Tag Archives: hyperconverged

Random Short Take #38

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Welcome to Random Short Take #38. Not a huge amount of players have worn 38 in the NBA, and I’m not going to pretend I was ever a Kwame Brown fan. Although it did seem like he had a tough time of it. Anyway let’s get random.

  • Ransomware is the new hotness. Or, rather, protecting storage systems from ransomware is the new hotness. My man Chin-Fah had a writeup on that here. It’s not a matter of if, but rather when you’ll run into a problem. It’s been interesting to see the various approaches being taken by the storage vendors and the data protection companies.
  • Applications for the vExpert program intake for the second half of 2020 are open, but closing soon. It’s a fantastic program to be a part of, so if you think you’ve got the goods, you can apply here. I also recommend this article from Christopher on his experiences.
  • This was a great article from Alastair on some of the differences between networking with AWS and VMC on AWS. As someone who works for a VMware Cloud Provider, I can confirm that NSX (T or V, I don’t care) has a whole slew of capabilities and whole slew of integration challenges.
  • Are you Zoomed out? I am. Even when you think the problem can’t be the network, it might just be the network (I hope my friends in networking appreciate that it’s not always the storage). John Nicholson posted a typically comprehensive overview of how your bandwidth might be one of the things keeping you from demonstrating excellent radio voice on those seemingly endless meetings you’re doing at the moment. It could also be that you’re using crap audio devices too, but I think John’s going to cover that in the future.
  • Scale Computing has a good story to tell about what it’s been doing with a large school district in the U.S. Read more about that here.
  • This is one of those promotions aimed at my friends in Northern America more than folks based where I am, but I’m always happy to talk about deals on data protection. StorCentric has launched its “Retrospect Dads & Grads Promotion” offering a free 90-Day subscription license for every Retrospect Backup product. You can read more about that here.
  • Pure//Accelerate Online was this week, and Max did a nice write-up on Pure Storage File Services over at Gestalt IT.
  • Rancher Labs recently announced the general availability of Longhorn (a cloud-native container storage solution). I’m looking forward to digging in to this a bit more over the next little while.

 

 

Scale Computing Makes Big Announcement About Small HE150

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Scale Computing recently announced the HE150 series of small edge servers. I had the chance to chat with Alan Conboy about the announcement, and thought I’d share some thoughts here.

 

Edge, But Smaller

I’ve written in the past about additions to the HC3 Edge Platform. But those things had a rack-mount form factor. The newly announced HE150 runs on Intel NUC devices. Wait, what? That’s right, hyper-converged infrastructure on really small PCs. But don’t you need a bunch of NICs to do HC3 properly? There’s no need for backplane switch requirement, as they use some software-defined networking to tunnel the backplane network across the NIC. The HC3 platform uses less than 1GB RAM per node, and each node has 2 cores. The storage sits on an NVMe drive and you can get hold of this stuff at a retail price of around $5K US for 3 nodes.

[image courtesy of Scale Computing]

Scale at Scale?

How do you deploy these kinds of things at scale then? Conboy tells me there’s full Ansible integration, RESTful API deployment capabilities, and they come equipped with Intel AMT. In short, these things can turn up at the remote site, be plugged in, and be ready to go.

Where would you?

The HE150 solution is 100% specific to multi-site edge implementations. It’s not trying to go after workloads that would normally be serviced by the HE500 or HE1000. Where it can work though, is with:

  • Oil and Gas exploration – with one in each ship (they need 4-5 VMs to handle sensor data to make command decisions)
  • Grocery and retail chains
  • Manufacturing platforms
  • Telcos – pole-side boxes

In short, think of environments that require some amount of compute and don’t have IT people to support it.

 

Thoughts

I’ve been a fan of what Scale Computing has been doing with HCI for some time now. Scale’s take on making things simple across the enterprise has been refreshing. While this solution might surprise some folks, it strikes me that there’s an appetite for this kind fo thing in the marketplace. The edge is often a place where less is more, and there’s often not a lot of resources available to do basic stuff, like deploy a traditional, rackmounted compute environment. But a small, 3-node HCI cluster that can be stacked away in a stationery cupboard? That might just work. Particularly if you only need a few virtual machines to meet those compute requirements. As Conboy pointed out to me, Scale isn’t looking to use this as a replacement for the higher-preforming options it has available. Rather, this solution is perfect for highly distributed retail environments where they need to do one or two things and it would be useful if they didn’t do those things in a data centre located hundreds of kilometres away.

If you’re not that excited about Intel NUCs though, you might be happy to hear that solutions from Lenovo will be forthcoming shortly.

The edge presents a number of challenges to enterprises, in terms of both its definition and how to deal with it effectively. Ultimately, the success of solutions like this will hinge on ease of use, reliability, and whether it really is fit for purpose. The good folks at Scale don’t like to go off half-cocked, so you can be sure some thought went into this product – it’s not just a science project. I’m keen to see what the uptake is like, because I think this kind of solution has a place in the market. The HE150 is available for purchase form Scale Computing now. It’s also worth checking out the Scale Computing presentations at Tech Field Day 20.

Scale Computing Announces HE500 Range

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Scale Computing recently announced its “HC3 Edge Platform“. I had a chance to talk to Alan Conboy about it, and thought I’d share some of my thoughts here.

 

The Announcement

The HE500 series has been introduced to provide smaller customers and edge infrastructure environments with components that better meet the sizing and pricing requirements of those environments. There are a few different flavours of nodes, with every node offering E-2100 Intel CPUs, 32 – 64GB RAM, and dual power supplies. There are a couple of minor differences with regards to other configuration options.

  • HE500 – 4x 1,2,4 or 8TB HDD, 4x 1GbE, 4x 10GbE
  • HE550 – 1x 480GB or 960GB SSD, 3x 1,2, or 4TB HDD, 4x 1GbE, 4x 10GbE
  • HE550F – 4 x 240GB, 480GB, 960GB SSD, 4x 1GbE, 4x 10GbE
  • HE500T – 4x 1,2,4 or 8TB HDD, 8 x HDD 4TB, 8TB, 2x 1GbE
  • HE550TF – 4 x 240GB, 480GB, 960GB SSD, 2x 1GbE

The “T” version comes in a tower form factor, and offers 1GbE connectivity. Everything runs on Scale’s HC3 platform, and offers all of the features and support you expect with that platform. In terms of scalability, you can run up to 8 nodes in a cluster.

 

Thoughts And Further Reading

In the past I’ve made mention of Scale Computing and Lenovo’s partnership, and the edge infrastructure approach is also something that lends itself well to this arrangement. If you don’t necessarily want to buy Scale-badged gear, you’ll see that the models on offer look a lot like the SR250 and ST250 models from Lenovo. In my opinion, the appeal of Scale’s hyper-converged infrastructure story has always been the software platform that sits on the hardware, rather than the specifications of the nodes they sell. That said, these kinds of offerings play an important role in the market, as they give potential customers simple options to deliver solutions at a very competitive price point. Scale tell me that an entry-level 3-node cluster comes in at about US $16K, with additional nodes costing approximately $5K. Conboy described it as “[l]owering the barrier to entry, reducing the form factor, but getting access to the entire stack”.

Combine some of these smaller solutions with various reference architectures and you’ve got a pretty powerful offering that can be deployed in edge sites for a small initial outlay. People often deploy compute at the edge because they have to, not because they necessarily want to. Anything that can be done to make operations and support simpler is a good thing. Scale Computing are focused on delivering an integrated stack that meets those requirements in a lightweight form factor. I’ll be interested to see how the market reacts to this announcement. For more information on the HC3 Edge offering, you can grab a copy of the data sheet here, and the press release is available here. There’s a joint Lenovo – Scale Computing case study that can be found here.

Scale Computing and Leostream – Better Than Bert And Ernie

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Scale Computing recently announced some news about a VDI solution they delivered for Illinois-based Paris Community Hospital. I had the opportunity to speak with Alan Conboy about it and thought I’d share some coverage here.

 

VDI and HCI – A Pretty Famous Pairing

When I started to write this article, I was trying to think of a dynamic duo that I could compare VDI and HCI to. Batman and Robin? Bert and Ernie? MJ and Scottie? In any case, hyper-converged infrastructure and virtual desktop infrastructure has gone well together since the advent of HCI. It’s my opinion that HCI is in a number of enterprises by virtue of the fact that a VDI requirement arose. Once HCI is introduced into those enterprise environments, folks start to realise it’s useful for other stuff too.

Operational Savings

So it makes sense that Scale Computing’s HC3 solution would be used to deliver VDI solutions at some stage. And Leostream can provide the lifecycle manager / connection broker / gateway part of the story without breaking a sweat. According to Conboy Paris Community Hospital has managed to drastically reduce its operating costs, to the point that it’s reduced its resource investment to a part-time operations staff member to manage the environment. They’re apparently saving around $1 million (US) over the next five years, meaning they can now afford an extra doctor and additional nursing staff.

HCI – It’s All In The Box

If you’re familiar with HCI, you’ll know that most of the required infrastructure comes with the solution – compute, storage, and hypervisor. You also get the ability to do cool stuff in terms of snapshots and disaster recovery via replication.

 

Thoughts

VDI solutions have proven popular in healthcare environments for a number of reasons. They generally help the organisation control the applications that are run in the (usually) security-sensitive environment, particularly at the edge. It’s also useful in terms of endpoint maintenance, and removes the requirement to deploy high end client devices in clinical environments. It also provides a centralised mechanism to ensure that critical application updates are performed in a timely fashion.

You won’t necessarily save money deploying VDI on HCI in terms of software licensing or infrastructure investment. But you will potentially save money in terms of the operational resources required for endpoint and application support. If you can then spend those savings on medical staff, that has to be a win for the average healthcare organisation.

I’m the first to admit that I don’t get overly excited about VDI solutions. I can see the potential for value in some organisations, but I tend to lose focus rapidly when people start to talk to me about this stuff. That said, I do get enthusiastic about HCI solutions that make sense, and deliver value back to the business. It strikes me that this Scale Computing and Leostream combo has worked out pretty well for Paris Community Hospital. And that’s pretty cool. For more insight, Scale Computing has published a Customer Case Study that you can read here.

Scale Computing Have Been Busy

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I recently had the opportunity to get on a call with Alan Conboy to talk about what’s been happening with Scale Computing lately. It was an interesting chat, as always, and I thought I’d share some of the news here.

 

Detroit Rock City

It’s odd how sometimes I forget that pretty much every type of business in existence uses some form of IT. Arts and performance organisations, such as the Detroit Symphony Orchestra are no exception. They are also now very happy Scale customers. There’s a YouTube video detailing their experiences that you can check out here.

 

Lenovo Partnership

Scale and Lenovo recently announced a strategic partnership, focussed primarily on edge workloads, with particular emphasis on retail and industrial environments. You can download a solution brief here. This doesn’t mean that Lenovo are giving up on some of their other HCI partnerships, but it does give them a competent partner to attack the edge infrastructure market.

 

GCG, Yeah You Know Me

Grupo Colón Gerena is a Puerto Rico-based “restaurant management company that owns franchises of brands including Wendy’s, Applebee’s, Famous Davés, Sizzler’s, Longhorn Steakhouse, Olive Garden and Red Lobster throughout the island”. You may recall Puerto Rico suffered through some pretty devastating weather in 2017 thanks to Hurricane Maria. GCG have been running the bulk of their workload in Google Cloud since just before the event, and are still deciding whether they really want to move it back to an on-premises solution. There’s definitely a good story with Scale delivering workloads from the edge to the core and through to Google Cloud. You can read the full case study here.

 

Thoughts

It’s no big secret that I’m a fan of Scale Computing. And not just because I have an old HC1000 in my office that I fire up every now and then (Collier I’m still waiting on those SSDs you promised me a few years ago). They are relentlessly focussed on delivering easy to use solutions that work well and deliver great resiliency and performance, particularly in smaller environments. Their DRaaS play, and partnership with Google, has opened up some doors to customers that may not have considered Scale previously. The Lenovo partnership, and success with customers like GCG and DSO, is proof that Scale are doing a lot of good stuff in the HCI space.

Anyone who’s had the good fortune to deal with Scale, from their executives and founders through to their support staff, will tell you that they’re super easy to deal with and pretty good at what they do. It’s great to see them enjoying some success. It strikes me that they go about their business without a lot of the chest beating and carry on associated with some other vendors in the industry. This is a good thing, and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next for them.

Axellio Announces FX-WSSD

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Axellio (a division of X-IO Technologies) recently announced their new FX-WSSD appliance based on Windows Server 2019. I had the opportunity to speak to Bill Miller (CEO) and Barry Martin (Product Manager for the HCI WSSD product) and thought I’d share some thoughts here.

 

What Is It?

Axellio recently announced the new FabricXpress Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) | Windows Server Software-Defined Datacenter (known as FX-WSSD to its friends). It’s built on the Axellio Edge FX-1000 platform and comes licensed with Windows Server Datacenter Edition 2019 and runs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct. You can manage it with Windows Admin Center and the (optional) 5nine management suite.

 

Density

A big part of the Axellio story here revolves around density. You get 4 nodes in 4 RU, and up to 36 NVMe drives per server. Axellio tell me you can pack up to 920TB of raw NVMe-based storage in these things (assuming you’re deploying 6.4TB NVMe drives). You can also have a minimum of 4 drives per server if you have a requirement that is more reliant on processing. There’s a full range of iWARP adapters from Chelsio Communications available with support for 4x 10, 40, or 100GbE connections.

[image courtesy of Axellio]

You can start small and scale up (or out) if required. There’s support for up to 16 nodes in a cluster, and you can manage multiple clusters together if need be.

 

Not That Edge

When I think of edge computing I think of scientific folks doing funky things with big data and generally running Linux-type workloads. While this type of edge computing is still common (and well-catered for with Axellio’s solutions), Axellio are going after what they refer to as the “enterprise edge” market as opposed to the non-Windows workloads. The Windows DC Edition licensing makes sense if you want to run Hyper-V and a number of Windows-based workloads, such as Active Directory domain controllers, file and print services, small databases (basically the type of enterprise workloads traditionally found in remote offices).

 

Thoughts and Further Reading

I’m the first to admit that my working knowledge of current Windows technologies is nowhere near what it was 15 years ago. But I understand why choosing Windows as the foundation platform for the edge HCI appliance makes sense for Axellio. There’s a lot less investment they need to make in terms of raw product development, the Windows virtualisation platform continues to mature, there’s already a big install base of Windows in the enterprise, and operations folks will be fairly comfortable with the management interface.

I’ve written about Axellio’s Edge solution previously, and this new offering is a nice extension of that with some Windows chops and “HCI” sensibilities. I’m not interested in getting into a debate about whether this is really a hyper-converged offering or not, but there’s a bunch of compute, storage and networking stuck together with a hypervisor and management tier to help keep it running. Whatever you want to call it, I can see this being a useful (and flexible) solution for those shops who need to have certain workloads close to the edge, and are already leveraging the Windows operating platform to do it.

You can grab the Axellio Data Sheet from here, and a copy of the press release can be found here.

Datrium Announces CloudShift

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I recently had the opportunity to speak to Datrium‘s Brian Biles and Craig Nunes about their CloudShift announcement and thought it was worth covering some of the highlights here.

 

DVX Now

Datrium have had a scalable protection tier and focus on performance since their inception.

[image courtesy of Datrium]

The “mobility tier”, in the form of Cloud DVX, has been around for a little while now. It’s simple to consume (via SaaS), yields decent deduplication results, and the Datrium team tells me it also delivers fast RTO. There’s also solid support for moving data between DCs with the DVX platform. This all sounds like the foundation for something happening in the hybrid space, right?

 

And Into The Future

Datrium pointed out that disaster recovery has traditionally been a good way of finding out where a lot of the problems exist in you data centre. There’s nothing like failing a failover to understand where the integration points in your on-premises infrastructure are lacking. Disaster recovery needs to be a seamless, integrated process, but data centres are still built on various silos of technology. People are still using clouds for a variety of reasons, and some clouds do some things better than others. It’s easy to pick and choose what you need to get things done. This has been one of the big advantages of public cloud and a large reason for its success. As a result of this, however, the silos are moving to the cloud, even as they’re fixed in the DC.

As a result of this, Datrium are looking to develop a solution that delivers on the following theme: “Run. Protect. Any Cloud”. The idea is simple, offering up an orchestrated DR offering that makes failover and failback a painless undertaking. Datrium tell me they’ve been a big supporter of VMware’s SRM product, but have observed that there can be problems with VMware offering an orchestration-only layer, with adapters having issues from time to time, and managing the solution can be complicated. With CloudShift, Datrium are taking a vertical stack approach, positioning CloudShift as an orchestrator for DR as a SaaS offering. Note that it only works with Datrium.

[image courtesy of Datrium]

The idea behind CloudShift is pretty neat. With Cloud DVX you can already backup VMs to AWS using S3 and EC2. The idea is that you can leverage data already in AWS to fire up VMs on AWS (using on-demand instances of VMware Cloud on AWS) to provide temporary disaster recovery capability. The good thing about this is that converting your VMware VMs to someone else’s cloud is no longer a problem you need to resolve. You’ll need to have a relationship with AWS in the first place – it won’t be as simple as entering your credit card details and firing up an instance. But it certainly seems a lot simpler than having an existing infrastructure in place, and dealing with the conversion problems inherent in going from vSphere to KVM and other virtualisation platforms.

[image courtesy of Datrium]

Failover and failback is a fairly straightforward process as well, with the following steps required for failover and failback of workloads:

  1. Backup to Cloud DVX / S3 – This is ongoing and happens in the background;
  2. Failover required – the CloudShift runbook is initiated;
  3. Restart VM groups on VMC – VMs are rehydrated from data in S3; and
  4. Failback to on-premises – CloudShift reverses the process with deltas using change block tracking.

It’s being pitched as a very simple way to run DR, something that has been notorious for being a stressful activity in the past.

 

Thoughts and Further Reading

CloudShift is targeted for release in the first half of 2019. The economic power of DRaaS in the cloud is very strong. People love the idea that they can access the facility on-demand, rather than having passive infrastructure doing nothing on the off chance that it will be required. There’s obviously some additional cost when you need to use on demand versus reserved resources, but this is still potentially cheaper than standing up and maintaining your own secondary DC presence.

Datrium are focused on keeping inherently complex activities like DR simple. I’ll be curious to see whether they’re successful with this approach. The great thing about something like a generic orchestration framework like VMware SRM is that you can use a number of different vendors in the data centre and not have a huge problem with interoperability. The downside to this approach is that this broader ecosystem can leave you exposed to problems with individual components in the solution. Datrium is taking a punt that their customers are going to see the advantages of having an integrated approach to leveraging on demand services. I’m constantly astonished that people don’t get more excited about DRaaS offerings. It’s really cool that you can get this level of protection without having to invest a tonne in running your own passive infrastructure. If you’d like to read more about CloudShift, there’s a blog post that sheds some more light on the solution on Datrium’s site, and you can grab a white paper here too.

Primary Data – Seeing the Future

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It’s that time of year when public relations companies send out a heap of “What’s going to happen in 2018” type press releases for us blogger types to take advantage of. I’m normally reluctant to do these “futures” based posts, as I’m notoriously bad at seeing the future (as are most people). These types of articles also invariably push the narrative in a certain direction based on whatever the vendor being represented is selling. That said I have a bit of a soft spot for Lance Smith and the team at Primary Data, so I thought I’d entertain the suggestion that I at least look at what’s on his mind. Unfortunately, scheduling difficulties meant that we couldn’t talk in person about what he’d sent through, so this article is based entirely on the paragraphs I was sent, and Lance hasn’t had the opportunity to explain himself :)

 

SDS, What Else?

Here’s what Lance had to say about software-defined storage (SDS). “Few IT professionals admit to a love of buzzwords, and one of the biggest offenders in the last few years is the term, “software-defined storage.” With marketers borrowing from the successes of “software-defined-networking”, the use of “SDS” attempts all kinds of claims. Yet the term does little to help most of us to understand what a specific SDS product can do. Despite the well-earned dislike of the phrase, true software-defined storage solutions will continue to gain traction because they try to bridge the gap between legacy infrastructure and modern storage needs. In fact, even as hardware sales declines, IDC forecasts that the SDS market will grow at a rate of 13.5% from 2017 – 2021, growing to a $16.2B market by the end of the forecast period.”

I think Lance raises an interesting point here. There’re a lot of companies claiming to deliver software-defined storage solutions in the marketplace. Some of these, however, are still heavily tied to particular hardware solutions. This isn’t always because they need the hardware to deliver functionality, but rather because the company selling the solution also sells hardware. This is fine as far as it goes, but I find myself increasingly wary of SDS solutions that are tied to a particular vendor’s interpretation of what off the shelf hardware is.

The killer feature of SDS is the idea that you can do policy-based provisioning and management of data storage in a programmatic fashion, and do this independently of the underlying hardware. Arguably, with everything offering some kind of RESTful API capability, this is the case. But I think it’s the vendors who are thinking beyond simply dishing up NFS mount points or S3-compliant buckets that will ultimately come out on top. People want to be able to run this stuff anywhere – on crappy whitebox servers and in the public cloud – and feel comfortable knowing that they’ll be able to manage their storage based on a set of business-focused rules, not a series of constraints set out by a hardware vendor. I think we’re close to seeing that with a number of solutions, but I think there’s still some way to go.

 

HCI As Silo. Discuss.

His thoughts on HCI were, in my opinion, a little more controversial. “Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) aims to meet data’s changing needs through automatic tiering and centralized management. HCI systems have plenty of appeal as a fast fix to pay as you grow, but in the long run, these systems represent just another larger silo for enterprises to manage. In addition, since hyperconverged systems frequently require proprietary or dedicated hardware, customer choice is limited when more compute or storage is needed. Most environments don’t require both compute and storage in equal measure, so their budget is wasted when only more CPU or more capacity is really what applications need. Most HCI architecture rely on layers of caches to ensure good storage performance.  Unfortunately, performance is not guaranteed when a set of applications running in a compute node overruns a caches capacity.  As IT begins to custom-tailor storage capabilities to real data needs with metadata management software, enterprises will begin to move away from bulk deployments of hyperconverged infrastructure and instead embrace a more strategic data management role that leverages precise storage capabilities on premises and into the cloud.”

There’re are a few nuggets in this one that I’d like to look at further. Firstly, the idea that HCI becomes just another silo to manage is an interesting one. It’s true that HCI as a technology is a bit different to the traditional compute / storage / network paradigm that we’ve been managing for the last few decades. I’m not convinced, however, that it introduces another silo of management. Or maybe, what I’m thinking is that you don’t need to let it become another silo to manage. Rather, I’ve been encouraging enterprises to look at their platform management at a higher level, focusing on the layer above the compute / storage / network to deliver automation, orchestration and management. If you build that capability into your environment, then whether you consume compute via rackmount servers, blade or HCI becomes less and less relevant. It’s easier said than done, of course, as it takes a lot of time and effort to get that layer working well. But the sweat investment is worth it.

Secondly, the notion that “[m]ost environments don’t require both compute and storage in equal measure, so their budget is wasted when only more CPU or more capacity is really what applications need” is accurate, but most HCI vendors are offering a way to expand storage or compute now without necessarily growing the other components (think Nutanix with their storage-only nodes and NetApp’s approach to HCI). I’d posit that architectures have changed enough with the HCI market leaders to the point that this is no longer a real issue.

Finally, I’m not convinced that “performance is not guaranteed when a set of applications running in a compute node overruns a caches capacity” is as much of a problem as it was a few years ago. Modern hypervisors have a lot of smarts built into them in terms of service quality and the modelling for capacity and performance sizing has improved significantly.

 

Conclusion

I like Lance, and I like what Primary Data bring to the table with their policy-based SDS solution. I don’t necessarily agree with him on some of these points (particularly as I think HCI solutions have matured a bunch in the last few years) but I do enjoy the opportunity to think about some of these ideas when I otherwise wouldn’t. So what will 2018 bring in my opinion? No idea, but it’s going to be interesting, that’s for sure.

Dell EMC VxRail 4.5 – A Few Notes

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VxRail 4.5 was announced in May by Dell EMC and I’ve been a bit slow in going through my enablement on the platform. The key benefit (beyond some interesting hardware permutations that were announced), is support for VMware vSphere 6.5 U1 and vSAN 6.6. I thought I’d cover a few of the more interesting aspects of the VxRail platform and core VMware enhancements.

Note that VxRail 4.5 does not support Generation 1 hardware, but it does support G2 and 3 Quanta models, and G3 Dell PowerEdge appliances.

 

VxRail Enhancements

Multi-node Additions

Prior to version 4.5, adding an additional node to the existing cluster was a bit of a pain. Only one node could be added at a time and this could take some time when you had a lot of nodes to add. Now, however,

  • Multiple nodes (up to 6) can be added simultaneously.
  • Each node expansion is a separate process. If one fails, the remaining five will keep going.

There is now also a node removal procedure, used to decommission old generation VxRail products and migrate to new generation VxRail hardware. This is only supported for VxRail 4.0.301 and above and removal of only one node at a time is recommended.

 

Network Planning

Different VLANs are recommended for vSAN traffic and for management across multiple VxRail clusters.

 

VxRail network topologies use dual top-of-rack (ToR) switches to remove the switch as a single point of failure.

 

vSAN 6.6 Enhancements

Disk Format 5

As I mentioned earlier, VxRail 4.5 introduces support for vSAN 6.6 and disk format 5.

  • All nodes in the VxRail cluster must be running vSAN 6.6 due to the upgraded disk format.
  • The upgrade from disk format 3 to 5 is a metadata only conversion and data evacuation is not required. You need disk format 5 is required for datastore-level encryption (see below).
  • VxRail will automatically upgrade the disk format version to 5 when you upgrade to VxRail 4.5.

 

Unicast Support

Unicast is supported for vSAN communications starting with vSAN 6.6. The idea is to reduce network configuration complexity. There is apparently no performance impact associated with the use of Unicast. vSAN will switch to unicast mode once all hosts in the cluster have been upgraded to vSAN 6.6 and disk format 5. You won’t need to reconfigure the ToR switches to disable multicast features in vSAN.

 

vSAN Data-at-Rest Encryption

vSAN Data-at-Rest Encryption (D@RE) is enabled at cluster level, supporting hybrid, all-flash, and stretched clusters. Note that it requires an external vCenter and does not support embedded vCenter. It

  • Works with all vSAN features, including deduplication and compression.
  • Integrates with all KMIP-compliant key management technologies, including SafeNet, HyTrust, Thales, Vormetric, etc.

When enabling encryption, vSAN performs a rolling reformat of every disk group in the cluster. As such, it is recommended to enable encryption on the vSAN datastore after the initial VxRail deployment. Whilst it’s a matter of ticking a checkbox, it can take a lot of time to complete depending on how much data needs to be migrated about the place.

 

Other Reading

You can read more about vSAN D@RE here. Chad delivered a very useful overview of the VxRail and VxRack updates announced at Dell EMC World 2017 that you can read here.

Scale Computing Announces Cloud Unity – Clouds For Everyone

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The Announcement

Scale Computing recently announced the availability of a new offering: Cloud Unity. I had the opportunity to speak with the Scale Computing team at VMworld US this year to run through some of the finer points of the announcement and thought I’d cover it off here.

 

Cloud What?

So what exactly is Cloud Unity? If you’ve been keeping an eye on the IT market in the last few years, you’ll notice that everything has cloud of some type in its product name. In this case, Cloud Unity is a mechanism by which you can run Scale Computing’s HC3 hypervisor nested in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The point of the solution, ostensibly, is to provide a business with disaster recovery capability on a public cloud platform. You’re basically running an HC3 cluster on GCP, with the added benefit that you can create an encrypted VXLAN connection between your on-premises HC3 cluster and the GCP cluster. The neat thing here is that everything runs as a small instance to handle replication from on-premises and only scales up when you’re actually needing to run the VMs in anger. The service is bought through Scale Computing, and starts from as little as $1000US per month (for 5TB). There are other options available as well and the solution is expected to be Generally Available in Q4 this year.

 

Conclusion and Further Reading

This isn’t the first time nested virtualisation has been released as a product, with AWS, Azure and Ravello all doing similar things. The cool thing here is that it’s aimed at Scale Computing’s traditional customers, namely small to medium businesses. These are the people who’ve bought into the simplicity of the Scale Computing model and don’t necessarily have time to re-write their line of business applications to work as cloud native applications (as much as it would be nice that this were the case). Whilst application lift and shift isn’t the ideal outcome, the other benefit of this approach is that companies who may not have previously invested in DR capability can now leverage this product to solve the technical part of the puzzle fairly simply.

DR should be a simple thing to have in place. Everyone has horror stories of data centres going off line because of natural disasters or, more commonly, human error. The price of good DR, however, has traditionally been quite high. And it’s been pretty hard to achieve. The beauty of this solution is that it provides businesses with solid technical capabilities for a moderate price, and allows them to focus on people and processes, which are arguably the key parts of DR that are commonly overlooked. Disasters are bad, which is why they’re called disasters. If you run a small to medium business and want to protect yourself from bad things happening, this is the kind of solution that should be of interest to you.

A few years ago, Scale Computing sent me a refurbished HC1000 cluster to play with, and I’ve had first-hand exposure to the excellent support staff and experience that Scale Computing tell people about. The stories are true – these people are very good at what they do and this goes a long way in providing consumers with confidence in the solution. This confidence is fairly critical to the success of technical DR solutions – you want to leverage something that’s robust in times of duress. You don’t want to be worrying about whether it will work or not when your on-premises DC is slowly becoming submerged in water because building maintenance made a boo boo. You want to be able to focus on your processes to ensure that applications and data are available when and where they’re required to keep doing what you do.

If you’d like to read what other people have written, Justin Warren posted a handy article at Forbes, and Chris Evans provided a typically insightful overview of the announcement and the challenges it’s trying to solve that you can read here. Scott D. Lowe also provided a very useful write-up here. Scale Computing recently presented at Tech Field Day 15, and you can watch their videos here.