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Author’s Note: This content was first published over at Storage Monkeys, but it appears that it has since disappeared and is no longer available. For that reason, I’m republishing it here (with minor edits). Where applicable, I’ll also be republishing other old content from that site in the coming weeks. Thanks!

In this article, I’m going to tackle what will probably be a sensitive topic for some readers: VMware over NFS. All across the Internet, I run into article after article after article that sings the praises of NFS for VMware. Consider some of the following examples:

• VMware over NFS - Why?
• Why VMware over NetApp NFS
• VMware & NFS

That first link looks to be mostly a reprint of this blog post by Nick Triantos. Now, Nick is a solid storage engineer; there is no question in my mind that he knows Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS inside out. Nick is certainly someone who is more than qualified to speak to the validity of using NFS for VMware storage. But…

I am going to have to disagree with some of the statements that are being propagated about NFS for VMware storage. Is NFS for VMware environments a valid choice? Yes, absolutely. However, there are some myths about NFS for VMware storage that need to be addressed.

1. Myth #1: All VMDKs are thin provisioned by default with NFS, and that saves significant amounts of storage space. That’s true—to a certain point. What I pointed out back in March of 2008, though, was that these VMDKs are only thin provisioned at the beginning. What does that mean? Perform a Storage VMotion operation to move those VMDKs from one NFS datastore to a different NFS datastore, and the VMDK will inflate to become a thick provisioned file. Clone another VM from the VM with the thin provisioned disks, and you’ll find that the cloned VM has thick VMDKs. That’s right—the only way to get those thin provisioned VMDKs is to create all your VMs from scratch. Is that what you really want to do? (Note: VMware vSphere now supports thin provisioned VMDKs on all storage platforms, and corrects the issues with thin provisioned VMDKs inflating due to a Storage VMotion or cloning operation, so this point is somewhat dated.)
2. Myth #2: NFS uses Ethernet as the transport, so I can just add more network connections to scale the bandwidth. Well, not exactly. Yes, it is possible to add Ethernet links and get more bandwidth. However, you’ll have to deal with a whole list of issues: link aggregation/802.3ad, physical switch redundancy (which is further complicated when you want to use link aggregation/802.3ad), multiple IP addresses on the NFS server(s), multiple VMkernel ports on the VMware ESX servers, and multiple IP subnets. Let’s just say that scaling NFS bandwidth with VMware ESX isn’t as straightforward as it may seem. This article I wrote back in July of 2008 may help shed some light on the particulars that are involved when it comes to ESX and NIC utilization.
3. Myth #3: Performance over NFS is better than Fibre Channel or iSCSI. Based on this technical report by NetApp—no doubt one of the biggest proponents of NFS for VMware storage—NFS performance trails Fibre Channel, although by less than 10%. So, performance is comparable in almost all cases, and the difference is small enough not to be noticeable. The numbers do not, however, indicate that NFS is better than Fibre Channel. You can read my views on this storage protocol comparison at my site. By the way, also check the comments; you’ll see that the results in the technical report were independently verified by VMware as well. Based on this information, someone could certainly say that NFS performance is perfectly reasonable, but one could not say that NFS performance is better than Fibre Channel.

Now, one might look at this article and say, “Scott, you hate NFS!” No, actually, I like using NFS for VMware Infrastructure implementations, and here’s why:

• Provisioning is a breeze. It’s dead simple to add NFS datastores.
• You can easily (depending upon the storage platform) increase or decrease the size of NFS datastores. Try decreasing the size of a VMFS datastore and see what happens!
• You don’t need to deal with the complexity of a Fibre Channel fabric, switches, WWNs, zones, ISLs, and all that. Now, there is some complexity involved (see Myth #2 above), but it’s generally easier than Fibre Channel. Unless you’re a Fibre Channel expert, of course…

So there are some tangible benefits to using NFS for VMware Infrastructure. But let’s be real about this, and not try to gloss over technical details. While NFS has some real advantages, it also has some real disadvantages, and organizations choosing a storage protocol need to understand both sides of the coin.

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

Republished: Dispelling Some VMware over NFS Myths

Similar Posts:

• Only Thin Provisioned in the Beginning
• Proving VMware Over NFS
• Articles in Progress
• Storage Protocol Performance Whitepaper from NetApp
• Keeping Thin VMDKs Using NetApp SnapRestore

Oracle has stopped selling Virtual Iron products, terminated its Virtual Iron reseller agreements and seen the departures of two top Virtual Iron execs.

We still don’t know what Oracle’s plans are for the Virtual Iron technology it acquired in May, but in light of these developments, a much bigger question is arising about a much bigger acquisition: Will Oracle kill off Sun Microsystems’ virtualization line too?

To answer this question, I did what any responsible journalist would do. I consulted the Magic 8-Ball. Its response?

On one hand, the future doesn’t look good for Sun virtualization. In the wake of the acquisition by Oracle — which is expected to close this summer — Sun has backed down on its plans to offer its xVM Server as a standalone hypervisor. It will only be available as part of the xVM Ops Center management console or the OpenSolaris operating system (but not the commercial version of Solaris).

Judging from this move, you’d think Sun sees the writing on the wall: Oracle wants to present a unified virtualization front, and all these different products from three different vendors won’t help meet that goal.

But on the other hand, Sun just yesterday released its VirtualBox 3.0 virtualization software. Why would Sun execs go through all the trouble of putting out a new release if they thought Oracle was just going to squash it in a few months?

It’s all very confusing for the three companies’ customers and partners. Oracle’s relative silence about the acquisitions isn’t helping matters. (Instead of responding to our questions about Virtual Iron’s future, the company just emailed us a link to its specifics-deficient Virtual Iron FAQ.)

Oracle knew what its plans were for both Virtual Iron and Sun when it bought them. Whether the Magic 8-Ball says “signs point to yes” or “outlook not so good,” any sort of definitive answer would be welcomed.

It appears, that hosting geek Jorke, has already started getting the wireless plumbing reading for TechED Australia this year. 

According to his twitter feed, there was a [secret?] visit to the Gold Coast Convention Center back in May to check things out.

Anyway Jorke has just recently posted some more info on his blog.  It looks like the lads have been busy, and already started a Wireless Survey of the up and coming TechED site.

You can read more in his post “Tech.Ed 2009 Windows 7 Experience – Netbooks for you!”, and a snippet is below:

Now we go into the fun part of getting them on the network and doing some awesome things. We’ve already started planning this, with a wireless survey of the Gold Coast Convention Centre  – as you can see, there’s a lot of air to cover!

Nice touch.  I’ll see what else I can find out.

Dutch:

 

Summer Night

Op 24 juli 2009 organiseert de System Center User Group nederland de jaarlijkse System Center ‘Summer Night’. We starten de avond om 17.00 uur met pizza en vangen om 17.30 uur aan met het programma:

17.30 uur – 17.45 uur:  SCUG NL, stand van zaken

17.45 uur – 18.45 uur:  Windows 7 deployment met SCCM 2007

18.45 uur – 19.45 uur:  DPM en Cloud Recovery

19.45 uur – 20.00 uur:  Break

20.00 uur – 21.00 uur:  SCOM 2007 R2, what’s new

21.00 uur – 22.00 uur:  Borrel en afsluiting

Je kunt je kosteloos inschrijven door een email te sturen aan info@scug.nl met je naam en contactgegevens. De locatie is De Witte Bergen in Eemnes. Hier is een routebeschrijving te vinden: http://www.hoteldewittebergen.nl/route.aspx

Hopelijk tot de 24^e,

I had a chance this morning to spend a few moments with Microsoft Australia’s, Nick Hodge.  Nick is “the man” who is organising the logistical challenge of getting 2,000+ netbooks into the hands of all us Tech•Ed attendees.    …to put that in perspective that’s roughly 58x forklift palettes =)

Anyway, In the spirit of Windows 7, I asked Nick 7x questions on who/why/where etc, and his answers are below the fold.

1. The burning question:  Why?  Why do us Aussies get to something as cool as this, when our [jealous] counterparts in the USA didn’t?
2. And why the Why the HP 2140?
3. Some uber-keen attendees have pointed out some issues with Wireless and battery.  Do you think it will be a show stopper?
4. What about attendees who can’t accept the “gratuity” clause?
5. What can we do with our Netbook and win7?  Will there be places to download MSDN/Technet/etc/etc?
6. Ok, the clown clause.  In the spirit of embracing interoperability, what is the prize/penalty for the first person to install Ububtu?  =)
7. Which version of Windows 7 is being loaded?

Nick Says:

Q1:  The burning question:  Why?  Why do us Aussies get to something as cool as this, when our [jealous] counterparts in the USA didn’t?

A:   Personally, I blame Andrew Coates. We think it was his idea.

Windows 7 is big, and there’s a whole bunch of enterprise deployment features that we’d like to showcase. It is a big, but safe bet.

As a software company, it is tough to provide a physical experience. Providing hardware will close the loop.

And as far as US/NZ/Europe and other Tech•Ed’s are concerned: people can come to the Gold Coast if they book early. 3+ days in a conference centre at Australia’s answer to Hawaii are welcome to attend.

 

Q2:  And why the Why the HP 2140?

A: Why the HP 2140? HP is our hardware sponsor for Tech•Ed 2009, and the 2140 is a premium “netbook” … and we can get enough of them to test and hand out. We’ve loaded Windows 7 Beta and RC onto our test units, and err’d on the side of memory/diskspace over latest and greatest coolness. 2300+ netbooks being loaded in the week prior to Tech•Ed is a large project with many risks. We’re reducing them to ensure delegates have fun. Not un-fun.

The risk here is to take a later device, not having device drivers, no units to test, and a delivery schedule that didn’t work for Tech•Ed.

As everyone knows, as much as possible you try and minimize risk in these big projects. On balance, the 2140 is a sweet machine.

 

 

Q3:   Some uber-keen attendees have pointed out some issues with Wireless and battery.  Do you think it will be a show stopper?

A:  Wireless: this is a known risk we’re aware of, and are working with the venue to get this as right as we can. Some of the limitations are with wireless full stop: the amount of bandwidth you can get from the allocated frequencies. To help out, we’re expanding hard-wired connections; including power-recharge areas with spare adaptors. Needless to say, we’re working through the potential roadblocks.

Battery life is a concern, so we’re beefing up in-presentation room power outlets/boards too. This will also benefit those who bring their laptops to TechEd.

A part of “the massive hands-on-lab” will be to see the implications of a massive number of people with small, wireless devices. It’s going to be a learning experience, and that’s TechEd  =)

 

 

Q4:  What about attendees who can’t accept the “gratuity” clause?

A:  I love the loan-to-donate to charity side. Not all delegates will be permitted to take their netbooks back to work due to gifting policies… and we have lots of people who need IT skills for future employment. I joined the dots to make this happen. Personally, this is the best part of this for me: giving back to Australia, not just taking.

A concern we had at the beginning of the internal 18 week journey was thinking through the implications for public sector employees … we didn’t want them to miss out. The Loan option gives the best of all worlds: Windows 7 at Tech•Ed .. and a feel-good help out those less fortunate than ourselves.

UPDATE:  Deeps has posted more info on this, on the official Tech•Ed web site, http://bit.ly/2E0kuV

 

Q5:   What can we do with our Netbook and win7?  Will there be places to download MSDN/Technet/etc/etc?

A: Anything you can do with Windows 7. We are looking to the community to come up with some cool ideas.

As a for-instance, I’d like the Powershell community to create something cool to do some remote administration.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime 2300+ devices massive hands-on-lab.

 

 

Q6:  Ok, the clown clause.  In the spirit of embracing interoperability, what is the prize/penality for the first person to install Ububtu?  =)

A: Penalty is no Windows 7. LOL

 

 

Q7:  Which version of Windows 7 is being loaded?

A: The formal statement is “the latest public version we have access to”

We are locking down the build about 2 weeks out from Tech•Ed start, and as everyone knows with software. Anything can, and probably will, happen.

 

Sweet, Thanks Nick!  If you want more info, follow Nick on twitter:  http://twitter.com/NickHodge

Super Blogger Long Zheng broke the news in his post "TechEd Australia attendees to receive free HP Mini Notebook with Win7 ", and shortly after twitter went crazy (check the hashtag auteched), a snippet from Long’s Post is below:

If any Aussies out there wasn’t entirely sure of going to the Microsoft TechEd Australia conference on the Gold Coast this year or not, then here’s an offer to nitro-boost your thought process a little. Microsoft Australia is going to be hosting the largest hands-on Windows 7 evaluation in the world by offering each paying attendee with one of 2,300 HP Mini netbook preloaded with Windows 7 for free

Microsoft Australia’s Jeff Alexander posted a heads up on some of the technical planning the TechED team have been working on to deploy Windows 7 on over 2,000 netbooks.   Whilst Nick Hodge (the man with the logistics) has posted some gems as well.

That was all yesterday — Today Microsoft’s OCS powerhouse,  Johann Kruse posted that the story has been picked up by IT Newswire.

I’ve also stumbled across some more info about the decision behind the HP Mini netbook, I’ll post it later this afternoon.

Source: OpsManJam

This time in “Tech Talk”: “Managing noise with your management pack. A frequent complaint heard regarding management packs is that once it is deployed in an environment, it is too noisy! In this article, we cover all aspects of “noise” – what noise is, some common sources of noise, and how to make sure that your management pack is not noisy.”

Read more here.

VMworld 2009 is still two months away, but at least one virtualization competitor is already planning to steal some thunder at the show.

The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) suite will hit general availability Sept. 1, according to LeMagIT — which, for those of you who don’t parlez francais, means “The IT Mag.” Sept. 1 is the first full day of VMworld 2009, when VMware typically makes most of its major announcements.

RHEV marks a shift from Xen to KVM as Red Hat’s open source virtualization technology of choice, as senior virtualization director Navin Thadani said on last week’s edition of This Week in Virtualization.

(Shameless plug: Subscribe to This Week in Virtualization on iTunes!)

The suite is in private beta now, but Red Hat had been keeping its release date under wraps.

Red Hat’s attempt to turn VMworld into KVMworld is just the latest of several attempts to grab headlines during VMware’s show. Citrix dropped its free XenServer bomb at VMworld Europe in February, and Microsoft handed out its infamous “VMware Costs Way Too Much” poker chips at VMworld 2008.

We'd like to hear from you regarding your satisfaction of the MAP Toolkit 4.0 Beta program! Please fill out this short satisfaction survey before July 2nd, 2009 (5pm Pacific Time) and you may be one of the first 20 respondents who will get a free copy...(read more)

• VMware KB - Index Page
  This is the full index of the VMware Knowledge Base.

This is another one of my “thinking out loud” posts. This time, the question I’m mulling is this one: why deploy FCoE?

I haven’t hid the fact that I’m not really a fan of FCoE (see here or here), but I was starting to warm to the technology and thought that I was beginning to see some benefits to deploying FCoE. Namely, the fact that FCoE is inherently very compatible with “traditional” FCP, allowing organizations to leverage their existing FCP installation while transitioning to FCoE. Some hands-on time I’d recently spent with a Cisco Nexus 5000 switch showed me just how closely aligned the two technologies are and how (relatively) easy it was to extend an FC fabric using FCoE. OK, I think I get this.

Then, a few days ago, I read this article on FCoE divergence. Given that The Register can sometimes be quite sensationalist (and that’s putting it mildly), I contacted a colleague of mine whose input and knowledge I trust. He informed me that FCoE was currently limited in that FCoE is not multi-hop enabled—meaning, you can’t connect FCoE initiators on one switch to FCoE targets on another switch. (Apparently, this shortcoming is due to be corrected shortly.)

Whoa! That’s a limitation of which I was not aware. And with that limitation in mind, knowing that FCoE will—for the time being at least—be limited to convergence at the edge, I have to ask: why deploy FCoE at all? What real and specific benefits does an organization seek to gain by deploying FCoE as opposed to just deploying FC? Is the edge convergence really that worthwhile and valuable?

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

Thinking Out Loud: Why Deploy FCoE?

Similar Posts:

• Is Unified Fabric an Inevitability?
• A Collection of Viewpoints on Cisco UCS
• FCoE versus MR-IOV…huh?
• Continuing the FCoE Discussion
• Blades Won’t Die, But They Will Change

I was going through my list of actions in OmniFocus, looking at my projects and actions and evaluating each of them. In my “Potential Posts” project, where I keep links to articles that I might use in a blog post, I found the URL for this article by Steve Kaplan about virtualization, Cisco Nexus, and blade servers. The basic idea of his article is that virtualization and the Cisco Nexus—specifically, the unified fabric—are going to combine to kill blade servers.

I do agree with Steve that there is no innate relationship that means running VMware on blades is somehow “automagically” better:

It is amazing how frequently we hear IT managers talk about deploying blade servers as an integral component of their new virtual infrastructures - as if there were an obvious synergy between VMware and blade server architectures.

Absolutely! Blades are an option, just like rack mounted servers, and it’s up to the customer to choose (or us as consultants to recommend) the form factor that best meets the business needs. It might be blade servers, or it might be rack mounted servers. It just depends. So, on this one point, I agree with Steve.

Yet, at the same time, I also disagree with this point that Steve makes in his article:

Blade servers have always been an impediment to an optimal virtual infrastructure because they introduce limitations in efficiently utilizing power and cooling resources, budget, flexibility, manageability, bios and firmware updates, performance and troubleshooting.

Here is where Steve and I start to disagree. In fact, this specific article was something of the catalyst for a series of posts, written by colleague and friend Aaron Delp, detailing how blade servers and virtualization work well together:

Blades and Virtualization Aren’t Mutually Exclusive: Part One, HP Power Sizing
Blades and Virtualization Aren’t Mutually Exclusive: Part Two, IBM Power Sizing
Blades and Virtualization Aren’t Mutually Exclusive: Part Three, IBM Traditional Expansion Options
Blades and Virtualization Aren’t Mutually Exclusive: Part Four, HP Traditional Expansion Options

While this series of articles doesn’t squarely address all of the arguments against blades and virtualization, the series does make it clear that blades can produce power savings vs. rack mounted servers, and that blades do offer enough expansion options to accommodate the majority of virtualization deployments.

I also disagree with Steve about the value of the unified fabric, especially considering that right now unified fabric can exist only at the edge of the network and not at the core. That being the case, I find it hard to say that unified fabric is going to kill blade servers. So, again, I have to disagree with Steve’s position.

However, Steve’s not entirely wrong—virtualization, FCoE and 10Gb Ethernet, and yes even unified fabric will change how blade servers are designed and deployed. Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) is one example of how blade servers are going to adapt to these agents of change, and I believe we’ll see more examples from other leading vendors in the coming months and years. But will blades die away entirely? No, I don’t think so.

Think I’m crazy? Think I’m out of my mind? Feel free to speak up in the comments—courteous comments are always welcome.

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

Blades Won’t Die, But They Will Change

Similar Posts:

• Alas, BladeVault is No More
• Blades and Virtualization Aren’t Mutually Exclusive: Part Three, IBM Traditional Expansion Options
• Blades and Virtualization Aren’t Mutually Exclusive: Part Two, IBM Power Sizing
• Blades and Virtualization Aren’t Mutually Exclusive: Part One, HP Power Sizing
• Blades and Virtualization Aren’t Mutually Exclusive: Part Four, HP Traditional Expansion Options

Over the course of the next few months, I’m going to “repurpose” this blog a little bit. We’re going to start using our team blog to focus on product announcements, features etc. It’s just easier to keep all of that information centralized and I will continue to link to that blog when major news is announced. With this blog, I’ll focus more on strategy/direction/opinion with our feature investments in SCVMM and also share some of what we’re hearing from our customers.

Recently at our annual Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) we demo’d some early work we’ve been doing to allow SCVMM customers to augment their on-premise/private cloud resources with hosted/public cloud resources. Cloud computing isn’t new but the appeal of what it offers is really starting to resonate with customers. Last year we conducted focus groups for SCVMM feature planning and not a single person brought up cloud computing as being near the top of their radar. This year we had lots of dialog on cloud computing with customers, most of it unprompted. What we found is that more and more, customers are looking to build a “private cloud” within their enterprise datacenters. Lots of customers told me that many of their internal business units are starting to leverage external public cloud providers and the reasoning typically went something like this:

“All they need is a credit card number and they get a server in a few hours or even minutes. If they call me (internal IT) we have this bureaucracy that takes weeks and that’s assuming I can even automate the provisioning process from networking, storage, physical servers, OS etc. If it’s for dev/test, it will take even longer since that’s less critical.”

Ultimately, as an IT shop, they want to provide their business users with the same level of responsiveness and all of the attributes of public cloud computing so that the decision of whether to go on premise or off premise is a business decision, not a technical one.

The definition of “cloud computing” has also been evolving but most definitions include the concepts of scalability, shared resources and abstraction of physical implementation. Virtualization is a key enabler for many of these scenarios but ultimately we feel it comes down to management as the differentiator (I know, I’m biased but that doesn’t make me wrong!).

Many vendors are advising customers to wait for better industry alignment before proceeding (Tom Bittman at Gartner has an alternative interpretation of this tactic) but waiting isn’t really an option for most customers who are already under heavy pressure in this particularly difficult economy. Over the next few blog posts I’ll be going into more detail but System Center and Windows Server will form the foundation of our technology stack so you can get started now knowing that we have your back on ensuring that your investments today line up with our strategy longer term. Customers are telling us that they want to manage both private and public resources using a consistent approach and using a single set of tools so that’s what we’re committed to bringing them.  We showed an early glimpse of this at MMS but we are very ambitious and that’s just the tip of the iceberg – stay tuned!

Server virtualization enables multiple operating systems to run on a single physical server as virtual machines. With server virtualization, you can consolidate the workloads of multiple servers onto a smaller number of fully utilized servers. Fewer servers can reduce hardware, energy, and management costs. By using the Microsoft® Hyper-V™ technology in the Windows Server® 2008 operating system, you can run a virtualized instance of Windows® Essential Business Server on a single server or several servers.

Edwin Yuen: As you may have seen, we recently released the Release Candidate for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2. One of the most anticipated features of SCVMM 2008 R2 is Quick Storage Migration (QSM) which enables the migration of the storage of VM from one location to another. For example, suppose you have virtual machines on a leased SAN (SAN 1). The lease runs out and you decide to upgrade to a new SAN (SAN 2) with more capacity, better performance and additional capabilities. Quick Storage Migration allows you to move the virtual machine which resides on SAN 1 to SAN 2. I have had a number of request for more details on how this works so we've written this brief guide to QSM. (In addition, we wanted to make this technology broadly available, not just the biggest enterprises.