With vCD 1.5, you can now manage both private and public as a hybrid mode from the administration with secure federated. It allow you to subscribe, manage, relocate and provision anywhere you prefer, could be internal infrastructure or public cloud provider you choosen and manage in same console. I went through the hands on lab session for this topic and found the setup was great.

It took me sbout 1.5 hours to complete the lab and the lab instruction is clear and no customization required. I would like to thank the folks from vmware who creted the lab and allow me to try it out. Every configuration is web base and wizard base, which allow the administrator to setup and configure easily. Hybrid cloud no longer a concept, whih I believe is real and many users will seriously consider it in the future.

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1. Future of Virtualization and Cloud Computing
2. Security Consideration with Cloud Computing
3. Intel Xeon E7 New Tech line Refresh bring 10 Cores and 20 Threads per CPU

One of the key area they highlighted was the stoage protocol they choosed, which is NFS rather than iscsi and FC SAN, which was mainly due to the flexibility of volume shrink or resize that could support on the fly. I am agreed with their statement as personal thought, for large scale deployment, NFS are much easier to manage compare to Iscsi and FC environment.

NFS is pure ethernet ip base, which certified and proven in many of the large scale deployments worldwide. With 10G ethernet today, performance throughput on the NFS will no longer concerns over the performance. If you had not evaluated NFS as an option in your deployment currently, you may want to take a try on it.

here is the latest Intel Xeon E7 Data sheet. You can view the full copy over here.

Once again, I believe the consolidation ratio will be significant increase in most of the virtualization project in future.

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1. Cisco New Generation UCS Servers Range with Intel E7 Chipset

According to the link here www.theregister.co.uk,  it should able to push the total memory up to 1TB per 2 U machine in single chassis. The C260M2 will come with 2 x 10Gb Ethernet and 4 x gigabits NICs, which is very sufficient for most of the deployment today on stand alone or virtualize environment. Cisco claimed it will ship the B230 M2, B440M2 with Intel E-7 base chip set. Once again, I am very excited for this to reach the market as it will transform the server infrastructure and virtualization infrastructure deployment in the future.

You can read more from the original post here.

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1. UCS Firmware 1.4 support FCoE Direct Attach SAN

What is unified storage?

A single platform support multi-protocol such as FC, ISCSI, NFS, CIFS, FCoE and etc. It also support file, volume and block level data access.

You will able to get the unified box from either Netapp, EMC and HDS in the market now.

Well, seems like all the major storage players are aligned and agreed with the Unified Storage architecture now. Let’s share some of my personal experiences here. For my pass experience as an end users, I had met up with numbers of Storage experts from different principle. I often received those comments as Unified storage will slow down the performance, not efficient and they are not block base solution from multiple experts. No right or wrong for what they had commented, but with the storage trend today, they may need to reconsider the statements they had put in front to the customers previously.

Personal opinion, the storage transformation majority are caused by Virtualization and cloud computing as you could easily decide the protocol or methodology for different deployment, which had forced the storage vendor to re-consider their approach for SAN offer to support unified protocol in single platform.

General de-duplication solution:

1. Primary SAN de-duplication
2. Appliance target base de-duplication
3. Host base de-duplication
4. Software base de-duplication

I may had missed out some of them, but these should cover majority of the de-deduplication solution in the market today.

Primary SAN de-duplication allow dedupe happens on the primary SAN,  where most of the active data were stored. This should be the highest cost / GB that running in your environment.  Primary SAN de-dupe happen on Netapp and EMC storage today. While both claim they are doing de-duplication, you may need to take note the block base de-dedupe and file base de-dupe are different approach.

Primary SAN de-dupe allow you to achieve disk space saving up to 50% or more, especially in virtualization environment. As we all are familiar with the virtual machine deployment, most of the virtual machines are usually cloned or deploy from the standard template, which will contains numbers of duplicated block data on the primary storage. De-duplication allow administrator to re-claim more space from the primary SAN, and reduce the TCO of overall virtualization strategy. I will suggest de-dupe to be enable for virtualization deployment and exclude the volume or LUN that require high I/O performance especially for Databases.

Appliance base de-deuplication – example Data Domain VTL, Quantum VTL and etc. These solution will be more specified to backup and recovery. As an example, it allows users to perform daily full backup with minimal disk space consumption with de-deduplication on virtual tape library. This is not on primary SAN as your VTL are not the primary SAN where the data are stored

Host base de-duplication – Avamar. This is another great solution in the market; allow data to be de-dupe before process over for local or remote backup. As an example, it will allow users to minimize the bandwidth requirement for remote office or location, and centralize manage the backup and recovery on primary data center.

Software base de-duplication which allows users to convert direct attach, NAS, tape or SAN attach storage, to be target base deduplication machine. This is heavily relying on the management software to perform the data de-duplication and not the hardware appliance itself.

No right or wrong, just to share the different in general how you should consider about de-duplication solution today in the market. Each of them has the unique position in the market for different perspective.

Cisco Nexus 1000V is a enhance virtual distributed virtual switch which integrate to the VMware vSphere 4. With Cisco Nexus 1000V, you will contain VSM and VEM, which VSM will be the virtual appliances that host the management of Nexus 1000V, and VEM will be installed on each ESX host that been connected to the Nexus 1000V.  I will not go in too details about Nexus 1000V in this post as my intention is to clear up the confusion on the VN-Link meant by Cisco.

6 months ago, this new term had come to my career while someone had claimed that the VN-Link will allow virtual machine to direct interact to the physical IO devices on the PCI-E without hypervisor in place. Well, this features had been included in VMware for quite some times in vSphere 4 by using the functionality call VMDirectPath I/O. But while doing this, you will lose the functionality of VMotion, and most users will not go for this due to the limitation on VMotion. Since this is new, no right or wrong, I decided to leave it for a while and further research to understand it.

After many round of discussion and reading on the blog and white paper, finally I have the answer I want now. VN-Link is the product name for a family of products, does not specifically refer to any one product so forget the idea of hardware vs. software implementation, etc.  Think of the Nexus family of switches: 1000v, 2000, 4000, 5000, 7000.  All different products solving different design goals but are components of the Data Center 3.0 portfolio from Cisco.  In VN-Link it contains Cisco Nexus 1000V, Hypervisor Bypass with Direct Path I/O, Pass Through Switching, Virtual Interface card & VNTag. If you had done the administration or implementation on Cisco UCS, Nexus 1000V, Nexus 5000 & 2000, you should familar with all these term that I mentioned here.

For more details information, I will recommend the Unified Computing Blog who had done the good explanation to described further in details for the VN-Link technology.

Or you can view from here.

Well, since we had achieved this in virtual environment, what about physical environment?

Most of the server vendor out there today, they are stateful, because the information require for the system such as UUID, Bios, Firmware, MAC, WWN ID are tie down to the physical hardware. There are others vendor able to virtualize the WWN and MAC address out there but still there are challenges to remain the UUID, Bios and firmware when they move the system state from 1 physical hardware to another. Now with Cisco Service profiles technology, we able to migrate our system state without changes, without reconfiguration and the entire process could be completed within 15 to 20 mins. All you need to do is to disassociate the service profile from the blade and apply the service profiles across another available blade. This is similar with the cold migrate features we are using in Virtualize environment. Of course, it does not provide online migration as vmotion does today. Therefore, now you can have vmotion on vmware provide online migration, cold migration for offline migration on virtual machine. With Cisco UCS Service Profile features, you will able to achieve the cold migration of the physical system within short down time. It meant a lot to the system administrator who manage the 24 x 7 operation.

Photo shot of the real environment which have 14 gigabits NIC Ports and 4 x 2 Gbps FC.

If you are going to adopt virtualization technology in your environment today, you should consider the comparison within gigabits and 10G Ethernet. Of course, for some environment which may not require 10G if the number of virtual machines and IO requirement are low, and I absolutely agreed that we shouldn’t over provision what you require in the IT infrastructure. But if you are looking for medium and large scale virtualization and consolidation, I will say that 10G Ethernet are the way to go from now. 10G Ethernet provide lower latency vs traditional gigabits Ethernet. It does solve the physical and virtual management on the networking perspective on virtualization. From operational standpoint, it simplified the data center by reducing the complexity from switch or storage management.

From VMware architecture, if you are currently on gigabits environment, you may end up create multiple vswtich, multiple DVswitch, or multiple uplink for different port group and VLAN. Well, no problem of doing this of course, but when the number of interfaces increase to 18 NICs per Server, you will spend hours to just plug in and trace all the physical cable 1 by 1. An example here for reference, if you have 2 x 10G Ethernet per ESX host, the implementation will be much more simplified. a DV switch for all port group require. Of course, you will maintain the standard best practices which split out the port group to multiple interfaces as usual. Of course you can applied QoS if you wish to do so, but in most scenario, you may leave it default.  Now, you have 20Gbps VS 18 Gbps, and the entire management from both physical and virtual are much more simplified. With Intel Westmere and AMD 12 cores technology, you will no longer looking at virtualize 10:1 per ESX host. I had generally see the users at least virtualizing 18 to 25 per ESX host as a minimum today. Network IO become more important now since the number of virtual machine per host are increasing.

Screen short of 2 x 10G Ethernet configuration with DVswitch.

There are also plenty of storage vendor out there supported 10G Ethernet interface for ISCSI and NFS both. Meant you can have your virtual machine network and Storage traffic both running on 10G Ethernet.