Speakers:

• Samuel McBride – VMware, Inc.
• Monica Sharma, VMware, Inc.

This session will discuss capacity planning. Monica Sharma is speaking now. The right management tools allow the ratio of VM per Admin to be much more efficient. We can manage more with fewer resources.

Capacity problem areas can get amplified with higher consolidation.

• Performance Triage / Reactive Capacity Remediation – Over-commitment / Reservations tend to be common in larger environments
• It is difficult to cross-reference multiple tools to obtain the most relevant information needed to troubleshoot
• This leads to higher Mean Time to Resolution
• Demand forecasting – This is all about capacity waste and stress
• What are my used vs allocated resources?
• Do I have the need for burst demand?
• How can we stay ahead of demand?
• How can we optimize efficiency and cost?
• What metrics should I measure?

How do we think differently?

• Right metrics
• Change your mindset
• Look for symptoms

vCenter Operations Management Suite Overview

• Integrated management
• Manage physical and virtual
• Automated management

Is your capacity / performance problem really a capacity / performance problem? Or is it really a configuration problem?

Getting the right metrics

• Capacity
• Usable Capacity
• Demand
• Usage
• How much would a VM consume if it did not have contention?
• Humans can feel about 10% degradation in speed

What are the symptoms?

• Workload = Demand / Capacity
• Abnormal = Actual / Expected
• Faults = Failures
• Stress = Accumulated Peak Demand / Time
• Time Remaining
• Capacity Remaining
• Waste
• Density

Be wary of “Faith-based” capacity planning. This is when capacity management tools are tuned based on general best practices and not the day to day run rate of the infrastructure. Tune the management tool based on what an actual “Bad Day” looks like. Ratios are more important than actual capacity numbers.

Looking at workload can help you to quickly identify problems like:

• A VM could be way overprovisioned
• Population pressure – is my host overcommitted?
• Is a limit causing problems?
• Always check normal demand vs charts shown

Map symptoms to problems

• Workload High / Anomalies Low / Stress Low – OK
• Workload High / Anomalies High / Stress Low – Investigate

Putting it all together

• Get the right metrics
• Change your mindset
• Watch for symptoms
• Putting symptoms together
• Visuals and notifications
• Find the problem
• Finally, remediate

That wraps up this session. It’s good to see VMware thinking about these problems and bringing integrated solutions to the market to address them.

Speakers / Moderator:

• Chris Colotti- VCDX # 37 VMware, Inc. – Moderator
• Aidan Dalgleish – VCDX # 10 VMware, Inc.
• Duncan Epping – VCDX #007 VMware, Inc.
• Rawlinson Rivera VCDX #86, VMware, Inc.

This will be a panel discussion. The session begins with “Gathering Requirements”

Talk to Customers

• Gather information and document
• Categorize (Requirements, Nice to Have, Constraints, Assumptions
• Conceptualize

Great advice for consultants and anyone going for the VCDX certification.

Some Example Requirements

• Increase agility / flexibility while reducing costs
• 99.9% Availability

Some Example Constraints

• Hardware already acquired
• Number of NICs dictated per server
• Reuse existing equipment

Some Example Assumption

• Sufficient switch ports
• Storage can handle expected workload
• Properly trained staff

Historical best practices

• Understand why it is a best practice
• It is better to put requirements first and apply the best practices to that requirement
• Constantly evaluate best practices and question whether it still applies to newer software

Some Use Case Examples (The application comes first!)

• Server consolidation
• OPEX savings
• Resource optimization
• Standardization
• IaaS

Conceptualize Your Design

• Building Blocks – Operations, Time to Market, Compliance

Sizing / Scaling

• What does the environment look like today?
• How will size / scaling impact your Design / Project?
• What is the use Case?

Again, all of these details should revolve around the application use case.

Tools

• Capacity Planner
• PlateSpin
• Lanamark

With capacity planning, we are trying to identify the anomalies within the physical infrastructure. These anomalies may require some extra planning.

Compute Considerations

• 2 vs 4 sockets
• Optimal Memory Configurations
• TPS vs no TPS
• What is the sweetspot? – Still seems to be dual socket – 96GB of memory

Network Sizing

• Networking is rarely a bottleneck (especially with 10GbE)
• 10GbE will lift all (or most) constrains for a long time
• Again, use the capacity planning report to identify anomalies.

Storage Sizing

• It’s not just the capacity, but the performance that matters
• Take into account RAID penalties
• Size includes the VM and its associated files

Storage Considerations

• The RAID level used impacts IOPS
• RTO impacts the number of VMs per datastore. Can you restore within the RTO window?

Hosts

• What is the vendor?
• AMD vs Intel
• Blade vs Rack
• Embedded ESXi, Boot from SAN, Auto-Deploy, etc?
• Management integration?

Boot Considerations

• Local
• Local SD / USB
• SAN Boot
• PXE Boot with Auto-Deploy
• USB is cheap
• Local disk has higher availability
• SAN Boot, Stateless computing but more costly
• PXE Boot is the best of all worlds

vCenter Design

• How many VMs?
• vCenter Appliance?
• Web Client? – Use vCenter Appliance
• SRM / View / vCloud Director? – Consider vCenter Heartbeat
• Statistics level will impact performance / scaling
• Read, read, read the documentation!
• Scale up or scale out?
• Should we put VUM on the same server?
• How many vCenter users?

Clustering

• How many physical Datacenters?
• Will each physical DC need a vCenter Server?
• How many Datacenters will each vCenter manage?
• Separate clusters for DMZ?
• Separate clusters for test?
• Remember the Datacenter is the boundary for vMotion, not the cluster
• EVC is required for FT, consider enabling it by default

Networking Design

• What type of switch will be used?
• What are the pSwitch capabilities?
• Will VLANs be used?
• Will PVLANs be required? – Consider vShield App
• Network I/O Control is awesome! Use it!

vShield App

• VNIC level firewall
• DVFilter used for in- and out-bound traffic
• VShield App Firewall per host
• Set rules on vCenter Objects like Resource Pools and Portgroups
• vShield Manager cannot be locked out, Exclude vCenter as well

vShield Edge

• 5 tuple firewall
• NAT
• DHCP
• VPN
• Load Balancing
• Network Isolation
• Data Security Options
• High Availability option is now available
• Consider a management cluster as more appliances are deployed

Back up all management databases!

Storage Design

• Protocol choice? – Fibre Channel higher performing, NFS is much easier to implement
• Does the array support VAAI?
• Does the array support VASA?
• Can we use Storage DRS? – Auto-Tiering can impact the decision

This wraps up the session. There was a lot of great information for practitioners and those who are pursuing the VCDX certification. This has been one of my favorite sessions at VMworld.

Speakers:

• Jim Chow – VMware, Inc. Staff Engineer
• Srinivas Kotamraju – VMware, Inc. Product Manager
• Shrinand Javadekar – VMware, Inc. Senior MTS

Shrinand Javadekar has taken the stage and is discussing vSphere availability features to date (NIC-Teaming, HA, DRS, vMotion, storage multipathing, etc.). This session will concentrate on continuous availability with Fault Tolerance.

He goes on to define continuous availability

• Zero downtime
• Zero data loss
• No loss of TCP connections
• Completely transparent to guest software

One of the major limitations of Fault Tolerance as it exists today is the fact that FT can only protect uni-processor VMs. VMware has reached a key milestone in solving this and this is what is being shared in this session. First, some background.

A technology called vLockstep keeps the primary and secondary VM in sync. The data exchange happens over the FT Logging network (dedicated 1Gb networks). The FT protected VM and the secondary VM use shared VMDKs. VMware is replacing vLockstep with the SMP FT protocol. Here are some of the design points:

• Dedicated 10GbE for FT logging
• Each VM (primary and secondary) has its own VMDKs

Jim Chow has taken the stage and will be discussing SMP FT in practice. The following is the proposed workflow.

• Turn on FT (creates 2 VMs – the secondary is an exact clone)
• The opportunity to separate the primary and secondary VMs on multiple datastores allows greater availability
• A single datastore (called the Break Datastore) must be provisioned in case the FT logging link fails. The secondary mode of communication happens through the tie break (Break) datastore.
• When you turn on FT for a VM you need to select the initial placement of the secondary VM. The two hosts must be vMotion compatible.
• Next, you have the opportunity to choose the datastores that the secondary VM and its VMDKs will reside on.
• Finally, you will click Finish on the “Ready to Complete” screen.

Next, the live demo will show a virtual vCenter (4 vCPU, 16GB RAM) server protected by FT failing over. It worked as expected. The proposed SMP FT will allow vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) to create non-disruptive snapshots on virtual machines protected by FT.

This is clearly a step in the right direction and I cannot wait until this is available for our clients. Thank you for reading.

The VMworld 2012 Hang Space

This is probably one of the coolest rooms at VMworld 2012. All those worn and weary from the barrage of sessions can relax and take it easy amongst fellow virtualization enthusiasts. They even have a “Charging Valet” where you can drop your device off to be charged while you relax. Pretty cool.

Here are among the many things you can do in the “Hang Space.”

Watch the Jumbo NYSE-Like Twitter Feed Display

Play a game of giant chess

Play a classic coin-op arcade game

Or just hang out on the many lounge areas provided

As you can see, there is no reason for you to worry about me. There are plenty of activities other than sessions, should I choose to actually relax. If the management team is reading this, the thought never crossed my mind. Back to the sessions. Thanks for reading.

Speakers:

• Alan Renouf – VMware, Inc. Senior Technical Marketing Architect
• Eric Williams – Cisco Systems, Inc. Technical Marketing Engineer
• Jake Robinson – BlueLock Solutions Architect

Alan Renouf is on the stage and talking about the history of PowerShell and PowerCLI. PowerCLI will be the basis for the automation featured in the presentation. He is discussing some basic PowerShell and PowerCLI cmdlets and how easy it is to create scripts by piping cmdlets into other cmdlets.

PowerCLI Snap-In’s available in the latest PowerCLI release include:

• Core – Managing vSphere
• Image Builder – Image Profiles
• Auto Deploy – Deploying ESXi via PXE
• License – Working with vSphere Licensing
• Cloud – vCloud Director Providers
• Tenant (new in 5.1) – vCloud Director Tenants – You can give these to your cloud tenants

PowerCLI 5.1 – What’s New?

Core

• Kerberos
• Linked clones
• Datastore clusters
• VCloud object relation

Cloud

• Organization creation / manipulation
• Permissions
• Assign compute and network resources
• Create / modify vApp networks

Eric Williams from Cisco is taking the stage now. He will be discussing what can be done with Cisco and PowerShell. First up is a Cisco UCS overview. UCS was developed with an API first, then GUI. A single API will manage any component of the UCS that is available through the UCS Manager GUI. The UCS PowerShell library is UCS PowerTool. There are over 1500 PowerShell cmdlets available today. Most of these are auto-generated with the UCS XML Schema. This is very cool!

There is a ConvertTo-UCSCmdlet cmdlet that will convert UCS actions done in the GUI to a series of PowerShell cmdlets. Automated automation. That is awesome!

Up next is the automation demo. The demo starts with a minimal UCS configuration. vCenter is a minimal config as well. There are no hosts in vCenter. They are now running a PowerShell script.

• Log into domain
• Create / manipulate UCS Manager objects
• Create / manipulate vCenter objects

The script is creating server pools, VLANs, MAC pools, WWPN pools, etc. It also creates a service profile template and a service profile based on that template. Next the script is doing all the configuration in vCenter. The script now monitors the state of the configuration application to the blade in UCS manager.

The script is using the OEM string in VMware Auto-Deploy to determine the ESXi image version from Auto-Deploy depending on the Service Profile Template name in UCS. A host is now added to vCenter in a DRS cluster with all the configuration that it needs (storage, networking, etc.). Now a second script is run to add two more hosts to the cluster. This was all automated. After running the two scripts, a three host cluster was ready to go.

The next script that is demonstrated is a rolling upgrade for the ESXi hosts. This script updates the UCS firmware and the ESXi image. The script actually grabs the latest image from the VMware website and tells the hosts to boot from that image using Auto-Deploy.

The scripts shown in this demo are available on develper.cisco.com. So far, this has been my favorite session. It shows the extensibility and management power of PowerShell. That wraps up this session. Thank you for reading.