on board as well, such as education courses.

This week I have had the pleasure of sitting in on the first ever running of the re-written "VMware vSphere 4: Install, Configure, Manage". Its Revision A or really Beta as our goal in doing the course is to suggest changes and find errors, after all, the participants are experienced VMware admins and have participated in the vSphere Beta. Of course such a group of people leads to some robust architectural arguments and debates over new features. 

Yesterday I mentioned that there would be a roundtable hosted by EMC on The Emergence of Private Clouds – A Roundtable Discussion with Industry Experts. The experts are Stephen from VMware, Chad from EMC and Doug from Cisco.

The recording is out, if you register you can probably get a link to it. The verdict is its worth the time. Here are my simple notes of the types of things discussed. I occasionally remembered to mark the time of the recording as well.

• What is a private cloud?
• How IT is run rather than where, giving you the freedom of choice.
• Virtualisation an enabler for cloud, allowing you to move between data centers. Removing the penalty of application rewrite. Non-disruptive disruptiveness.
• A discussion around the assumption that things need to be virtualised, what about high end loads and the non-x86 environment.
• A discussion on centralized desktops in your data center in your private cloud, whilst being able to take it offline into your local device.
• Discussion on Cisco UCS for delivering all those virtual workloads. Provisioning networks in software rather than in hardware. 
• The change in organizational models with the lines between network, server and storage teams changing. The precursors of this are occurring now, for example when trying to implement BCDR with SRM.
• The VM is the new atomic unit or building block of the datacenter. It breaks how we build networks, how storage moves. Seeing many things now being built around this new atomic unit. Interoperability is becoming pervasive.
• 24:00 A discussion on service providers, how big will they build, the choice it brings and new pricing models they bring.
• vCloud initiative.
• Service providers are evolving from hardware to software providers. 
• There is a lot of work to do to broaden out the use cases. People want migration between the private and federated clouds which may require lots of data movement. How do you bridge the DC with layer 2? Not for all workloads but some. 
• Expanding the security model out into the external cloud.
• VMware, Cisco and EMC are working together on the hard problems which will surface in the future.
• 32:00 Where does Green IT fit it?
• What are the barriers to adoption? Moving from manual to automation, look at the change in DRS automation. Knowing your data is protected and highly available. 
• Running your infrastructure the way a service provider would do it, quality services at a flexible price.
• 40:00 Questions
  

Enjoy, Rodos.

VMware have given support for the Open Cloud Manifesto.

VMware Director of Standards Architecture, Winston Bumpus, put out a post today detailing some of the standards activities he is working in for VMware.

VMware supports the idea of cloud standards and has already made good progress on some key pieces. As one of the original authors of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) specification, VMware has already shown its leadership and support for working with the industry to drive interoperability standards. In fact VMware believes that interfaces should be open so customers can have choice and improved interoperability while service providers can differentiate on functionality and performance of their services.

One of the details mentioned was

VMware agreed to be part of the Open Cloud Manifesto. This document and discussion, while providing a very minimal set of principles to agree upon, will form a basis for initial agreements as the standards for this new computing paradigm are developed. We don’t believe there will be a single standard or standards body that will standardize all aspects of cloud interoperability.

Of course Microsoft voiced concerns regarding the process and possible outcome which they detailed. Microsoft are not listed on the signatures page of the Manifesto.

Its good that at this stage of the cloud development we are seeing intent for standards and a dialog.

Also great to see so many cloud posts from VMware in the last few days!

Rodos

This one is more of a heads up. There is an round table today that will be worth listening too.

The Emergence of Private Clouds – A Roundtable Discussion with Industry Experts

Don't try registering to attend as its already full. Would have been nice to see VMware advertise this somewhere a bit earlier. Could not find any details in any of my RSS feeds but thankfully someone tipped me off (thanks Tim!). If you do register you can get a link for the recording. Once I get the recording I will let you know any good details or if its worth listening to. Given that the speakers are Doug, Stephen and Chad it should be really good!

For an example of something probably not worth it, there was a webcast last week from VMware "Protecting Confidential Data in Cloud Computing Environments" which was woeful. It was on at 5:00am my time and to me it missed the mark and would have been better described as "Security in a essentially traditional shared VMware environment but it sounds cooler if we put the word cloud in there". Please don't send me hate mail, see for your self when the recording appears in the webcast section of the Cloud Resources tab on the VMware site.

Very excited to see what the discussion in this latest round table is though. Should be great.

Rodos

Update : I did find an announcement 30 minutes after this original post, it was on Chads blog (which is aggregated into Planet V12n) but it did not appear in my search as it was brief and did not have the keywords in it I was looking for. Still stands though, VMware should have advertised this a bit more.