Top VMware Bloggers

Tuesday, June 30, 2009 Category : 1

A few weeks ago Eric Siebert decided it was time to update his list of top VMware blogs.

Eric has been running his top 20 list on vLaunchpad which he based on the following criteria.

  1. The first is posting frequency, if a blogger has not posted in many weeks or months I generally disqualify them. I’m looking for bloggers that post at least 2-3 times a month.
  2. Next is posting quality, if a blogger is generally just repeating news and things other people have written I also tend to disqualify them. I look for the bloggers that produce quality, informative posts and aren’t afraid to share their own opinions
  3. Next is post length, short posts are OK for some things but the really long posts that contain lots of information score more points with me.
  4. Finally the length of time that the blogger has been posting, I generally don’t include ones that have been around for less than 3 months until they’ve established themselves.
You would have to agree thats a solid criteria list.

Well for the update to the top 5 Eric decided a survey of the community was the way to go, after all its the community who reads them, why not have them choose. Of course this prompted a rash of "Vote for me" posts by people like Vaughn, Scott Lowe, Steve, Cody Bunch, Jon Owings, Rich Brambley and Erik Scholten. Even Chad (obviously in the top two) got in on the act soliciting votes on some Canadian national pride agenda. Duncan posted a pointer to the survey but did not actually call for votes, he probably figured he had no need! Me, well I was just stoked to be in the top 20 in the first place back when the original list was created. I wanted to wait until after voting was closed before posting anything.

So with the results coming out any day now I wondered what my top list would be (I voted off gut feeling).

I thought a great way to see who was worth reading, was to analyse the Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts put out by VMware each week. Duncan puts the list together by the looks of it.

I was able to find the last 11 weeks of data which gave 55 entries. Doing a frequency of who got a top post of the week the top 5 VMware bloggers are :
  • Duncan Epping (5)
  • Chad Sakac (3.5)
  • Scott Lowe (3)
  • Rodney Haywood (3)
  • Steve Chambers (3)
Chad got a half point because he had a joint post with Vaugn, that's fair. Scott is no surprise, the guy is a gun. Must admit, totally surprised to see myself and Steve there (no offence to Steve). Just goes to show, you can do anything with statistics. Congratulations to the other top 5.

Strangely there were five people who shared two each.
  • Rich Brambley (2)
  • Greg A. Lato (2)
  • Robert Patton (2)
  • Steve Kaplan (2)
  • Jason Boche (2)
So now all you need to do is wait for Eric to collate and post the results at http://vsphere-land.com/. Who is going to win the popularity contest!

Good luck everyone! However I think the bloggers will mozy on just as they always have posting their thoughts, tips and ideas.

Rodos

Scaling Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)

Saturday, June 27, 2009 Category : , 4

So Rodos, how much can I scale my Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)? Great question. For those with a short attention span scroll to the table at the end, otherwise keep reading.


UCS is built for scale, when you look at the numbers its impressive. Yet the devil is in the detail when it comes to scaling it out.

On initial thought you can look at the datasheet for the Fabric Interconnects and come up with some figures. There is the 6120 and the 6140 with 20 and 40 ports so with two for redundancy you could run 20 chassis or 40 chassis, each of these can have 8 B200 blades. Thinking this way is theoretically right, but thats not going to be a real world case.

Lets dive into what you would really need to do to hook your UCS environment together, doing some real world calculations.

First, there are five different interfacing requirements that need to be provisioned for:
  • Some Ethernet uplinks into the rest of the datacenter
  • Some Ethernet downlinks to the chassis
  • Some Fibre Channel links toward your Storage Fabric
  • The Ethernet link for the management system
  • The Ethernet links for the high availability of the UCS managers
The following picture shows where we can take each of these from.

Lets look at each one in turn.

One. Cluster Ports
There are 4 ports here, two of these are the dual 10/100/1000 Ethernet clustering ports which are used for connected two 6120/40s together, they do sync and hearbeat. You direct connect these with a standard Ethernet cable. The other two ports are reserved for future use. All of these ports are dedicated and you can not use them for any other purpose.

Two. Management port.
This is a dedicated 10/100/1000-Mbps Ethernet management port for out-of-band management.

Three & Four. SFP+ ports
The SFP+ ports take a number of cable types (copper or fiber) of varying lengths. They may be used to connect to the 2100 Fabric Extenders (FeX) modules inside the 5100 Chassis (that contains the blades). They may also be used to connect up to your data center switching core or aggregation point. We are going to come back to these two in some more detail.

Five. Expansion modules.
The expansion modules are used to provide further external connectivity. There are three types available.
  • Ethernet module that provides 6 ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet using the SFP+ interface
  • Fibre Channel plus Ethernet module that provides 4 ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet using the SFP+ interface; and 4 ports of 1/2/4-Gbps native Fibre Channel connectivity using the SFP interface
  • Fibre Channel module that provides 8 ports of 1/2/4-Gbps native Fibre Channel using the SFP interface for transparent connectivity with existing Fibre Channel networks
Most people are probably going to go with the 8 port FC one.

Okay, now that we have gotten all of that background out of the way (this is turning into a Chad diatribe post!) we can get to the interesting bit.

To provide bandwidth and redundancy you are going to consume ports.

If we go back to those uplinks to your aggregation switches, say a pair of Nexus 7000 you are at least going to need some redundancy and bandwidth. As most of the switching will occur in the 6100's you probably don't need a massive amount of bandwidth out. I think a safe bet initially is two 10G links out of each 6100, at a pinch one out of each.

The real issue is around the links between the 2100 FeX units in the 5100 Chassis back up to the 6100s. Here is what they look like.



Here is where they sit in the back of the 5100 chassis.



Now you are going to have two FeX for redundancy. That means you are going to consume a minimum of one port of each 6100. But is that enough. If one was to fail, you now only have 10G of bandwidth and all of your storage and networking traffic for all eight blades are going to be going over this link. Also remember there is NO internal switching inside the chassis, all inter-blade traffic has to go up to the 6100 to be switched. Therefore I think the real world situation is to provision two ports from each FeX and this halves the amount of chassis you can connect into the 6100.

So here is a table that does some calculations based on how many uplink ports you want to your aggregation switches and how many ports you want to run from each chassis. It also shows how many blades this would give you and how many racks you would consume, given two chassis per rack (you are going to need a lot of power if you go more than two).



You can see that with 4 ports from each chassis and 4 links to the aggregation switches you are looking at either 9 or 19 chassis. Thats either 72 or 152 blades which is a LOT.

Out of interest I did some quick calculations on number of racks and possible VMs. If you put 48G of RAM per blade which is optimal price wise you could safely estimate 48 VMs for a low RAM environment (1G per VM and a core ration of 6:1) or a high RAM environment (2G per VM and a core ration of 3:1).

So for a 6120 a realistic figure is five racks housing 9 chassis, 72 blades and close to somewhere between 1700 and 3400 VMs. Thats not bad for a total of 40 cables!

Of course playing around with things there would be a few ways of tweaking at the edges of this, but I think you get the idea.

Rodos

Panel - Toward Cloud Computing: Private Enterprise Clouds As A First Step

Friday, June 26, 2009 Category : , 0

Its great to see people discussing cloud in a really constructive way. At the Structure 09 event "Put Cloud Computing to Work" in San Francisco there has been lots of cloud discussion.

I recommend you watch this video of a panel discussion moderated by George Gilbert from TechAlpha.

Toward Cloud Computing: Private Enterprise Clouds As A First Step
Enterprises are cautious about migrating their most demanding applications to public clouds. Public cloud infrastructure can’t run all existing enterprise applications, particularly the most mission critical, without some modification and more advanced management software. IT also faces concerns about security and control. Yet the lure of self-service provisioning and usage-based pricing is still strong. The solution? Build your own cloud with your existing infrastructure investment as a first step. This panel will explore how enterprise clouds are likely to take shape, building on the evolution of virtualization infrastructure and systems management technology as a foundation.
The people were
  • James Urquhart from Cisco
  • Chuck Hollis from EMC
  • Stephen Herrod from VMware
  • Scott Morrison from Layer 7
  • Kia Behnia from BMC
  • Brandon Watson from Microsoft
Thats a great bunch of smart people. The only person that surprised me within the space was Scott from Layer 7, so I had to go and dig around to see what they are all about, interesting.

Some of the things discussed
  • Where Cisco Unified Compute System (UCS) fits in to the private cloud and virtualisation
  • VMware and providing isolation in the hardware layers
  • Virtualising storage and where/when is it appropriate to use it at the hypervisor, in the fabric or in the storage array.
  • Moving storage around with clouds. Its easy to move a virtual machine but try moving the TB of data behind it.
  • Management platforms, traditional versus the cloud with virtualisation.
  • Its all about the services.
  • The complexity of administraiton of all the different layers and having works who can understand them all.
  • The impediment of rewriting your applications and data compliance.
To be honest I did not think the moderator did a great job of driving the questions and/or understanding the panels answers. Some of the questions were just hard to understand (maybe its just me). But the comments from the panelists are great.

Be warned, watching this will make you think. You can find the video at LiveStream and it should also be embedded below.


Rodos

Attend VMworld 2009

Thursday, June 18, 2009 Category : 3

Why come to VMworld 2009?

This morning on the VMTN podcast John Troyer stated it was time for some blogs post in the community on why go to VMworld. Hey, count me in.

I do feel that I am qualified to comment here. I am a VMworld Alumni, having attended the last 3 years. For two years it was funded by my employer (thanks guys). One year, because I was in the period of transition between two employers, my wife paid, serious. Don’t forget, I live in Australia so it’ not an inexpensive exercise. I have lived through and succeeded in the task of negotiating with my wife as to why I should invest in taking an overseas trip just to attend VMworld.




Here are some reasons why you should attend VMworld 2009.
  • With so many sessions and such a large section of vendors there WILL be relevant content to your needs and area of interest. You will come away with concrete things that will make a difference. Every year VMworld has set my agenda for the next 12 months, none more than last year!
  • In the current economic client we need to bring solutions to the business and not problems. Everyone knows virtualisation is one of the few areas that can bring returns to the business with short ROI. Yes you have already virtualised, but how much, 20%? How are you going to get to 90%? VMworld is a smart investment to achieve some business savings.
  • The exhibition hall has all the vendors you could ever want to talk to in regards to VMware. You can cover a lot of companies in a short period of time. At VMworld they have their best people on the stand who know their stuff. You can fast track your information gathering.
  • You are a geek, you love technology and you love VMware. Don’t kid yourself you are reading this blog post from some weird guy in Australia, you ARE a VMware geek. Being a VMware geek you just have to be part of the action. This is where it is at peoples, the announcements, the vendors, the personalities, the competitive shenanigans of Microsoft. If you want your bit of geek heaven, there is no better place to get it.
  • Tried and tested. VMworld has been at the Moscone center before. It had its challenges but that’s my point, its tested. VMware knows what works and what does not in the facility. It should be one smooth running conference. I also think that the San Fran had the best food out of the lot.
  • Thanks to the GFC, deals on flights and accommodation are never going to be better. This is the most least expensive time that there will be to get there!
  • You can bring your spouce. Now you wife (or husband) may not get the VMware thing but some time in San Francisco might be welcomed. Crystal Lowe (wife of Scott) is organising spouce events again this year.
Now that you have been convinced you need to attend, here are my tips for attending VMworld.
  • Book you sessions early. They fill up and you want to get in on the good ones.
  • Go for sessions that are technology preview, you will have to read between the lines on some of the descriptions. Think about is this one that it would be good to see in person versus watching the slide deck four weeks later.
  • Go to sessions where you can meet good people, like the people that write the code. They have insights and tips, that’s why you are there.
  • Go to sessions that are relevant to your work. It’s great to come back with something that you can action or share with your peers. In the session talk to the people around you or the speaker. They are there because they are interested in the topic too. You will get insights and contacts that will be helpful.
  • Ask a question in the sessions. Don’t ask stupid or obscure questions, ask ones that will suit the whole audience not just you, but ask one you care about. It helps the speaker and everyone else.
  • Arrive a day or two early and play tourist. This way you are fresh and can register before the crowds. VMworld is exhausting and most people get little sleep. If you plan on doing things afterwards you will probably just spend the time sleeping off the exhaustion.
  • Spend lots of time in the exhibit hall and talk to people on the stands. There are a lot of interesting people, tell them your issues and get their insights, ask how things may work in your environment. I find you need to do the whole thing a few times. Take a friend. I still remember walking up to the VMware booth and talking to a guy who was demoing Fusion and the mutli-head support. I like fusion and told him how sweet the new feature was. The guy just grinned, his eyes widened with pride and he said, “I wrote the code!”. The guy was so excited to share his contribution and tell me all about how awesome it was and you could see the boyish excitement on his face. Priceless.
  • Have spare space in your luggage for goodies, mainly books. If you are into such things you can grab a lot of free stuff. However I always collect up on a few books which are heavy and take up space. Then there is the VMware gear. My laptop bag, which is now getting a little tired, I picked up at VMworld and it has the VMware logo embroided on it.
  • Stay close by. It saves on travel costs and travel time. One of the hotels that has the busses is fine too. Its great to be able to whip back to drop some stuff off, like your laptop, because you don’t need it for the rest of the day.
  • Organise your parties and events. Hook up with the vendors and get into the right parties. This is more key if you are a Partner but there are a lot of great parties where you can have some fun but continue to network and talk shop a bit.
  • Find your peers. As a partner one thing I love about VMworld is getting to spend some time with my competitors who are very smart and nice people. During the day our companies fight it out but at VMworld we get to talk shop and technology with people who really understand our jobs, market and vendors as intimately as we do, which is very rare. You can leave your ego at the door, not be competitive and not discuss confidential matters of course. You will be amazed at just how helpful dialog like this is to your daily job. I imagine if you are a customer then find people in the same space (they will be in those sessions you are in or the birds of a feather sessions) and you will have the same results.
  • Sort out your IT and communications. This is mainly for international travelers. Power adapters, roaming on your mobile, internet access, you want all of your IT to work whilst you are there. Then you communications. Do you have the mobile numbers of all the people you may want to be in contact with whilst you are there.
If you can’t afford to go, do one of two things. You can purchase the virtual attendance so you get access to the session recordings. They may take a little while to be available but the content is great and you will use it all year.

What if you can’t do that. Do what I did, tell your boss straight, if you don’t go you will resign. That’s what I did and I mean it, and he knows it too! (Note to Andrew, my boss. Yes I know I have a lot of work to do but I am writing this on the bus on the way home. You know, I WILL resign!)

Just don’t use that tactic with your wife.

See you there.

Rodos

UPDATE : To add in the spouce activities.

VMsafe

Category : 0

Is VMsafe the same as vShield?

I have been getting this question a bit since my last post on VMware vShield Zones . It is a question that people really should be asking because there is confusion between the two technologies that needs to be cleared up.

vShield Zones is a product that is released and uses the existing network switching techniques in vSwitches to intercept, monitor and control Layer 2/3 networking traffic. It only does networking. It happens to be part of vSphere licensing wise and it was released after vSphere was released.

VMsafe is a new technology or function inside vShere. It allows a 3rd part to build a solution, based on a virtual machine, which can inspect the memory, CPU, Networking, Storage and process execution of a virtual machine.

Here is how VMware explain the different elements.

  • Memory and CPU. VMsafe provides introspection of virtual machine memory pages and CPU states.
  • Networking. VMsafe enables filtering of network packets inside hypervisors,,as well as within the security virtual machine itself.
  • Process execution. VMsafe provided in-guest, in-process APIs that enable complete monitoring and control of process execution.
  • Storage. Guest virtual machine disk files can be mounted, manipulated and modified as they persist on storage devices.
Here is a picture that trys to represent what its doing.


I think Aaron Bawcom, VP of Engineering at Reflex Systems sums up VMsafe nicely when he writes
VMsafe is a low level enforcement API that allows developers to intercept and inspect memory, CPU, and network traffic for a virtual machine without requiring an agent to run inside the virtual machine itself. VMsafe allows a small kernel module to run inside the ESX hypervisor which intercepts traffic between the virtual
network interface of a VM and the virtual switch. This capability offers an entirely new dimension to enterprise security. VMsafe will enable a whole new type of enterprise security that has been impractical to achieve until now. VMsafe will also allow an entire class of new security applications for the virtual environment by allowing organizations to specify granular security policy down to the virtual network interface of a virtual machine.
Whitepaper : New Directions in Virtualization Security: How Segmentation Can Strengthen Your Security Posture

VMsafe enables a lot and I don't think we will see one vendor do the whole stack, although some may try. A network security vendor may just use VMsafe as a better way to get at the networking flow of a VM (compared to the hoopes that vShield has to go through). Another vendor may simply use it to scan the disks of VMs regardless of their power state to search for viruses or do data mining. An anti-virus vendor may use VMsafe to watch the CPU execution, outside of the VM.

So things to remember.
  • VMshield does not equal VMsafe
  • VMshield could one day use VMsafe to do its functions a different way
  • VMsafe as a technology is not released yet
  • A 3rd party product will be required that uses the VMsafe technology to actually do something
Hope that helps.

Rodos

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