VMworld 2013 Conference Highlights

CEO General Session

Speaker: VMware’s CEO Patt Galsinger

“The Software Defined Data Center”

22,000 attendees this year to VMworld 2013!

VMware’s 3 Imperatives:

1. Virtualize all the things
2. IT management gives way to automation
3. Hybrid cloud will be ubiquitous

4 Pillars of a Software Defined Data Center:

1. Compute
2. Storage
3. Network
4. Management and Automation

Product Announcements:

• Compute:
  • ESXi 5.5 (vSphere 5.5)
• Storage:
  
  • Virtual SAN (vSAN)
  • Virtual Volumes
  • vFlash Read Cache
  • Virsto
• Network:
  
  • VMware NSX (major topic for VMworld this year)
• Management/Automation:
  
  • vCloud Hybrid Services

New in ESXi 5.5:

• 2x (cores and other limits raised)
• App Aware H.A.
• Big Data Extensions
• Hadoop

Software Defined Storage:

• Policy driven control plane
• Virtual data plane
• Application centric data services

New with vSAN:

• Simplifies Storage
• distributed software datastore
• Resilient
• Policy driven
• Elastic
• High performance
• * Release in 1H 2014 *

New in Networking with NSX:

• Software Defined Networking (SDN)
• What ESX was to hardware, NSX is to networking
• Network virtualization platform

Summary: VMware is hell bent on removing all IT admins (Storage/Server/Network/Management) from the data center and replacing them with Virtualization Admins!

VMworld 2014 – Save the Date – August 24^th - 28^th, 2014

COO General Session

Speaker: VMware COO, Carl Eschenbach

ITaaS (IT as a Service)

• Self service
• Transparent Pricing
• Governance
• Automation

All about “having the perception that you have control”

Focus: East and West Fabric

• There is a major shift of traffic volume in the data center from North-South (client-server) to East-West (server-server).

New Product Summary:

• vSAN – Simplifies storage, distributed software datastore
• Virtual Vol – VVOLS – VM centric, snapshot VMDK from storage
• Virstro – Appliance that aggregates storage pool as NFS data store
• Horizon View – Desktop Virtualization Product (renamed from “VMware View”)

War Room – designated for critical issues

Virtual San

Presenter: Kiran Madnani

• On Beta forms, for vSAN, have had conversations with him before

Virtual Data Plane – pooling hardware like a hypervisor does – “hypervisor based pooling of heterogeneous hardware”

Virtual SAN (vSAN):

• Single datastore called “vsanDatastore” by default, can be renamed.
• Optimized for resources that are a mix of expensive and inexpensive
• Scale out
• Software solution
• Cluster disks and cache
• High performance – flash based distributed read / write cache
• VM centric management
• Automated SLA management
• High resiliency – distributed RAID
• Dynamic capacity scaling
• Rebuilds happen in parallel
• Different sizes of servers – including magnetic disks
• Storage policy specification
  • Capacity, availability, performance
  • Distribution, RAID and SLA are on a per VM level
  • Works with vMotion, storage vMotion, DRS, SRM, etc

Requirements:

• 3 x ESXi 5.5 Hosts
• vCenter 5.5
• 1 x SSD empty
• 1 x HDD empty
• Network: 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps (preferred)
• SAS/SATA controller working in passthru/JBOD/HBA mode

Performance: 80 – 100K IOPS ???  (I have not seen this level of performance from my tests)

Use Cases:

• VDI
• Test/Dev
• Data Center Consolidation
• Big Data
• Private Cloud
• Disaster Recovery

Join the vSAN beta: http://vsanbeta.com

Power CLI Best Practices

Strong PowerCLI community.  Google “PowerCLI Community”

Based off of PowerShell

Works off of objects (can pipe objects too!)

Uses verb-noun construct in plain English

Easy help: get-help

New in 5.5:

• Same: core, image, auto deploy, license, vds, cloud, tenants
• Tagging
• Open-vmconsole - awesome

Best Practices:

• Store results in variables
• Help and Examples
• -ShowWindow switch
• Functions breakdown
• Splatting (put parameters into hash table)
• Make it simple
• Try, catch, throw
• Filter on the left
• Steal from the best
• Don’t use write-host

Check out VMware Flings – free projects that are very useful!

Exchange Messages Between Guest and Host using RPC

Cool stuff, might be useful for vCenter Plugin?

Uses a combination of Guest API and VMware Tools

Fling Guest API Library – http://labs.vmware.com

VAM (Virtual Machine Monitor)

Good for monitoring an application and posting to vSphere Client

vSAN Panel

Discussion:

• Be able to track trends (request from audience)
• Provision without having to pester IT
• CapEx driven
• Direct Attach – host pinning – get around
• Moves responsibility from Storage Team to virtualization team, but can they handle the extra load?

Join the vSAN beta: http://vsanbeta.com

Ask the Experts

Experts:

• Duncan Epping, VMware – Yellow Bricks blog
• William Lam, VMware – Virtually Ghetto blog
• Scott Lowe, VMware – scottlowe.org
• Vaughn Steward, NetApp – Virtual Storage Guy.com

Awesome blogs, add to favorites!

What about Linux side Automation – PowerCLI seems to be the focus now

• pySphere – soap suds (recommended by William Lam)

vSAN Best Practices

Use Cases:

• Best used for VDI
• Tier 2 & Tier 3 Test / Dev Private Cloud
• DR Target (SRM)
• Branch Office making use of replication

vSAN is just a cluster object/property

vSAN Workflow:

• Setup Network and vmk interfaces
• Enable vSAN
• Set vSAN Auto Mode or Manual Mode
  • Manual Mode: Pick disks

Best practice: have each host similarly configured for best results

Storage policies are like Storage Profiles v2

Policy Capabilities:

• Stripes per object
• Failures to tolerate
• Space reservation
• Flash read cache reservation
• Force provisioning

Performance Monitoring:

• Esxtop
• Performance manager UI
• RVC & Observer (where does one get these from??)

Performance Group Discussion

NUMA:

• Trust VMware NUMA default settings, the experts know better.  Modify at your own peril!
• App must be NUMA aware
• NUMA allows scheduling RAM on same CPU

Virtual CPUs:

• Virtual Cores only added for licensing reasons.  Using Virtual Sockets vs Virtual Cores makes no difference to VM.
• Match Hardware and Virtual CPU to actual need for best results
• Max, don’t allocate more Virtual CPUs than system has of cores (ignore HT and the like)

Latency:

• If latency sensitive – don’t over subscribe!  Simple as that.
• Monitor with vCenter Operations
• No silver bullet
• New “latency” property in 5.5 for Network latency related issues (reserves CPU time)

Storage:

• Split out disks (luns) is still a good practice for database
• Qdepth, queues, and paths

PCIe Hotplug

Supported with Native Driver – another good reason to switch to native driver model

VMware Ready

VMware: Joe Taylor, Pat Richards, Matt Stander

Matt Stander – runs Dev Center (mstandar@vmware.com, or is that mstander@vmware.com?)

All in the Ecosystems Engineering department

Dev Center & VMware Ready – One stop development shop for partners

VMware has 20,000 partners, and 3,000 technical partners.

Contact: tapalliance@vmware.com

Resources: Dev Center, Partner Central, Dev Community, vmdev.net

Workbench IS – for integrating directly into existing eclipse installs

SDK UI Integration docs and guides

Questions:

• Community forums for developers?
  • Coming
• How to get better dev support?
  • Sales Force pay style coming
• How to get in as inbox driver?
  
  • One off requests
• TAM or SDK support (SLA)?
  
  • Ecosystems Engineering
• IOVP Recert 5.5?
  • Will better communicate
• vSAN Cert on Dev Center?
  
  • Coming
• Native Driver?
  
  • Slowly migrate and deprecate Linux
• Workbench – why SLES?
  
  • Legal reasons, getting unified with other departments
• Need packaging repo
  
  • Conference for Dev or more technical dev sessions at VMworld?

Have we tried the new Test Manager that can help automate IOVP process?

• Workbench – top left tutorials
• CLI / Log browser

DDV – Dynamic Driver Verifier on Dev Center

ROSA – will migrate to Dev Center eventually

Dev Support SLA – can hire a guy for a week through Dev Consulting at about $11K a week.  Managed through “Sandy”.  Contact Martin Lister / Joe Taylor for more information (Ecosystem Engineering)

Recommend using Ecosystems Engineering over TAM.  (TAM account manager-> GSS -> Product Management)

vCenter Deep Dive

Web Client now in Simple Install

Custom install: for distributed setup

New in Web Client 5.5:

• Now includes Mac OSX Support
• Filter by tags
• Recent Objects Tab
• Missing: VUM, Host Client, SRM
• Performance still sucks
• Database “shattered” into smaller ones to help with performance

SSO:

• Dropped database
• Dropped master password