What comes after virtual server sprawl?

Sunday, October 25, 2009 1

Do you think virtual server sprawl is real? Is it a problem in your environment? This last week I did some thinking in relation to virtual sprawl. Have we remove physical server sprawl and replaced in with virtual server cluster sprawl? Where are the new areas of inefficiencies and how can they be addressed?


Here is the summary of where I got.
  • Many organizations adopt virtualisation to reap large savings is rack space, networking, power and cooling.
  • In addition we are now able to virtualise a lot more workloads than possible in the past. Releases like VMware vSphere allow the move towards 90% virtualised environments.
  • However without continuing along the “virtualisation maturity model” and introducing virtual server life cycle management organizations start to become faced with virtual server sprawl greater than their previous physical server sprawl. It is just too convenient to create a new, or duplicate an existing, machine. Early on the impacts of this sprawl are hidden.
  • Just as data life cycle management has become important to handle the grown in data, virtual machine life cycle management has become important to handle the grown in virtual machines.
  • Yet the for large Enterprise the problem does not end there.
  • In the large Enterprises which have standardized on virtualisation alongside a “virtual first” policy I am seeing that they are required to create islands of virtual clusters, each dedicated for particular workload purposes. An Enterprise will have solo’d clusters of virtual server farms dedicated to different development or testing groups, departments, production areas or security zones. Each of these farms often has different build characteristics for memory and networking capacity and cooling.
  • What is required is for the great benefits that were brought to the servers in terms of abstraction from the hardware to be applied to the physical layers of the virtual server farms.
  • This is why the Enterprise is looking at virtualisation of the remaining physical layers of storage and networking. As an example converged fabrics such as Cisco UCS can virtualise the remaining physical server stack. By abstracting all of the networking and server personalities the remaining server silos are broken down even further driving further savings and standardization.
Food for thought.

Rodos

Cloudy discussions

Thursday, October 15, 2009 Category : , , 1

Even though everyone is getting into the cloud the community of people really getting into it (and talking and announcing) is not that great, one often keeps seeing the same names. Well from what I can see anyway.

So it was interesting to see that some of the people I am hooked up with at NaviSite have announced their cloud offering.

NaviSite Managed Cloud Services (NaviCloud), based on VMware vSphere™ 4 and VMware vCloud™ and the Cisco Unified Computing System, is an innovative, enterprise-class infrastructure platform that provides high-performance, scalable, on-demand, usage-billed IT infrastructure.
No surprises there, VMware, vCloud, UCS. I have been sharing some UCS implementation insights with these guys as we are both early adopters of the technology. Its great to be able to share with those outside your geography, because they are not your competitors.

But the point of this post is an interesting detail that I noticed about the Savvis Cloud which was posted at Channel Register; Savvis picks Compellent for public cloud service.
Compellent arrays track block-level activity and automatically move data blocks across tiers of storage, from fast and expensive solid state drives (SSD) to slower and capacious SATA hard disk drives across intervening faster but lesser capacity HDDs. This means that expensive SSD is used to optimum effect without placing excess data there, and that data movement does not need manual intervention.

Savvis chief technology officer Bryan Doerr said: "Compellent will help us drive down the cost of lifecycle storage while preserving application performance for our customers' applications.”

Todd Loeppke, the technical VP of storage architecture in Doerr's office, added: "It allows us to take cost out of storage... (We) write data to the right tier for performance reasons and then it will waterfall down the tiers as it ages." Doing it at the LUN or sub-LUN level "is not granular enough".
This is great stuff. I have really been pushing that storage for the cloud has to be super automated especially in the performance tiering. So its really interesting to see these comments and drivers from Savvis which support that. Not sure if Savvis are thinking of playing games with their customers and moving them to a lower tier of storage if they don't have the demand, whilst having them pay for a higher tier. I doubt it.

Yet is the driver performance? I don't think so. To me one key driver for this type of technology is reducing your operational costs. Its the operational support costs that will kill you and loose all your profit in Cloud. So if you can use a technology to self tune the storage across your performance tiers you may just be able to stop many support calls regarding "My IO is slow, whats wrong?". These calls are going to just suck up all your profit from that customer for the month. I know my experience with EMC Mozy is an example of that, which is probably why its support was so bad. So just as valid as moving some storage down the tiers you may move it up for a while as well, even if the customer is not paying for it. It may just be cheaper than the support call.

Of course Compellent are the not the only players in this space. Anyone in the field knows that others, such as EMC have this. For EMC its their coming FAST technology(see 1 and 2).

This is why people really need to be particular when they are architecting Clouds, especially large ones. Don't let people sell you the same old things, such as storage as one example, without describing what's different about it for Cloud. Are you just purchasing large scale storage or are you purchasing storage that has characteristics and functions to support the Cloud use case.

Also interesting to see that Savvis mention SSD in there, I think we are going to see that become common in the Cloud space. When you are paying by the Gb, SSD can be very attractive.

Rodos

Cisco view of Virtualization link to Cloud

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 Category : , , 0

Are Cloud and virtualization (specifically the server type) the same thing? It's a question often asked. In the following video, Glenn Dasmalchi, technical chief of staff in the office of the CTO at Cisco, provides a summary of how cloud computing and virtualization are related.



Glenn states that Cloud is IT services which are on demand and elastic. Server virtualisation brings economics (savings through better utalisation) and flexibility (for on demand deployment along with movement within or across data centers) to the use case for the Enterprise.

Rodos

Twitter shirt

Category : , , , 8

Sometime we just embarrass ourselves, today was one of those days.

As I got dress this morning I figured I would try out my new t-shirt ordered from http://www.customtees.com.au/. All I can say is my wife burst out laughing, rolled over in bed and continued laughing. All day I have been getting weird looks from people in the office.



I don't know whats wrong with everyone. I think its cool, which makes me sad I know.

You know you want one, you just can't admit it.

Rodos

UCS Palo and C-Series

Saturday, October 10, 2009 Category : , , 2

The Register has published some of the information regarding the awaited Palo adapter along with the C-Series rack servers for Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). Now that some of its public, even though many already know about it, we can start talking more outside of our NDAs.

Have a read of the article but here are the highlights or new things.

Some of the C-Series models will start shipping this year.

  • C200-M1, two-socket, 1U rack box, up to 96 GB of main memory, two PCI-Express 2.0 slots and up to four 3.5-inch SAS or SATA drives. Ships November.
  • C210-M1, two-socket, 2U rack box, up to 96 GB of main memory, five PCI-Express slots and up to sixteen 2.5-inch SAS or SATA drives. Ships November.
  • C250-M1, two-socket, 2U rack box, up to 384 GB of main memory with the Catalina memory technology and up to eight 2.5-inch SAS or SATA drives. Expected to ship in December.
Starting to ship any day is the full width B250-M1 blade. This model has the Catalina memory technology to go to 384 GB of main memory. It also has 2 Mezz cards so it can provide 40Gb of bandwidth, 20Gb of each fabric (F-I A/B).

The article also gives a production name to the long awaited Palo card, being the Virtual Interface Card (VIC). The VIC is a CNA that in theory "supports up to 128 virtual network interfaces (vNICs) on the C-Series version of the card, which plugs into a PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slot, and up to 64 vNICs on the mezzanine card that plugs into the B-Series blades". The PCI-Express version of the VIC will ship in December.

In order to run the VIC (Palo) with VMware you will need to upgrade your vSphere to the next version, vSphere Update 1 (40u1), which is not released yet. Given that these cards are going to start to appearing soon you would expect that Update 1 may be coming soon! I certainly won't be saying when in this post!

Lastly details of something that I think a lot of people don't realise about the C-Series blades
it is not possible to use the C-Series rack servers in conjunction with the UCS box, which has the system and network management software converged into the UCS 6100 switch. [...] But sometime in the first half of 2010, Cisco is going to allow the C-Series racks to plug into the UCS system.

Until then, customers have to use C-Series racks servers as they would any other such machine, using a variety of in-band and out-of-band system management tools and KVM switches, and perhaps plugging them into Nexus 5000 switches to at least converge network and storage links into the server.
If you would like some more details on a few of these items. I detailed the extended memory technology called Catalina, videos of the B250-M1 extended memory blade along with a VIC (Palo) adapter and a lame unprepared video of a C-Series.

[Update : Here is a video from Cisco revealing many of the details. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10493/index.html]

Rodos

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