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Cohesity at VMworld Barcelona 2018

October 26, 2018 by FrankBrix Leave a Comment

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

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Awarded vExpert 2018

March 11, 2018 by FrankBrix Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

RVTools 3.10 released

February 26, 2018 by FrankBrix Leave a Comment

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/

Filed Under: Uncategorized

vCenter er nede, hvad gør du?

November 3, 2017 by FrankBrix Leave a Comment

Hvad ville du gøre hvis dit vCenter blev utilgængeligt i morgen og hvilken indflydelse ville det have på din forretning? Svarene falder typisk i to kategorier:

  • Mit vCenter er ikke kritisk for min produktion og hvis det er nede installere jeg blot et nyt og forbinder det til mine ESXi servere.
  • KRISE! Hvis mit vCenter er nede er der ikke self-service, overvågning og styring af de virtuelle resourser. Jeg er på dybt vand!

Det er er en gammel kendt udfordring i et hvert datacenter. Hvordan beskytter man sin VMware mangement stack og får den hurtigt online igen med en lav RTO. VMware udvider sine management produkter. Hvor man tidligere kunne nøjes med en enkelt vCenter server består de fleste miljøer af adskillige servere til håndtere den daglige drift og rutiner. Den er i dag udbygget til:

  • vCenter (med intern eller ekstern database)
  • vRealize Operations Manager
  • vRealize Automation Center
  • vReaize Log Insight
  • NSX Manager
  • PSC (platform services controllers)
  • SDDC (VMware Cloud Foundation)
  • Management AD og DNS

Udover disse VMware services er der også flere administrative servere som IT afdelingen er afhængige af som kan tilføjes som kritiske komponenter til en disaster plan. Med det Software Defined Data Center er det ikke som tidligere hvor vCenter var “nice-to-have” – er det nu blevet til en kritisk funktion der altid skal være online. Hvis vCenter er nede skaber det problemer for ting som

  • Selv-provisionering af nye virtuelle maskiner
  • Overvågning
  • 3′ parts produkter der kommunikerer med vCenter

I et tilfælde hvor der er nedbrud eller datatab på management stacken er man ilde stedt. Hvordan bringer man stacken online når vCenter og evt. management AD og DNS er nede? Er din platform til beskyttelse 100% uafhængig af dem? Med stor kompleksitet er det muligt at bygge et system med traditional software som kan håndtere dette. Men hvordan tester man det? Hvordan sikrer man at alle windows servere benytter lokale service accounts og ikke AD konti? På hvilken måde kompromittere dette sikkerheden? Hvad med faren for Ransomware når traditional software kører på Windows og i værste tilfælde bliver backup data kryptereret og utilgængelig?

Til at løse dette er der behov for at se på problemet med friske øjne. Der er behov for en løsning der opfylder følgende

  • Baserer sig ikke på Windows og backup data er immutable
  • Har ingen afhængigheder af AD og DNS
  • Kan benyttes selvom vCenter er utilgængelig
  • Kan udføre en Instant-Mass-Restore og bringe ALLE administrative servere online med det samme og som en gruppe.
  • Simpel og alt inkluderet i et system (ikke 4-5 forskellige produkter og producenter)
  • Ingen single point of failures.

Hos Cohesity løser vi dette elegant og din management stack er beskyttet og muligt at lave recovery på få sekunder. De unikke funktioner ved Cohesity:

  • Policy baseret beskyttelse
  • Alt-i-et-system (de-dupe storage, backup software, databaser, always-online, fuld HA for alle komponenter software og hardware.)
  • Instant-Mass-Restore: Recovery af 5 eller 50 maskiner på få sekunder
  • SnapTree: Alle backup punkter er fully hydrated og instant-recoverable. Ingen baggrunds IO operationer for at lave syntetiske fulls
  • Test/Dev: Mulighed for at teste recovery når som helst og validere det virker

Hvis du ønsker at få en demo at dette i dit eget datacenter så tag kontakt.

Hvis du vil læse mere om hvordan Cohesity beskytter den fulde VMware Management Stack inklusive cloud foundation så læs mere her:

http://www.cohesity.com/vmware-cloud-foundation-vcf-cohesity-white-paper/

Video Demonstration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtAoCi4HcX4

Filed Under: certification, Cohesity, Network, PernixData, SSO, Uncategorized, vCloud, vcops, View, vMotion, vSphere

Disaster Recovery and site redundancy with Cohesity

February 8, 2017 by FrankBrix 3 Comments

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Home Lab reinstall – vSphere Host Client is awesome

October 14, 2016 by FrankBrix Leave a Comment

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.

screenshot-2016-10-14-23-40-11

Filed Under: Uncategorized

#VMworld Day 1 General Session

August 29, 2016 by FrankBrix Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

PernixData FVP accelerates crawling All-Flash-Array

May 18, 2016 by FrankBrix Leave a Comment

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 25th at 9:00 PDT or 18.00 CET. right here: https://get.pernixdata.com/analytics-driven-design-afa

Filed Under: Uncategorized

PernixData Architect 1.0 is now GA

November 4, 2015 by FrankBrix 1 Comment

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

 

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized

PernixData Nordic Tour 2015 with Frank Denneman

September 10, 2015 by FrankBrix 1 Comment

Frank Denneman (frankdenneman.nl) is back in the Nordic capitals for the PernixData tour 2015. The Agenda is PernixData FVP and our newest product Architect that will revolutionize the datacenter. Some highlights of what to expect:

  • Combine best-in-class user experience with robust real-time analytics
  • Deliver unprecedented visibility and control of virtualized applications and the underlying infrastructure
  • Maximize application performance while minimizing troubleshooting costs

Monday September 21st: Helsinki

Tuesday September 22nd: Stockholm

Wednesday September 23rd: Oslo

Thursday September 24th: Copenhagen

It is all free and you can sign up here for the event: Sign up here

Filed Under: PernixData, Uncategorized

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