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VMworld Barcelona is only a few weeks away. I am very excited about joining my 19th VMworld! For the past 3 years I have been to VMworld working for Cohesity and I look forward to meet many friends from the community.

You are probably thinking about what Cohesity is planning this year at the show. Trust me it is going to be something you don’t want to miss. Here is the complete agenda: http://www.cohesity.com/vmworld2018/europe/

Tuesday night we are having an amazing party that you can register for here: http://events.cohesity.com/cohesitypartyBCN

If you are a Queen fan don’t miss out! The Break Free Queen Tribute Show is the best in Europe.

The list of the VMworld’s I have participated in:

1. 2007 – San Francisco
2. 2008 – Cannes
3. 2008 – Las Vegas
4. 2009 – San Francisco
5. 2010 – Copenhagen
6. 2011 – Copenhagen
7. 2012 – Barcelona
8. 2013 – San Francisco (VMworld Speaker)
9. 2013 – Barcelona (VMworld Speaker)
10. 2014 – San Francisco
11. 2014 – Barcelona
12. 2015 – San Francisco
13. 2015 – Barcelona
14. 2016 – Las Vegas
15. 2016 – Barcelona
16. 2017 – Las Vegas
17. 2017 – Barcelona
18. 2018 – Las Vegas
19. 2018 – Barcelona

Received confirmation Friday night that I was awarded for my help to the community as vExpert for 2018. This is my 9th consecutive year as vExpert. The vExpert program was launched in 2009 – but I did not apply before 2010 where I got my first award.

Congratulations to all of my fellow vExperts. It is a community that helps on so many levels.

Now it is time to spend the rest of 2018 contributing to the community.

Thanks VMware! You have amazing products.

One of the most valuable tools to extract information from a vSphere environment has been updated to 3.10. If you have not used this tool before definitely check it out. The tool is great to get a very comprehensive list of ALL information for a complete virtual environment.

Get the latest version here https://www.robware.net/rvtools/

I have written several blogs on how Cohesity protects your data at the primary site. Cohesity protects the following workloads today:

• Virtual Machines on VMware
• Physical Windows and Physical Linux
• Granular restore of: Files, Folders, MS SQL, MS Exchange and MS SharePoint

All built in-to an infinite web-scale hyper-converged platform that scales linearly with your data growth.

But where it gets even more interesting is how Cohesity will simplify and potentially improve your DR solution. Everyone will agree that the first priority is to have an off site copy of the data. Once we have that we have to consider the RTO (Recovery Time Objective) How much time do you want to spend to bring the data back online.

Cohesity is now changing what we can expect from our DR solutions. By leveraging a policy based approach to data protection. (blog here) We now simply define how many local and remote copies we want of our data. We then apply that policy to virtual machines or physical servers. This operation will take less than 1 minute for an inexperienced VMware administrator 🙂

One option could be:

• Local backup retention: Daily backup keep for 30 days
• DR backup retention: Daily backup keep for for 7 days AND Monthly backup keep for 3 years

If we need to recover from our disaster site, this is where Cohesity truly shines. Since everything is self-contained inside the Cohesity OS (management interface, backup software, de-dupe storage) we just need the Cohesity Cluster and a standalone ESXi host to perform the restore. If the ESXi host is without any storage no problem. In fact Cohesity will let you run VM’s on your disaster site directly from a Cohesity NFS based datastore presented to the ESXi host. The restores are instant because of our own SnapTree technology.

Last year I blogged about my home lab and it has been running stable for more than a year. I never found the need to upgrade from vSphere 5.5 since everything just worked.

My old configuration was:

• 2x Intel NUC5i5MYHE with i5-5300U processor and Intel VPRO/AMT technology
• 16 GB DDR3L Kingston Memory
• Kingston E50 240GB SSD
• 32GB Sandisk Cruzer fit USB Key
• Synology NAS used as shared NFS datastore
• ESXi 5.5 and vCenter 5.5

I wanted to get my home lab upgraded to 6.0 update 2 to stay current but at the same time I thought about my vCenter and shared storage usage. I only have a few VM’s running at home, and to be honest I don’t need shared storage or a vCenter for my usage. I had some 800GB Intel S3700 SSD available and choose to go down the route with local storage. One of the reasons for my usage of vCenter is that I access it from a Mac. I need the web client.

After installing the first NUC with a local SSD I tried to login in to the new HTML5 Host Client. What a pleasant surprise. The client is FAST, efficient and works from Chrome on my Mac Book. I deployed a few VM’s and even on my small dual-core NUC running on local S3700 SSD the VM’s performed great. I will probably deploy a vCenter Appliance on my second NUC, but for the home lab it is not really needed.

Pat Gelsinger CEO went on stage to discuss the challenges of IT and looking ahead in the crystal ball. The big theme of this years show is: be_TOMORROW

A lot of talk about public cloud and private cloud. This is a growing market but it will take many years for the public cloud to take over most of the workloads.

This lead into the first big annoncement of the week: “VMware Cloud Foundation” It is a cross cloud architecture that will bring all of the goodness of the private data center to the cloud. VMware will be able to deliever Freedom and Control while using the cloud and not sacrisifing one of them.

Pat also let us know that VSAN now got more than 5000 customers! I am sure at next years VMworld this number will be even more impressive.

VMware showed a tech-preview demo of the VMware Cloud Services and it showed how it could handle any cloud including Amazon. It was suprising how much Amazon was mentioned, VMware now understands that Amazon is here and the best thing to do is built a system that will provide VMware customers with freedom and control in a multi-cloud world.

Disclaimer: I am a PernixData Systems Engineer, this is a true story based on actual events.

A cold evening in October I was sitting late at night putting the final touches to a PowerPoint presentation for a VMUG meeting when an email ticked in. The email was brief and to the point

“Frank, we have an application that is not performing as it should, we want to try FVP to see if it can make the performance problems go away”.

This is not an unusual request to receive since I have been involved in several hundreds of POC’s with similar characteristics. We agreed on a POC the following week at their offices. Many POC’s we don’t even have to help the customer, since the software is so easy to install, configure and manage. I did not know anything about the customer environment, I just knew that they had an application that needed better storage performance.

The following week I met the client at their offices, he had already prepared a fresh Windows server for the PernixData Management application as requested. The virtual server we had to help was running on a two ESXi host dedicated cluster. We spend the first 15 minutes on installing the PernixData host extension one host at a time and then we spend another 15 minutes on installing the management server. Now we were ready to roll and see what was happening with the application.

Luckily PernixData had just released their newest product Architect in public beta, so we could leverage the Architect to understand the IO behavior and then use FVP to accelerate the VM. No SSD or PCI-E flash were available but the host had plenty of spare memory. We spent a few minutes creating a FVP cluster using 200GB of memory from each host and put the virtual server in Write-Through mode (read acceleration only).

Within 1 hour, everything was ready to go. Software installed, and acceleration policy implemented. The only thing missing was the actual application owner to arrive and give some feedback (or criticism).

The application owner let us know that they had a test script that should complete in less than 40 minutes according to their software vendor. But it took them 50 minutes to complete the script using a stop-watch measurement. We held our breath as we ran the same test script, using local RAM for acceleration. The application owner was stunned. He was surprised that everything was already accelerated, with no reboots,  nor downtime. Yes, FVP does not require any of those things 🙂

First run of the script with VM in Write-Through mode cut the run time from 50 minutes all the way down to 35 minutes. The application owner looked shocked, exclaiming “I am not sure what you did, but this is FAST.”

Next we expanded the test of the application to Write-Back mode as well both with write acknowledgements now coming from local RAM (0,05ms) and with 1 replication peer (0,05ms + vMotion network latency) with similar results. The application relied heavily on the extremely low latency for reads.

This was all accomplished in as little as two hours and we were still too early for lunch. So I suggested to take a look at what really happened with the VM’s IO behavior and why it was such a success. We spent 30 minutes looking at Architect, and with its block size visibility it was clear what had happened. The virtual server running the application were issuing a lot of large block size IO in the 64KB to 256KB range. This drove a significant throughput and the external storage array did not provide good latency for these IO. This was all visible from an easy to use graph, no need for ESXTOP or vSCSISTATS.

 

Everyone was happy. The VMware administrator solved the problem in a simple way and there were no changes whatsoever to their storage infrastructure. Even the application owner was satisfied. He solved his performance challenges, but also got great insight as to why they were occurring.

I was curious about what storage infrastructure the application using, and the I got the response.

“The VM is running on a very popular All-Flash-Array, we are deploying AFA so we never have to worry about Performance issues anymore”

For this customer it was a big eye opener. AFA’s are great for reducing latency and providing capacity, but it is not where performance stops. Using local RAM or even PCI-E NVME flash in the host will result in significantly reduced storage latencies. Latencies that are not even possible to achieve with flash behind a storage network.

I am all in favor for faster storage whether it is Hybrid or AFA and they can deliver decent performance. But for hyper performance you have to think alternatively, and that is exactly what PernixData is doing with the FVP acceleration software. Combined with Architect, storage teams, applications owners and virtualization administrators will work better together, be more effective and have the right tools to properly architect their data center of the future.

If you want to learn more about this, sign up for the webinar that goes into further details Wednesday May 25^th at 9:00 PDT or 18.00 CET. right here: https://get.pernixdata.com/analytics-driven-design-afa

I am thrilled to announce that PernixData Architect is now GA. At the same time FVP was updated to 3.1 and both can be accessed from our download portal for existing customers and partners.

Architect has been out in a public beta for the past 2-3 months, the feedback has been fantastic, for the first time ever people now can design and architect storage from facts and not from thumb rules and gut feelings.

The Architect software is bundled in the same Management server as FVP, and it also uses the same host extension.

If you want to try out Architect and see what it is all about, sign up here: http://www.pernixdata.com/pernixdata-architect-software#trial-form