Category Archives: AWS

Random Short Take #66

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Happy New Year. Let’s get random.

  • Excited about VMware Cloud Director releases? Me too. 10.3.2 GA was recently announced, and you can read more about that here.
  • Speaking of Cloud Director, Al Rasheed put together this great post on deploying VCD 10.3.x – you can check it out here. 
  • Getting started with VMware Cloud on AWS but feeling a bit confused by some of the AWS terminology? Me too. Check out this extremely useful post on Amazon VPCs from a VMware perspective.
  • Still on VMware Cloud on AWS. So you need some help with HCX? My colleague Greg put together this excellent guide a little while ago – highly recommended. This margarita recipe is also highly recommended, if you’re into that kind of thing. 
  • Speaking of hyperscalers, Mellor put together a nice overview of Hyve Solutions here. 
  • Detecting audio problems in your home theatre? Are you though? Tom Andry breaks down what you should be looking for here.  
  • Working with NSX-T and needing to delete route advertisement filters via API? Say no more. 
  • Lost the password you set on that Raspbian install? Frederic has you covered. 

Random Short Take #65

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Welcome to Random Short take #65. Last one for the year I think.

  • First up, this handy article from Steve Onofaro on replacing certificates in VMware Cloud Director 10.3.1.
  • Speaking of cloud, I enjoyed this article from Chris M. Evans on the AWS “wobble” (as he puts it) in us-east-1 recently. Speaking of articles Chris has written recently, check out his coverage of the Pure Storage FlashArray//XL announcement.
  • Speaking of Pure Storage, my friend Jon wrote about his experience with ActiveCluster in the field recently. You can find that here. I always find these articles to be invaluable, if only because they demonstrate what’s happening out there in the real world.
  • Want some press releases? Here’s one from Datadobi announcing it has released new Starter Packs for DobiMigrate ranging from 1PB up to 7PB.
  • Data protection isn’t just something you do at the office – it’s a problem for home too. I’m always interested to hear how other people tackle the problem. This article from Jeff Geerling (and the associated documentation on Github) was great.
  • John Nicholson is a smart guy, so I think you should check out his articles on benchmarking (and what folks are getting wrong). At the moment this is a 2-part series, but I suspect that could be expanded. You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here. He makes a great point that benchmarking can be valuable, but benchmarking like it’s 1999 may not be the best thing to do (I’m paraphrasing).
  • Speaking of smart people, Tom Andry put together a great article recently on dispelling myths around subwoofers. If you or a loved one are getting worked up about subwoofers, check out this article.
  • I had people ask me if I was doing a predictions post this year. I’m not crazy enough to do that, but Mellor is. You can read his article here.

In some personal news (and it’s not LinkedIn official yet) I recently quit my job and will be taking up a new role in the new year. I’m not shutting the blog down, but you might see a bit of a change in the content. I can’t see myself stopping these articles, but it’s likely there’ll be less of the data protection howto articles being published. But we’ll see. In any case, wherever you are, stay safe, happy holidays, and see you on the line next year.

Random Short Take #47

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Welcome to Random Short Take #47. Not a great many players have worn 47 in the NBA, but Andrei “AK-47” Kirilenko did. So let’s get random.

  • I’ve been doing some stuff with Runecast in my day job, so this post over at Gestalt IT really resonated.
  • I enjoyed this article from Alastair on AWS Design, and the mention of “handcrafted perfection” in particular has put an abrupt end to any yearning I’d be doing to head back into the enterprise fray.
  • Speaking of AWS, you can now hire Mac mini instances. Frederic did a great job of documenting the process here.
  • Liking VMware Cloud Foundation but wondering if you can get it via your favourite public cloud provider? Wonder no more with this handy reference from Simon Long.
  • Ransomware. Seems like everyone’s doing it. This was a great article on the benefits of the air gap approach to data protection. Remember, it’s not a matter of if, but when.
  • Speaking of data protection and security, BackupAssist Classic v11 launched recently. You can read the press release here.
  • Using draw.io but want to use some VVD stencils? Christian has the scoop here.
  • Speaking of VMware Cloud Director, Steve O has a handy guide on upgrading to 10.2 that you can read here.

Random Short Take #31

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Welcome to Random Short Take #31. Lot of good players have worn 31 in the NBA. You’d think I’d call this the Reggie edition (and I appreciate him more after watching Winning Time), but this one belongs to Brent Barry. This may be related to some recency bias I have, based on the fact that Brent is a commentator in NBA 2K19, but I digress …

  • Late last year I wrote about Scale Computing’s big bet on a small form factor. Scale Computing recently announced that Jerry’s Foods is using the HE150 solution for in-store computing.
  • I find Plex to be a pretty rock solid application experience, and most of the problems I’ve had with it have been client-related. I recently had a problem with a server update that borked my installation though, and had to roll back. Here’s the quick and dirty way to do that on macOS.
  • Here’s are 7 contentious thoughts on data protection from Preston. I think there are some great ideas here and I recommend taking the time to read this article.
  • I recently had the chance to speak with Michael Jack from Datadobi about the company’s announcement about its new DIY Starter Pack for NAS migrations. Whilst it seems that the professional services market for NAS migrations has diminished over the last few years, there’s still plenty of data out there that needs to be moved from on box to another. Robocopy and rsync aren’t always the best option when you need to move this much data around.
  • There are a bunch of things that people need to learn to do operations well. A lot of them are learnt the hard way. This is a great list from Jan Schaumann.
  • Analyst firms are sometimes misunderstood. My friend Enrico Signoretti has been working at GigaOm for a little while now, and I really enjoyed this article on the thinking behind the GigaOm Radar.
  • Nexsan recently announced some enhancements to its “BEAST” storage platforms. You can read more on that here.
  • Alastair isn’t just a great writer and moustache aficionado, he’s also a trainer across a number of IT disciplines, including AWS. He recently posted this useful article on what AWS newcomers can expect when it comes to managing EC2 instances.

Random Short Take #20

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Here are some links to some random news items and other content that I recently found interesting. You might find them interesting too. Episode 20 – feels like it’s becoming a thing.

  • Scale Computing seems to be having a fair bit of success with their VDI solutions. Here’s a press release about what they did with Harlingen WaterWorks System.
  • I don’t read Corey Quinn’s articles enough, but I am glad I read this one. Regardless of what you think about the enforceability of non-compete agreements (and regardless of where you’re employed), these things have no place in the modern workforce.
  • If you’re getting along to VMworld US this year, I imagine there’s plenty in your schedule already. If you have the time – I recommend getting around to seeing what Cody and Pure Storage are up to. I find Cody to be a great presenter, and Pure have been doing some neat stuff lately.
  • Speaking of VMworld, this article from Tom about packing the little things for conferences in preparation for any eventuality was useful. And if you’re heading to VMworld, be sure to swing past the VMUG booth. There’s a bunch of VMUG stuff happening at VMworld – you can read more about that here.
  • I promise this is pretty much the last bit of news I’ll share regarding VMworld. Anthony from Veeam put up a post about their competition to win a pass to VMworld. If you’re on the fence about going, check it out now (as the competition closes on the 19th August).
  • It wouldn’t be a random short take without some mention of data protection. This article about tiering protection data from George Crump was bang on the money.
  • Backblaze published their quarterly roundup of hard drive stats – you can read more here.
  • This article from Paul on freelancing and side gigs was comprehensive and enlightening. If you’re thinking of taking on some extra work in the hopes of making it your full-time job, or just wanting to earn a little more pin money, it’s worthwhile reading this post.

Random Short Take #10

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Here are a few links to some random news items and other content that I found interesting. You might find it interesting too. Maybe. This will be the last one for this year. I hope you and yours have a safe and merry Christmas / holiday break.

  • Scale Computing have finally entered the Aussie market in partnership with Amnesium. You can read more about that here. 
  • Alastair is back in the classroom, teaching folks about AWS. He published a bunch of very useful notes from a recent class here.
  • The folks at Backblaze are running a “Refer-A-Friend” promotion. If you’re looking to become a new Backblaze customer and sign up with my referral code, you’ll get some free time on your account. And I will too! Hooray! I’ve waxed lyrical about Backblaze before, and I recommend it. The offer runs out on January 6th 2019, so get a move on.
  • Howard did a nice article on VVols that I recommend checking out.
  • GDPR has been a challenge (within and outside the EU), but I enjoyed Mark Browne‘s take on Cohesity’s GDPR compliance.
  • I’m quite a fan of the Netflix Tech Blog, and this article on the Netflix Media Database was a ripper.
  • From time to time I like to poke fun at my friends in the US for what seems like an excessive amount of shenanigans happening in that country, but there’s plenty of boneheaded stuff happening in Australia too. Read Preston’s article on the recently passed anti-encryption laws to get a feel for the heady heights of stupidity that we’ve been able to reach recently.

 

Nexenta Announces NexentaCloud

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I haven’t spoken to Nexenta in some time, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t been busy. They recently announced NexentaCloud in AWS, and I had the opportunity to speak to Michael Letschin about the announcement.

 

What Is It?

In short, it’s a version of NexentaStor that you can run in the cloud. It’s ostensibly an EC2 machine running in your virtual private cloud using EBS for storage on the backend. It’s:

  • Available in the AWS Marketplace;
  • Is deployed on preconfigured Amazon Machine Images; and
  • Delivers unified file and block services (NFS, SMB, iSCSI).

According to Nexenta, the key benefits include:

  • Access to a fully-featured file (NFS and SMB) and block (iSCSI) storage array;
  • Improved cloud resource efficiency through
    • data reduction
    • thin provisioning
    • snapshots and clones
  • Seamless replication to/from NexentaStor and NexentaCloud;
  • Rapid deployment of NexentaCloud instances for test/dev operations;
  • Centralised management of NexentaStor and NexentaCloud;
  • Advanced Analytics across your entire Nexenta storage environment; and
  • Migrate legacy applications to the cloud without re-architecting your applications.

There’s an hourly or annual subscription model, and I believe there’s also capacity-based licensing options available.

 

But Why?

Some of the young people reading this blog who wear jeans to work every day probably wonder why on earth you’d want to deploy a virtual storage array in your VPC in the first place. Why would your cloud-native applications care about iSCSI access? It’s very likely they don’t. But one of the key reasons why you might consider the NexentaCloud offering is because you’ve not got the time or resources to re-factor your applications and you’ve simply lifted and shifted a bunch of your enterprise applications into the cloud. These are likely applications that depend on infrastructure-level resiliency rather than delivering their own application-level resiliency. In this case, a product like NexentaCloud makes sense in that it provides some of the data services and resiliency that are otherwise lacking with those enterprise applications.

 

Thoughts

I’m intrigued by the NexentaCloud offering (and by Nexenta the company, for that matter). They have a solid history of delivering interesting software-defined storage solutions at a reasonable cost and with decent scale. If you’ve had the chance to play with NexentaStor (or deployed it in production), you’ll know it’s a fairly solid offering with a lot of the features you’d look for in a traditional storage platform. I’m curious to see how many enterprises take advantage of the NexentaCloud product, although I know there are plenty of NexentaStor users out in the wild, and I have no doubt their CxOs are placing a great amount of pressure on them to don the cape and get “to the cloud” post haste.

VMware – VMworld 2017 – STO3194BU – Protecting Virtual Machines in VMware Cloud on AWS

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Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2017 – US.  My flights were paid for by ActualTech Media, VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag, and Tech Field Day picked up my hotel costs. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Here are my rough notes from “STO3194BU – Protecting Virtual Machines in VMware Cloud on AWS”, presented by Brian Young and Anita Thomas. You can grab a PDF copy of my notes from here.

VMware on AWS Backup Overview

VMware Cloud on AWS

  • VMware is enabling the VADP backup partner ecosystem on VMC
  • Access to native AWS storage for backup target
  • Leverages high performance network between Virtual Private Clouds

You can read more about VMware Cloud on AWS here.

 

Backup Partner Strategy

VMware Certified – VMware provides highest level of product endorsement

  • Product certification with VMware Compatibility Guide Listing
  • Predictable Life Cycle Management
  • VMware maintains continuous testing of VAPD APIs on VMC releases

Customer Deployed – Same solution components for both on-premises and VMC deployments

  • Operational Consistency
  • Choice of backup methods – image-level, in-guest
  • Choice of backup targets – S3, EBS, EFS

Partner Supported – Partner provides primary support

  • Same support model as on-premises

 

VADP / ENI / Storage Targets

VADP

  • New VDDK supports both on-premises and VMC
  • VMware backup partners are updating existing products to use new VDDK to enable backup of VMC based VMs

Elastic Network Interface (ENI)

  • Provide access to high speed, low latency network between VMC and AWS Virtual Private Clouds
  • No ingress or egress charges within the same availability zone

Backup Storage Targets

  • EC2 based backup appliance – EBS and S3 storage
  • Direct to S3

 

Example Backup Topology

  • Some partners will support in-guest and image level backups direct to S3
  • Deduplicates, compresses and encrypts on EC2 backup appliance
  • Store or cache backups on EBS
  • Some partners will support vaulting older backups to S3

 

Summary

  • VADP based backup products for VMC are available now
  • Elastic Network Interface connection to native AWS services is available now
  • Dell EMC Data Protection Suite is the first VADP data protection product available on VMC
  • Additional VADP backup solutions will be available in the coming months

 

Dell EMC Data Protection for VMware Cloud on AWS

Data Protection Continuum – Where you need it, how you want it

Dell EMC Data Protection is a Launch Partner for VMware Cloud on AWS. Data Protection Suite protects VMs and enterprise workloads whether on-premises or in VMware Cloud

  • Same data protection policies
  • Leveraging best-in-class Data Domain Virtual Edition
  • AWS S3 integration for cost efficient data protection

 

Dell EMC Data Domain and DP Suite

Data Protection Suite

  • Protects across the continuum – replication, snapshot, backup and archive
  • Covers all consumption models
  • Broadest application and platform support
  • Tightest integration with Data Domain

Data Domain Virtual Edition

  • Deduplication ratios up to 55x
  • Supports on-premises and cloud
  • Data encryption at rest
  • Data Invulnerability Architecture – best-in-class reliability
  • Includes DD Boost, DD Replicator

 

Dell EMC Solution Highlights

Unified

  • Single solution for enterprise applications and virtual machines
  • Works across on-premises and cloud deployments

Efficient

  • Direct application backup to S3
  • Minimal compute costs in cloud
  • Storage-efficient: deduplication up to 55x to DD/VE

Scalable

  • Highly scalable solution using lightweight stateless proxies
  • Virtual synthetic full backups – lightning fast daily backups, faster restores
  • Uses CBT for faster VM-image backup and restore

 

Solution Detail

Backup of VMs and applications in VMC to a DD/VE or AWS S3. The solution supports

  • VM image backup and restore
  • In-guest backup and restore of applications using agents for consistency
  • Application direct to S3

 

ESG InstaGraphic

  • ESG Lab has confirmed that the efficiency of the Dell EMC architecture can be used to reduce monthly in-cloud data protection costs by 50% or more
  • ESG Research has confirmed that public cloud adoption is on the rise. More than 75% of IT organisations report they are using the public cloud and 41% are using it for production applications
  • There is a common misconception that an application, server, or data moved to the cloud is automatically backed up the same way it was on-premises
  • Architecture matters when choosing a public cloud data protection solution

Source – ESG White Paper – Cost-efficient Data Protection for Your Cloud – to be published.

 

Manage Backups Using a Familiar Interface

  • Consistent user experience in cloud and on-premises
  • Manage backups using familiar data protection UI
  • Extend data protection policies to cloud
  • Detailed reporting and monitoring

 

Software Defined Data Protection Policies

Dynamic Polices – Keeping up with VM data growth and smart policies

Supported Attributes

  • DS Clusters
  • Data Center
  • Tags
  • VMname
  • Data Store
  • VMfolder
  • VM resource group
  • vApp

 

Technology Preview

The Vision we are building towards (screenshot demos).

 

Further Reading

You can read more in Chad’s post on the solution. Dell EMC put out a press release that you can see here. There’s a blog post from Dell EMC that also provides some useful information. I found this to be a pretty useful overview of what’s available and what’s coming in the future. 4 stars.

VMware – VMworld 2017 – LHC3371BUC – VMware Cloud on AWS – The Painless Path to Hybrid Cloud

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Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2017 – US.  My flights were paid for by ActualTech Media, VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag, and Tech Field Day picked up my hotel costs. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Here are my rough notes from “LHC3371BUC – VMware Cloud on AWS – The Painless Path to Hybrid Cloud”, presented by Eric Hanselman (Chief Analyst, 451 Research) and Andy Reedy (Partner Solutions Architecture, AWS). You can grab a PDF or my notes here. Andy does the intro and then Eric takes the stage.

 

Infrastructure Change is Difficult

“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity” – Albert Einstein

Infrastructure change is difficult

  • … but necessary
  • Competitive pressures
  • Resource contraints
  • Business requirements

We need to be able to manage our environments. 451 Research did a survey on expected cloud uptake. The shift of workloads to cloud environments over the next 2 years is dramatic, from 41% overall today to 60% expected in 2 years. Off-premises workloads will also move from 35% to 52% in two years, and cloud providers will account for 76% of all cloud workloads.

 

Hybrid Momentum

  • 32% single cloud
  • 32% multi-cloud
  • 22% multi-cloud + (integrated on and off-premises environments)
  • 15% Hybrid – single business function distributed to multiple execution venues

There’s a lot of technical debt in the enterprise and while the promise of hybrid cloud is really attractive, getting there is difficult.

 

Strategies

  • Targeted
  • New workloads
  • Internal / external
  • DR / continuity
  • Test / dev
  • “Bursting” (This one isn’t terribly practical for a lot of enterprise applications)
  • Repatriation

 

An Opportunity

  • Integrated cloud management platforms – alliances that change the equation
  • Addressing risks – 3 Ts – transition, training, transformation
  • Facilitating change – Buying options at low cost

Test and development Use Case

 

Integrated management benefits

  • Common tool chains – reduced ops effort
  • Reduced error potential – single path, reduce brittleness

 

Performance Improvement

  • Getting closer to mobile users
  • Data sources on premises
  • Front ends to the cloud

 

Lifecycle management

  • Moving out of fixed cost infrastructure

What do customers want in hybrid?

  • Run workloads on-premises
  • Run workloads on the cloud
  • Tight integration
  • Without buying new hardware

 

The Challenge of Hybrid

  • Multiple machine formats
  • Incongruent networks
  • Operational inconsistency
  • Skillsets and tooling

The challenge is duplicate effort. <- This should be printed on t-shirts and given out with every conference backpack.

 

VMware Cloud on AWS

 

Account Structure

VMware Cloud SDDC Account

  • A new AWS account created to run a single customer’s SDDC resources
  • Is owned, operated, and paid for directly by VMware
  • Each account is a single tenant for all ESXi hosts

AWS Customer Owned Account

  • Is owned, operated, and paid for directly by the customer
  • Has private connectivity to the VMware Cloud SDDC
  • Has full access to the entire catalogue of native AWS services

 

Topology

Fully configured SDDC running on state of the art infrastructure provisioned on-demand in minutes / hours.

Latest Software

  • VCSA, ESXi, NSX, vSAN, HTML5 Client

Dynamic Capacity

  • DRS / HA Compute Cluster (Intel x86)
  • vSAN Storage Cluster (SSDs)
  • NSX Network Virtualisation (10Gbs+)

Flexible Topology

  • Standalone cloud cluster
  • Hybrid connectivity to on-premises
  • cloud to cloud connectivity

2 different networks – management gateway and compute gateway

 

Connectivity Options

 

Hybrid Use Cases

Consolidate + Migrate

  • DC contract for 12+ months
  • Depreciating assets
  • Long Migration is hybrid

Maintain + Expand

  • Geographic expansion
  • Capacity needs
  • Mainframe

 

Putting It All Together

  • AWS Physical Infrastructure – No dealing with power, cooling, physical security, cross-connects
  • VMware Lifecycle Management – Patching of ESXi, vCenter, NSX, vSAN. Provisioning / deprovisioning
  • Workload flexibility – seamlessly move workloads between on-site and VMware Cloud
  • Elasticity – Scale vSphere clusters up or down based on business demand
  • Cost – convert large capex expenditures to variable expense based on use
  • Expand globally – deploy new DCs through consoles / APIs, not Customs agents
  • AWS Services – 90+ cloud services such as RDS, Amazon Redshfit, S3, and Lambda

Interesting session, I need to dig deeper in terms of tech and business. 3.5 stars.