Especially on virtual desktop environment, workload offload is a must to be considered move forward to improve the consolidation ratio and maximize the the performance out of the infrastructure build. If you had not considered about this, you should immediately look into this as security can be another major bottlenecks to your infrastructure today, and of courses all the business units are always concern about it.

Related posts:

1. Security Consideration with Cloud Computing
2. Future of Virtualization and Cloud Computing
3. Arista Network for Virtualization vEOS vs Cisco Nexus 1000V

10Gbps Ethernet no longer as a dream to most enterprise environment. It had become affordable, and realistic to be adopted while users decided to build the virtualization or private enterprise cloud. I had always highlighted that network had become major component of the success for cloud or virtualization, therefore the manageability on the virtual switch had become equally important as well. Previously, Cisco Nexus 1000V is the only choice to perform virtual switch layer management. If you do not want to go for it, you have another choice here. Arista had a similar offer which is vEOS, that allow virtual traffic direct integrate and visible over to the Arista Physical Network switches.

Below are some table comparison within vEOS VS Cisco Nexus 1000V. There are some similarity but will not be the total same approach been taken.

Here is the table shown that some details functionality Compare to Cisco Nexus 1000V.

If you are planning for large scale deployment on 10G environment for production network and IP base storage network, you may also consider Arista as a good fit which they offer low latency and work well with most IP base storage vendor in the market. For more information, please refer to the official link here.

Related posts:

1. Cisco New Generation UCS Servers Range with Intel E7 Chipset
2. Intel Xeon E7 New Tech line Refresh bring 10 Cores and 20 Threads per CPU

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.

Related posts:

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.

Related posts:

1. UCS Firmware 1.4 support FCoE Direct Attach SAN

Well, there are many users, partner, or even principle who are reluctant to accept changes or new thing, which claimed nexus 1000V doesn’t bring any value while created problems to their day to day job. The main reason behind as they struggling to manage and configured nexus 1000v, mostly because they are just not the right person to manage it. Please do not feel offended with this statement, as I am telling the truth which myself are not the right person to configure SAP, Oracle, BI cognos too. We always need specified specialist and expertise from different area to compliment each others in IT environment.

That is why Cisco and VMware are alligned to create this virtual switch Nexus 1000V, which Xen open source are trying to follow the same now. For Enterprise IT, proper change management and ownership are important to be in placed, unless you think that ITIL practices doesn’t bring any value to the IT operation. Without Nexus 1000V, Network operation are out of picture for the virtualization operation practices and support as there had no visibility due to NIC teaming, load balancing configurations and non-transparency and integration with security devices allow by using the DEFAULT DVSwtich or Standard vSwtich from VMware. This happen to all the previous Generation Virtualization deployed before vSphere 4.

For the story I heard, he blame the Nexus 1000V doesn’t work just because he struggling to create port profile, VLAN assignment and etc on the Cisco Nexus 1000V. This could be easily done by a network admin in any organization and a great team work and participation could be created while introducing Virtualization or Cloud computing in Enterprise Environment.

I agreed as not everyone will able to handle server, storage, security, network and facility in a single person. I will always advise my friends and buddies to understand the different functional team’s technology and operation which allow us to better understand the integration requirements from different pieces in the infrastructure. I am not a network expert, but I did pickup nexus 1000V as we learn from previous experience, without nexus 1000V could be a nightmare for large virtualization environment. If you are deploying a small scale virtualization for SMB with less than 10 VMs, you may not require Nexus 1000V, but if large scale deployment, please consider this solution as part of your technical design consideration.

Virtualization & Cloud Computing require Network to deliver the services by resources sharing, if security and manageability are not address properly, the risk to business is very high. “The world is transforming, Changes are necessary”, we will be either ON the train or OFF the train in the fast pace moving IT world.

Today I had read through Virtual Geek blog about the exciting new product range coming soon in the near future with scale out architecture more than 100 cores for CPUs in storage controllers and more than 1000 Drives in total which call VNX. You can read more details from here. I am absolutely excited about this new product range which will transform the traditional mid-range or enterprise storage to the next level.

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.

Here are some of the key consideration which I would like to share it out to be success while adopting to the virtualization journey. I will suggest all of us to consider about the key point below, before we started the journey to cloud computing or virtualization.

1.    Network Infrastructure Capacity and Scalability

2.    Shared Storage for Primary, Archive, Backup, Recovery and Disaster Plan

3.    Security readiness in Virtualize Infrastructure and Cloud Computing

4.    Servers Computing Power with High Availability and Scalability

5.    Data Center Facilities – Power, Cooling, Cabling Structure and etc

6.    Operation Management – Troubleshooting, Provisioning and Billing

7.    Road map to expand from Private to Public Cloud with services automation

Today, Infrastructure virtualization is not limited to only server consolidation, we should always consider about the overall infrastructure for the total consideration. Failure in proper planning and execution, the virtualization journey could be very challenging and impact the production environment from time to time.

I am absolutely not agree with oversell solution which always the show stopper to the users which could not justify the TCO and ROI investment for the company.

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.