VMdamentals

The official word is out: The vExperts of 2012 are being announced. Having been a vExpert for 2011, I know what great people make up the vExpert group. When I found my name on the vExpert 2012 list, I felt honored to be part of this group once again! I will continue to evangelize VMware like I have been doing the past years.

Since I became a vSpecialist working for EMC I have had less time and less access to cool hardware to perform the technical deep dives I love to do so much. I will work hard to put up more of these in the near future! I think I should raid Chad’s garage or basement to see if I can dig up some cool hardware to use this year. For example, the “Performance impact when using VMware snapshots” is something way overdue for a revisit under vSphere 5.0 or 5.1 .

Thanks all for your support!

Even though this blog mainly focusses on technical geeky things, it cannot be denied that as infrastructures grow, the deep-down technical details get covered up more and more by the sheer size of things. As customers need to grow their environments more and faster, they have a need to make things decide for themselves, automate more and more. Yesterday you bought boxes and cables. Tomorrow you buy a converged infrastructure like VCE’s Vblock. But what about today? EMC is about to fill that gap…

The Cake Story

To explain the difference between a build-your-own and a Vblock, there is this great story where the parallel is drawn to birthday cakes: Read the rest of this entry »

I do not often write to specific implementations of a vendor. This time however I focus on EMC’s FAST-cache technology, and we will be playing a little “follow the I/O” to see what it actually does, where it helps and where it might not.

Read the rest of this entry »

EMC and VMware have published a joined Reference Architecture where an EMC VNX5300 using a minimum configuration of disks squeezes out the required IOPS for a thousand VDI users. That is awesome stuff, but how to go about using and remodeling this RA for your own needs? In this blog post I’ll try to put some numbers to it, both validating and enabling you to resize for your needs.

A very cool use case: VMware View and 1000 vDesktops running off an EMC VNX5300

This is a very VERY cool one. You can find the Reference Architecture Read the rest of this entry »

VAAI has been around for quite some time, but I still get a lot of questions on the subject. Most people seem to think VAAI is solely for speeding up processes, where in reality there should not be significant speeding up if your infrastructure has enough reserves. VAAI is meant to offload storage-related things so they are executed where they should: Inside the storage array.

EDIT: My title was stolen borrowed from my dear collegue Bas Raayman in a post like this one, but focussing on file-side in My VAAI is Better Than Yours – The File-side of Things. Nice addition Bas!

My VAAI is better than yours

I recently had an interesting conversation Read the rest of this entry »

As I am testing several third party backup tools, this morning I stumbled upon a failed backup. No snapshot present on the VM which could not be backed up – but a yellow mention in the VI client: “Configuration Issues – Virtual Machine disks consolidation is needed“. And my luck was, that selecting “consolidate” ended in that one brilliant error: Unable to access file since it is locked. Great. Here’s what was wrong!

Read the rest of this entry »

At the very end of 2011, I decided to post my top 10 posts over the year 2011:

1. RAID5 DeepDive and Full-Stripe Nerdvana
2. “If only we could still get 36GB disks for speed”
3. VM performance troubleshooting: A quick list of things to check
4. Cool videos on Technology, Virtualization and Storage
5. Different Routes to the same Storage Challenge
6. Under the covers with Miss Alignment: Full-stripe writes
7. VMworld Party Copenhagen 2011 – What’s Hot & What’s Not
8. Whiteboxing part 1: Deciding on your ultimate ESX Whitebox
9. Whiteboxing part 2: Building the ultimate Whitebox
10. Veeam Backup part 2- Using jumbo frames to target storage

My view on things

For me personally, 2011 has been a crazy year. Getting one’s head around being a vSpecialist working for EMC, the world leader in the storage and virtualization segment is not an easy task. Now that I’m settling down in this new function I hope to have some more time to do cool technical deepdive stuff in 2012.

Both EMC and VMware have a very similar vision where things are going. And if the biggest storage vendor and the biggest virtualization vendor have a joint vision… I think you understand where we will all be going next year….

For quite some time now we have been sizing VDI workloads by measuring what people are doing during the day on their virtual desktops. Or even worse, we use a synthetic workload generator. This approach WILL work to size the storage during the day, but what about the login storm in the morning? If this spikes the I/O load above the steady stte workload of the day, we should consider to size for the login storm…

Read the rest of this entry »

I have seen several Virtual Desktop projects with “bad storage performance”. Sometimes because the storage impact simply was not considered, but in some cases because the project manager decided that his Windows 7 laptop worked ok with 1GB of memory, so the Virtual desktops should have no issue using 1GB as well. Right? Or wrong? I decided to put this to the test.

Test setup

To verify the way a windows 7 linked clone (VMware View 5) would perform on disk, I resurrected some old script I had laying around on vscsiStats. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a short post to wish everyone the best wishes

Thanks to everyone who visited my blog site in 2011!