Preston did a great job of talking about the difference between Outage vs Outrage. It usually comes down to one letter.
I like Time Machine, and I like the way Howard explains Apple concepts in his blog posts, so this article “How does Time Machine make a backup?” really hit the spot.
My friend Vincent has made it to 100,000 hits on his blog, and I really hope he gets a lot more. He’s a smart chap.
If you’ve ever had the chance to listen to Rebecca talk, you know she’s really smart. This article on setting the technical direction for a team made for great reading.
All the kids like to talk about storage over networks, not storage area networks. What about when old meets new? Chin-fah posted an excellent article on Fibre Channel protocol in a zero trust world.
Happy New Year (to those who celebrate). Let’s get random.
Those of you who know me well will know I’m a big fan of Debian. I find running manual apt commands on my various Raspberry Pis therapeutic, but an automated approach is probably better. This is a great article on how to configure automated security updates on Debian automatically.
I miss Tru64, and Solaris for that matter. I don’t miss HP-UX. And I definitely won’t miss AIX. Read about the death of Unix over at El Reg – Unix is dead. Long live Unix!
The I3.metal is going away very soon. Remember this is from a sales perspective, VMware is still supporting the I3.metal in the wild, and you’ll still have access to deploy on-demand if required (up to a point).
Welcome to Random Short Take #81. Last one for the year, because who really wants to read this stuff over the holiday season? Let’s get random.
Curtis did a podcast on archive and retrieve as part of his “Backup to Basics” series. It’s something I feel pretty strongly about, so much so that I wrote a chapter in his book about it. You can listen to it here.
More William Gibson content is coming to our screens, with the announcement that Neuromancer is coming to Apple TV. I hope it’s as well done as The Peripheral. Hat tip to John Birmingham for posting the news on his blog.
It’s been a while since I looked at Dell storage, but my friend Max wrote a great article over at Gestalt IT on Dell PowerStore.
I love Backblaze. Not in the sense that I want to marry the company, but I really like what the folks there do. And I really like the transparency with which they operate. This article giving a behind the scenes look at its US East Data Center is a fantastic example of that.
And, to “celebrate” 81 Random Short Takes (remember when I used to list my favourite NBA players and the numbers they wore?), let’s take a stroll down memory lane with two of my all-time, top 5, favourite NBA players – Kobe Bryant and Jalen Rose. The background for this video is explained by Jalen here.
Take care of yourselves and each other, and I’ll hopefully see you all on the line or in person next year.
In this edition of Things My Customers Have Asked Me (TMCHAM), I’m going to delve into some questions around TRIM/UNMAP and capacity reclamation on the VMware-managed VMware Cloud on AWS platform.
Why TRIM/UNMAP?
TRIM/UNMAP, in short, is the capability for operating systems to reclaim no longer used space on thin-provisioned filesystems. Why is this important? Imagine you have a thin-provisioned volume that has 100GB of capacity allocated to it. It consumes maybe 1GB when it’s first deployed. You then add 50GB of data to it. You then delete 50GB of data from the volume. You’ll still see 51GB of capacity being consumed on the filesystem. This is because older operating systems just mark the blocks as deleted, but don’t zero them out. Modern operating systems do support TRIM/UNMAP though, but the hypervisor needs to understand the commands being sent to it. You can read more on that here.
How I Do This For VMware Cloud on AWS?
You can contact your account team, and we raise a ticket to get the feature enabled. We had some minor issues recently that meant we weren’t enabling the feature, but if you’re running M16v12 or M18v5 (or above) on your SDDCs, you should be good to go. Note that this feature is enabled on a per-cluster basis, and you need to reboot the VMs in the cluster for it to take effect.
What About Migrating With HCX?
Do the VMs come across thin? Do you need to reclaim space first? If you’re using HCX to go from thick to thin, you should be fine. If you’re migrating thin to thin, it’s worth checking whether you’ve got any space reclamation in place on your source side. I’ve had customers report back that some environments have migrated across with higher than expected storage usage due to a lack of space reclamation happening on the source storage environment. You can use something like Live Optics to report on your capacity consumed vs allocated, and how much capacity can be reclaimed.
Why Isn’t This Enabled By Default?
I don’t know for sure, but I imagine it has something to do with the fact that TRIM/UNMAP has the potential to have a performance impact from a latency perspective, depending on the workloads running in the environment, and the amount of capacity being reclaimed at any given time. We recommend that you “schedule large space reclamation jobs during off-peak hours to reduce any potential impact”. Given that VMware Cloud on AWS is a fully-managed service, I imagine we want to control as many of the performance variables as possible to ensure our customers enjoy a reliable and stable platform. That said, TRIM/UNMAP is a really useful feature, and you should look at getting it enabled if you’re concerned about the potential for wasted capacity in your SDDC.
We’re not done with backup and recovery yet though. This article from Ben Liebowitz on setting up immutable backups for Vembu using S3 was comprehensive.
Tom Hollingsworth wrote a great article on clearing out the cruft in your home – specifically the electronic kind. I have a cupboard full of cables I tell myself I’ll need at some point, but I really need to just get rid of them. In my defence, I did unplug my LaserDisc player last weekend. Baby steps and all that.
Speaking of streaming, this article covered some of the best mechanisms to purchase digital content with. I still prefer buying discs, but I’m a bit weird too.
Finally, I’ve been a fan of John Birmingham’s writing since I was a misspending my youth at university in the 90s, so it makes sense that I’d enjoy his food reviews too (mainly because it’s not just about food). It should come as no surprise that I, too, love pork rillette.
I’ve been a Dropbox user for some time, and as disk-slinger in a former life, I really enjoy reading the company’s tech blog. This post on cloud storage abstraction with Object Store was great.
Data breaches – everyone’s having them. Are you missing out? It’s probably just a matter of time. While you’re waiting, check out this article from Preston – John Proctor and Data Breaches.
It’s always sad when a startup stops. Mellor writes that Pavilion Data – last NVMe over Fabrics flash array startup – has died. I had the opportunity to take the kit for a spin in a previous role, and spent some time with some of their people. Smart folks doing interesting things. I hope those impacted land on their feet.
I always enjoy talking to Chris about his Plex setup, because he’s taken it to the next level. Here’s a great article he put together on how to automate lighting with Plex playback.
Finally, our old friend VMware vCenter Converter is back. You can download it from here.
At VMware Explore 2022 in the US, VMware announced a number of new offerings for VMware Cloud on AWS, including a new bare-metal instance type: the I4i.metal. You can read the official blog post here. I thought it would be useful to provide some high-level details and cover some of the caveats that punters should be aware of.
By The Numbers
What do you get from a specifications perspective?
Can I use custom core counts? Yep, the I4i will support physical custom core counts of 8, 16, 24, 30, 36, 48, 64.
Is there stretched cluster support? Yes, you can deploy these in stretched clusters (of the same host type).
Can I do in-cluster conversions? Yes, read more about that here.
Other Considerations
Why does the sizer say 20 TiB useable for the I4i? Around 7 TiB is consumed by the cache tier at the moment, so you’ll see different numbers in the sizer. And your useable storage numbers will obviously be impacted by the usual constraints around failures to tolerate (FTT) and RAID settings.
Region Support?
The I4i.metal instances will be available in the following Regions (and Availability Zones):
US East (N. Virginia) – use1-az1, use1-az2, use1-az4, use1-az5, use1-az6
US West (Oregon) – usw2-az1, usw2-az2, usw2-az3, usw2-az4
US West (N. California) – usw1-az1, usw1-az3
US East (Ohio) – use2-az1, use2-az2, use2-az3
Canada (Central) – cac1-az1, cac1-az2
Europe (Ireland) – euw1-az1, euw1-az2, euw1-az3
Europe (London) – euw2-az1, euw2-az2, euw2-az3
Europe (Frankfurt) – euc1-az1, euc1-az2, euc1-az3
Europe (Paris) – euw3-az1, euw3-az2, euw3-az3
Asia Pacific (Singapore) – apse1-az1, apse1-az2, apse1-az3
Asia Pacific (Sydney) – apse2-az1, apse2-az2, apse2-az3
Asia Pacific (Tokyo) – apne1-az1, apne1-az2, apne1-az4
Other Regions will have availability over the coming months.
Thoughts
The i3.metal isn’t going anywhere, but it’s nice to have an option that supports more cores and it a bit more storage and RAM. The I4i.metal is great for SQL workloads and VDI deployments where core count can really make a difference. Coupled with the addition of supplemental storage via VMware Cloud Flex Storage and Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, there are some great options available to deal with the variety of workloads customers are looking to deploy on VMware Cloud on AWS.
On another note, if you want to hear more about all the cloudy news from VMware Explore US, I’ll be presenting at the Brisbane VMUG meeting on October 12th, and my colleague Ray will be doing something in Sydney on October 19th. If you’re in the area, come along.
I (sadly) haven’t touched Rubrik in around a year now, but I couldn’t resist linking to Frederic’s post on Active Directory recovery with Rubrik. Great how-to article as always.
This short, sharp piece from JB is the best. Too often I’ve found myself grinding through a TV show because I had high hopes for it, or so many people told me it was great. What I should have realised is that amateur TV critics (i.e. your friends and colleagues) are often like home theatre enthusiasts who have bought their first subwoofer. Whether it’s good or bad, that’s the choice they made, and they need you to endorse that choice so they can feel better about it as well.
Finally, the blog turned 15 years old recently (about a month ago). I’ve been so busy with the day job that I forgot to appropriately mark the occasion. But I thought we should do something. So if you’d like some stickers (I have some small ones for laptops, and some big ones because I can’t measure things properly), send me your address via this contact form and I’ll send you something as a thank you for reading along.
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