The Virtual Storage Guy

Storage Efficiency and High Performance validated on Hyper-V

I'd like to share with you a nice post from Glenn Sizemore, a VMware vExpert and a technical expert in our Microsoft Business Unit. He's one of the many talented folks designing Hyper-V on NetApp solutions and architectures to run virtualized instances of Microsoft applications on Hyper-V, VMware, Citrix, etc.

Glen authored a nice post that demonstrates storage capabilities unique to NetApp that simultaneously deliver high performance and unimaginable storage savings from commodity hardware (aka low price point) while also delivering storage virtualization and integration unmatched in the industry.

Want to learn how a 1TB VHD (Hyper-V virtual disk) can be cloned 256 times in seconds, without consuming any additional storage on LUNs formatted with NTFS Cluster Shared Volumes? if so, read on...

Glenn's post is another example why NetApp is the fastest growing storage vendor in the storage industry and in the cloud market. Our ability to drive down infrastructure and operational costs through advancing the performance, resiliency, and integration of commodity priced disk is separating NetApp from the pact in the minds of those looking to advance their cloud initiatives.

Storage isn't just about spinning tin! Hope you enjoy Glen's post!

Storage for Desktops - Simple Versus Complicated

I’ve had some great meetings with a number of customers this week and in one of them they were very interested in understanding NetApp’s value proposition with VMware View. They were specifically interested in understanding how NetApp could deliver high levels of storage I/O from a dense, and cost-effective, storage footprint.

As a point of reference they drew what they perceived as a ‘simple’ storage layout on the whiteboard. They believed that such a storage configuration was an optimal means to deliver performance, cost savings, and operational simplicity for a View deployment of 500 users.

I was really surprised at what they drew and thought this would be a simple example to share with you how different NetApp arrays are from offerings from the traditional array vendors.

The image they drew included the layout I have recreated below.

New vSphere 4.1 Report: Measuring SAN & NAS Performance

NetApp and VMware performance engineering have completed a new storage performance technical report, TR-3916. This new report provides the relative I/O performance available from SAN and NAS storage protocols with vSphere 4.1 and a NetApp FAS array.

The testing in the new TR-3916 is a leap forward from our previous reports as it includes results obtained from shared and non-shared datastores, has VAAI enabled, and measures the gains provided by the Paravirtual SCSI adapter.

NetApp and VMware engineering believe that these tests result in the most accurate measurement of the performance capabilities of the storage protocols in vSphere as the test bed remains consistent throughout the testing. In fact, switching between SAN protocols with a NetApp array is as simple as mapping a different igroup (aka LUN mask). No reconfiguration or migration was required in completing the FC, FCoE, and iSCSI tests; just a simple rescan of the storage adapters from the hosts.

For the NAS (NFS) tests, our engineers simply created a FlexVol and connected it to the hosts in the cluster. The remainder of environment was unchanged, i.e. we leveraged the same arrays, disks, converged network adapters, etc… with the exception of the LUN we deleted.

The Test Bed

The test bed was comprised of a 8-node vSphere 4.1 cluster. Each host was powered by a Fujitsu Primergy RX200 with 2 Quad-core Intel Xeon E5507 Nehalem CPUs & 48GBs of memory, Qlogic CNA & HBAs, and Intel NICs. The I/O load was generated by 128 VMs, each running IOMeter.

Current Status, An Update, and a Look to the Future of Alignment

It has been one year to the date since the last time I authored a post on the topic of partition alignment. I think its fair to state this issue has gained awareness over the last year thanks to posts from a number of industry experts such as Duncan Epping, Aaron Delp, and Chad Sakac just to name a few. However alignment remains an open issue, which is unfortunate for customers and partners.

In this post I hope to shed some new light on this old topic with a to revisit this topic one year from now to proclaim misalignment is dead!

Let's Get on the Same Page

From where I sit it appears that this topic is somewhat confusing. It seems that some of the confusion is a direct result of some sales teams attempting to leverage the confusion around misalignment as incentive for the customer to purchase an alternative storage platform. I've heard the following messages far too many times...

Storage vendor sales pitch: “Mr. customer, Your current storage array suffers an awful performance penalty with misalignment. Our storage is unaffected by misalignment, so if you'd purchase our storage all of your problems will be resolved...”

These statements are simply rubbish. If you have a storage sales rep who has made statements such as these, maybe their taking you and your business for granted. Don't take my word for it; here are quotes, with direct links, from the technology partners which power your data center.

Dell - “The physical translation is important when selecting LUN element size. The smaller the element size, the more efficient the distribution of data read or written. However, if the size is too small for a single I/O operation, the operation requires access to two stripes,which requires reading and/or writing from two disks instead of one. This is known as disk crossing. Best practices recommend selecting a size that is a multiple of 16 sectors (8 KB) and is the smallest size that will rarely result in forced access to another disk.”

EMC Symmetrix with vSphere - "Prior experience with misaligned Windows partitions and file systems has shown as much as 20 to 30 percent degradation in performance.” .. “Aligning the data partitions on 64KB boundary results in positive improvements in overall I/O response time experienced by all hosts connected to the shared storage array."

EMC Symmetrix with Windows - “Misalignment with these storage boundaries could potentially lead to performance problems."

EMC Symmetrix with Oracle - “Because of the first partition misalignment on x86 systems relative to the storage array tracks, all data on that partition will continue to be misaligned and that misalignment has been shown to cause performance degradation.”

EMC Symmetrix with Oracle - “Aligning partitions to a 64KB offset is a general requirement on Linux x86_64 with ASM and Symmetrix storage arrays.”

EMC Clariion - “File-system misalignment affects performance in two ways: 1. Misalignment causes disk crossings: an I/O broken across two drives (where normally one would service it). 2. Misalignment makes it hard to stripe-align large uncached writes. The first case is more commonly encountered. Even if disk operations are bufferred by cache, the effect can be detrimental, as it will slow flushing from cache. Random reads, which by nature require disk access, are also affected, both directly (waiting for two drives in order to return data) and indirectly(making the disks busier than they need to be).”

EMC Celerra - “Performance improvement as high as 40% was observed on partitioning the drive using DISKPART and aligning the disk.”

IBM SVC - “The recommended settings for the best performance with SVC when you use Microsoft Windows operating systems and applications with a significant amount of I/O can be found at the following Web site”

IBM DS8000 - “An aligned partition setup makes sure that a single I/O request results in a minimum number of physical disk I/Os, eliminating the additional disk operations, which, in fact, results in an overall performance improvement.”

HP EVA - “As a quick background advisory, applications that utilize EVA VRAID disks might experience a write performance penalty with the default Windows 2003 primary disk partition alignment.” … “Qualitative evidence has shown that sector realignment with DiskPar has the greatest impact on large block sequential writes to VRAID5 LUNs rather than random I/O data streams. A significant impact can occur when performing a disk-to-disk backup using a VRAID5 LUN for the destination volume, for which there are large block sequential writes.”

Microsoft Exchange Server - “Setting the starting offset correctly will align Exchange I/O with storage track boundaries and improve disk performance” .. “Therefore, make sure that the starting offset is a multiple of 8 KB. Failure to do so may cause a single I/O operation spanning two tracks, causing performance degradation.”

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 - “Disk partition alignment is a powerful tool for improving SQL Server performance. Configuring optimal disk performance is often viewed as much art as science. A best practice that is essential yet often overlooked is disk partition alignment. Windows Server 2008 attempts to align new partitions out-of-the-box, yet disk partition alignment remains a relevant technology for partitions created on prior versions of Windows.”

Microsoft Windows - “Disk performance may be slower than expected when you use multiple disks in Microsoft Windows Server 2003, in Microsoft Windows XP, and in Microsoft Windows 2000. For example, performance may slow when you use a hardware-based redundant array of independent disks (RAID) or a software-based RAID.” ... “To resolve this issue, use the Diskpart.exe tool to create the disk partition and to specify a starting offset of 2,048 sectors (1 megabyte). A starting offset of 2,048 sectors covers most stripe unit size scenarios."

NetApp - “For optimal performance, the starting offset of a file system should align with the start of a block in the next lower layer of storage. For example, an NTFS file system that resides on a LUN should have an offset that is divisible by the block size of the storage array presenting the LUN. Misalignment of block boundaries at any one of these storage layers can result in performance degradation.”

Oracle Database Server - “On some Oracle ports, an Oracle block boundary may not align with the stripe. If your stripe depth is the same size as the Oracle block, then a single I/O issued by Oracle might result in two physical I/O operations. This is not optimal in an OLTP environment. To ensure a higher probability of one logical I/O resulting in no more than one physical I/O, the minimum stripe depth should be at least twice the Oracle block size.”

SUN Solaris - “An advanced storage system, such as Oracle’s Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System, is a traditional SCSI-accessed logical unit (LUN) to client systems. Although these devices may be accessed with legacy 512B I/O transfers, internally these devices may be managed with variable block sizes that are larger than the standard 512B sector size available on commercial hard disk drives. In practice, these advanced storage devices process data most effectively when the operating system I/O request is aligned with the block size of the LUN presented by the storage device. When I/O is not aligned to the block size of the LUN, response time may increase and throughput may decrease compared to the aligned case. “

 

VMware vSphere - “The alignment of your file system partitions can impact performance. VMware makes the following recommendations for VMFS partitions: Like other disk-based file systems, VMFS suffers a penalty when the partition is unaligned. Using the vSphere Client to create VMFS partitions avoids this problem since it automatically aligns the partitions along the 64KB boundary.” ... “Make sure the system partitions within the guest are aligned.”

 

As you can See the IT industry is aligned on alignment!

5 Reasons to Upgrade to Data Ontap 8.0.1

Last week while hosting our Virtualization Field Readiness Summit I spent some time with Dr. Desktop (aka Chris Gebhardt) and while educating me on advancements in our technologies related to desktop virtualization he shared a few of the enhancements in Data Ontap 8.0.1 that were so exciting I thought I’d share.

Reason Number 1 - 64 Bit Aggregates

64 bit aggregates allow customer to extend the size of their storage pools (or aggregates) by raising the maximum capacity from 16 TB (with Data Ontap 7.x) to 100TB. For those of you unfamiliar with NetApp technology, an Aggregate is a collection of physical disks that have been protected in RAID-DP RAID groups. The aggregate is NetApp’s means to logically separate the capacity and performance IOPs from a physical disk drive and serve it via a resource pool to a number of datasets. This model allows us to leverage the physical resources to a higher level of utilization than what one can accomplish with traditional RAID technologies.

With 64 bit aggregates and RAID-DP, customers extend their dataset size and capabilities without compromising the protection of their data.

Reason Number 2 - NetApp DataMotion for FC, FCoE, & iSCSI LUNs

Virtual Storage Tiering and Desktop Virtualization

Last week I presented our portfolio of desktop virtualization solutions to a group of Cisco engineers and account managers. These solutions are built on FlexPod and include desktop virtualization technologies from VMware and Citrix, include automated configuration instructions, and each is certified as a Cisco Validated Design (CVD). In short, we are working together to deliver integrated solutions intended to address the broadest set of IT and user requirements.

Today I want to share with you some of the data presented during this call that is truly amazing and clearly demonstrates why NetApp is the market leader in providing storage for virtual desktop solutions with Cisco, VMware, and Citrix.

Allow me to level set the discussion before going deeper

In terms of I/O load, desktop virtualization has two distinct operational modes that I’ll refer to as ‘Steady State’ and ‘I/O Storms’.

Is NetApp Missing from your Datacenter?

On behalf of NetApp, I’m writing to you with a simple proposition:

For your next storage purchase, you should consider NetApp.

Things move at a fast, if not exponential pace in the data center. The advent of virtual infrastructures and cloud computing has introduced a new set of requirements that redefined the value proposition of storage arrays within a cloud infrastructure stack.

The storage array that you ultimately select is responsible for maintaining most (if not all) of your organization’s intellectual property. This means that the success of your organization is dependent on the infrastructure that supports it and is tied to you ability to affect change in the quality of the storage you introduce.

Gone are the days when a shared storage platform simply provided high performance and data availability for a select set of business critical applications. Today, arrays MUST serve all of the data in the data center with greater than five (5) 9’s of availability while bringing to bear key enabling technologies such as: storage efficiency, data mobility, disaster resilience, continuous data protection, security and many, many more. Oh, did I mention that all this is predicated on a solution that must be repeatable, operationally consistent, non-disruptive, easy to manage, and able to grow with you and your business without adding unnecessary burdens to the adoption process?

What I have just articulated are array-specific requirements I have seen across the board – whether you are a small to medium business, a medium to lower-end enterprise, or a full on enterprise class customer. In every customer engagement that I have, these are always topics of conversation, and to you my fellow reader, I can only hope that many of these requirements are ringing true in your mind.

Now, if you do have a traditional storage array, then your existing vendor is likely a large and successful company with a long history of delivering big-iron solutions. Ideally, they have been there for you through the time of mainframes and open system through today’s emerging virtualization technologies, but you should ask yourself: “are they still offering a multitude of platforms under one banner, each offering a unique a specially tailored feature-set to address some portion of you virtual datacenter needs and ultimately your organization’s requirements?”

If you answered “no”, then let me thank you for being a NetApp customer ☺, otherwise, I encourage you to read on.

If you are open to new possibilities to extend your datacenter capabilities, especially for virtualization initiatives, or haven’t taken a closer look at NetApp’s technologies recently, then I’d like to offer you some compelling reasons as to why you should.

NetApp Takes SPECsfs2008 Benchmark To New Levels!

NetApp has published SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 results for our new FAS6200 & FAS3200 arrays, which demonstrates the performance capabilities of these platforms are nothing short of industry leading!

SPECsfs2008 is the latest version of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation benchmark suite measuring file server throughput and response time, providing a standardized method for comparing performance across different vendor platforms. SPECsfs2008 results summarize the server's capabilities with respect to the number of operations that can be handled per second, as well as the overall latency of the operations.

SPEC is expanding to address cloud infrastructures by working with VMware to define the next generation of VMmark. I expect some of you may find interest in the next generation of VMmark as it should help architects in designing next-generation infrastrucutres.

The FAS6240 - Enterprise Class Performance

I’d like to introduce you to the FAS6240. It is our new mid-tier model in the FAS6200 enterprise platform. It is a unified architecture capable of all storage protocols, data management features, and cloud integration points.

To give you a sense of enterprise class performance I’d like to compare the FAS6240 results to the best provided by EMC obtained in a hybrid VMAX & multi-node Celerra configuration. In reviewing the results a few things truly stand out...

The FAS6240:

• Is a single system and not 4 like the EMC test-bed (comprised of 1 SAN array with 2 or 3 NAS gateways)
• Provides 172.3% of the performance capable with EMC’s SSD based solution with 488% more capacity
• Provides 140.7% of the performance capable with EMC’s FC based solution with 446% more capacity

FACT: VMware vSphere on NetApp is Faster and Greener

 

I'd like to ask you, do you think the following statements are generally considered to be true?

1. Virtualization is software, and hardware is simply hardware
2. RAID10 out performs all other RAID types that provide data protection (redundancy)
3. Fibre Channel provides greater I/O performance than NFS for virtualized workloads
4. Deduplicated data sets perform slower than traditional data sets

I believe that for most these statements are considered true and why shouldn’t they? These views originate from historical validation in our physical infrastructures. Moreover, most of us are not storage experts, intimately familiar with nuances in arrays architectures and capabilities. For most SAN & NAS storage is just a black box and thus storage is simply hardware; or as my good friend Duncan Epping likes to say, ‘just spinning tin’

 

Spinning Tin

Duncan’s comment of spinning tin led me to ponder, does hardware matter with server virtualization? On one hand no, it does not as the hardware layer has been abstracted to a point where customers at any time can non-disruptively migrate to a net-new platform.

Yet on the other hand hardware does truly matter.

The level of intelligence and capability in the hardware provides greater performance, solution sets, functionality, and points of integration (both direct like VAAI and indirect like dedupe).

Storage Architectures with LDVM: Faster, Less ComPlex

While attending the VMware TechSummit this week, someone asked why I thought storage was relevant in light of server virtualization, the virtual datacenter, cloud deployments, the software mainframe, etc…

OK - This individual didn’t actual say software mainframe but I though I'd inject it into their synonym roll call. Mmmm… Synonym Rolls. Sounds yummy! (OK - running on 4 hours of sleep may be impacting my sense of humor).

In response to this question I replied, “There is one thing I can guarantee, which is by the time I finish this statement your company will have generated and stored more data than when I began.”

Consider the similarities with, and the diametrically opposed aspects of, the adoption rate of server virtualization and the data growth rate in your data center.

• Server virtualization separates the compute layer from the physical layer resulting in a means to enable application mobility
  
  
• Data growth is rampant, commonly growing at 50-100% year over year. A single copy is a minimum, redundant copies aren't free, and replication requires more bandwidth each year. These force work to keep data sedentary in nature

So why do I, like most of the engineers at NetApp, find the storage aspect of data center virtualization interesting? Simple, it's because we are developing ways to make application mobility a reality by addressing the shackles restricting data to an individual datacenter.

Raising Awareness Around the Misalignment of Data

Today my good friend Duncan Epping surprised me by shooting me an IM notifying me that he was posting on the impact of partition misalignment and asked if I’d care to comment. Fortunately for me I had time to do just that and this post is an expanded version of what I shared in the comments section at YellowBricks.

I’d suggest that anyone interested begin at YellowBricks before proceeding.

Alignment of the data in a virtual infrastructure to the storage array is critical to performance, scaling, hardware life cycle, and storage efficiencies. The lack of alignment results in an array retrieving more data than what the VM is requesting. This results in inefficiencies on the array that leads to requiring more storage hw resources to serve a workload.

Transparent Storage Cache Sharing– Part 2: More Use Cases

In part one of this series I introduced you to Transparent Storage Cache Sharing and introduced the use case of serving virtual machines and their binaries. The post received some great feedback and allowed me to realize that I wasn’t as clear as I had hoped to be in beginning this conversation.

Before we continue the conversation by looking at additional use cases, I think I should clarify a few details around traditional storage caches in order to effectively communicate the advantages of TSCS enabled storage arrays.

It’s fair to say that storage caches are available in different sizes, provide various predictive cache algorithms or means of read ahead in order to increase total storage performance. In their operation the cache stores data for use by a single VM in hopes that any subsequent requests from this same VM can be satisfied from cache before accessing disk. Any subsequent requests from any other VM cannot utilize the data cached for the first VM.

To put it another way, traditional array caching mechanisms lack transparency. They lack the ability to share a single reference between discrete objects such as two VMs.

TSCS provides such transparency and as a result discreet client requests can be served from a single instance of data in the array’s cache. This ability to serve multiple requests from a single copy of data provides a significant increase in array performance by serving more data requests from cache. This benefit provides a significant decrease in disk IO requests.

This capability is also available with any storage protocol be it SAN (FCoE, FC, iSCSI) or NAS (NFS, CIFS).

For today’s post I’ve added an I/O cache ratios to my images. This ratio depicts the number of discreet items that are served by a single cached item. I am hoping this addition will allow me to better depict the I/O gains provided by TSCS.

I’d like to point out that Linked Clones deliver a similar type of transparency via software. For the sake of this post I’d like to table the technical comparison of IO sharing via software and storage arrays for a later post. Fair enough?

Transparent Storage Cache Sharing– Part 1: An Introduction

I expect most of my readers are familiar with Transparent Page Sharing (TPS). For those in need of a refresh, TPS increases the over all performance capabilities of an ESX/ESXi cluster by ensuring efficient use of server memory. The TPS process achieves this efficiency by eliminating redundant virtual machine memory pages by remapping any duplicate reference back to a single page. The real ‘magic’ in TPS is its ability to transparently share the same pages (aka data) between multiple VMs.

Transparent Page Sharing is a key enabler in allowing the hypervisor to scale memory resources beyond the physical constraints.

This week I’d like to introduce you to Transparent Storage Cache Sharing (TSCS) and how it significantly changes the storage design and architecture in virtual infrastructures by allowing a single block of data to be accessed transparently by multiple virtual machines.

In this series, I will introduce you to the details of TSCS and review the benefits it delivers in a number of real-world use case scenarios.

The VMware Express and View on NetApp

PEX 2010 has wrapped up, and as usual there's way too many things going on each day which prevent me from sharing my thoughts in real time. So here's a few post show...

On Wednesday, I got a chance to take a break from the partner showcase and breakout sessions to take peak at the View Express. Let me say that impressive, is an understatement. The VMware Express is a mobile datacenter and demo environment and this year it will be traveling across the U.S. and Canada, making three coast-to-coast trips, bringing customers hands on experiences right in their own backyard.

 

EMC Benchmarking Shenanigans

I want to tell you a story about how my evening went the other night. I hope you don't mind a narrative.

Monday I received an email from a friend in the VMware community, "Did you see the Register, it's unreal, EMC arrays crushed the SPEC benchmarks!" As you'd assume, this news got my attention. I mean, EMC hasn't published a SPEC benchmark in years.

(The last EMC SPEC submission was published in November of 2007)

Crushed? My buddy said EMC crushed the results! I couldn't stop my mind from racing, had EMC unleashed some new technology which could revolutionize the storage industry? I mean, I thought NetApp had the coolest tech. I mean we are the only ones to offer production dedupe, intelligent caching, and the most integrated vCenter plug-ins. What could EMC have created?

Hi, My Name is Vaughn and I Use EMC Storage

This past holiday season I (and others) received a rather gracious gift from Chad Sakac in the form of an Iomega IX4-200D. While Chad and I may not always see eye to eye on the role and future of storage with virtual datacenters I believe I am in full agreement with him that the IX4 is a fairly robust SOHO storage device.

For the past decade I’ve been using network attached storage devices at home. These devices have ranged from entry level NetApp FAS arrays, which I found to be a bit too power hungry for day to day use, and my favorite in recent years them Synology Disk Station.

Chad thank you for the gift, it was very gracious of you. As others have shared their experiences with their IX4s I'd figure I'd share mine in the form of a review. I know this may catch some of you off guard, discussing an EMC storage offering, but as NetApp doesn't offer a product in this price range or for this market segment I feel sharing I can provide an unbiased perspective based on my experience with the device.

New VMware and NetApp Protocol Performance Report

Many of you have been asking when NetApp & VMware update TR-3697 (multiprotocol performance comparison paper covering VI3) to include vSphere. It is my pleasure to share that as of this morning we have jointly released a new report TR-3808.

The paper compares the performance of FC, iSCSI, and NFS connected storage along with the gains made in protocol optimization with vSphere as compared to VI3.

What’s Covered in the Report?

TR-3808 compares the scaling of NetApp FC, iSCSI, and NFS connected shared datastores. VMware agreed on testing general purpose shared datastores, as they comprise greater than 80% of all datastores currently deployed.

The concept of a general purpose datastores is the 80% of the 80:20 rule regarding storage with VMware. I tend to discuss the rule during my customer briefings and public presentations. The remaining 20% of the rule is what I refer to as High Performance Datasets. Both of these constructs were discussed in the 'Multivendor Post to help our mutual NFS customers using VMware', which was co-authored by Chad Sakac.

Maybe I’ll dedicate a post to the 80:20 rule in the near future...

SPEC SFS2008 Verifies You Can Run Faster on Fewer Disks with PAM

NetApp is the only storage vendor focused on reducing storage hardware footprints. Evidently discussions surrounding the use of storage saving technologies in a production environment must be upsetting to the traditional storage array manufactures as anytime I discuss the technologies that enable such environments the comments sections of my posts inevitably end up reading (and smelling) like the zoo after the monkey cage has endured a pooh-flinging outburst.

It is my premise that the attempts of the traditional legacy storage array vendors to dissuade customers from considering and implementing storage savings technologies is a self-serving and not a community driven interest. Maybe my statement is a bit inflammatory but just consider the following statements regarding the use of data deduplication from a well-known traditional storage manufacture VP...

”Typically, when storage admins run into I/O density problems, they have two fundamental approaches: more disks, or faster disks.”

“By spreading the load on more spindles, I/O density can be reduced. However, you now require more storage, power, cooling, etc. -- which kind of tends to defeat the whole premise of data deduplication to begin with.”

“The other approach is to use faster disks -- either disks that spin faster, or perhaps enterprise flash drives. Invariably, these cost more as well -- again tending to defeat the whole premise of attempting to save money through data deduplication.”

Statements like this are clearly meant to caution customers against the use of ‘risky’ new concepts (reduction of storage footprints) and the primary enabling technology (data deduplication). So is the information shared in this warning accurate?

Run Everything Virtualized and Deduplicated : aka Chuck Anti-FUD

Last night I got caught in what I would classify as a tweet-fight with several of my chums over at EMC on the role storage arrays play within a virtual datacenter. The conversation was pretty intense and at one point I posted the following string of tweets…

@sakacc @chuckhollis – Guys EMC & NetApp just look at virtualization differently. Allow me to explain…

@sakacc @chuckhollis - VMware allows customers to share CPU, memory, and network ports among multiple VMs allowing a reduction in servers

@sakacc @chuckhollis - Cisco allows customers to share ports among multiple connection protocols thus reducing network and storage switches

@sakacc @chuckhollis - NetApp allows customers to share disk capacity at a sub VM level among multiple VMs which reduces total storage

@sakacc @chuckhollis - EMC provides shared disk access to multiple VMs. Shared access is not shared resource usage; this is not virtualized

@sakacc @chuckhollis – VMware, Cisco, & NetApp want customers to purchase less hardware. What is EMC’s plan to reduce their HW footprint?

As you can see my premise is clear, for customers to be successful in their virtualization efforts, they must virtualize the entire datacenter this includes servers, networks, and storage.

Who decided that server and network hardware should be reduced while the shared storage footprint is permitted to grow uncontrollably?

VCE-101: What's Next with Deduplication?

Welcome to the latest post in our series entitled ‘Virtualization Changes Everything’

In our last post we discussed the CapEx savings provided by data deduplication of both production storage capacity and storage array cache. Deduplication is fundamentally changing the data center and it appears that there’s more on the horizon. I’d like to share with you what I call ‘Data Center Ethernet Acceleration’.

Overview

“"Some call it a software mainframe others call it cloud, it depends on when you were born" – Steve Herrod, CTO, VMware

When discussing multiple applications on a single hardware platform I prefer the term ‘software mainframe’. I think this is due more to my time working with VMware products rather than my age. I still recall my introduction to this concept back in 2001.

How Heavy is your ESX Load?

I can’t tell you how often we are asked for tips around optimizing the performance of virtualized applications. Resolving performance related issues can require investigating a number of variables ranging from the virtualized application including the GOS settings and the data layout, and all the way down to the configuration of the ESX/ESXi server itself.

What’s the right LUN size for a VMFS datastore?

I can’t tell you how often we are asked this question and the answer has many variables including the amount of aggregated I/O of the servers being virtualized onto the datastore, the storage protocol used in connecting to the datastore, etc.

I/O Efficiency and Alignment – the Cloud Demands Standards

I was surprised to read in the relatively recent EMC report: VMware ESX Server Optimization with EMC® Celerra® Performance Study that when it comes to aligning the partitions inside of virtual machines EMC has diametrically opposed recommendations based on the storage protocol and storage array which one deploys with VMware. I have to say that such recommendations raise a red flag that I believe needs some additional light shed on it.