Category: News

Just wanted to give everyone an update as I’m a little behind, the vSphere 6 launch coincided with the voting this year and I’m trying to keep up on my vSphere 6 link page as well.

I’m still updating the vLaunchpad, so if you don’t see your blog up there yet it should be soon. Don’t worry as the voting won’t start until it is updated. The update process is a pain in the butt and very time consuming, it’s basically a table that I have to cut and paste code for each blog from every cell I move either up and down to alphabetize and organize them all. When adding new blogs I have to put each blog’s info (name, URL, rss, twitter) into an html string to paste into new cell (see below figure).

To do this I have to build out a big text file with all the html code for each cell (see below figure) and then have to paste it all in the table in the right order alphabetically. All this is very time-consuming which is why I queue updates and then update the vLaunchpad periodically. A new blog that is alphabetically near the top of the alphabet (i.e. AAA Virtual Blog) makes it more difficult as I have to cut and paste one by one all those cells below it down one. One of these days I’ll see if I can find an easier way to do it, I’ve been looking around at WordPress plug-ins and haven’t found one that would work well, I might have to switch to a database model instead of a table. I’ll be working this weekend to get it all up to date.

As a result of this the voting start has been moved out a week to 2/27, the landing page has been updated with new dates.

A reminder if you haven’t nominated your blog for one of the special categories (if it fits in one) be sure and do so for a chance to get special recognition. I’ll do another post once the vLaunchpad is updated (probably Sunday) so you can do a final check to make sure your blog is listed before voting begins. I did have some issues with my suggest a link form a few weeks ago from my hosting provider not sending emails, so be sure and check next week to make sure I didn’t miss your blog.

I look forward to getting this started and publishing the results for 2015 as well as getting this over with as the whole process from start to finish is massively time-consuming. If you want to buy me a beer to support all my hard work feel free to use my beer fund donation link located at the bottom of the blog sidebar. Thanks and good luck to all the bloggers this year!

UPDATE:
As of 5:00pm MST on Sunday 2/22 the vLaunchpad is all up to date from all the submissions, I added over 50 additional blogs. Go over there and look and if you are not listed use this form asap and voting starts soon.

Want to know more about the new VVOL storage architecture that is coming soon in vSphere 6? HP has just published a new Technical Implementation Guide for VVOLs on 3PAR StoreServ. I managed the creation, development and review of this paper and actually had a hand in writing some of it. So give it a read if you want to learn what VVOLs is all about and how to implement it. Want to know even more about VVOLs including what other vendors are doing with it, be sure and check our my Virtual Volumes link page.

If you remember back a few years ago backup giant Symantec filed a lawsuit against up and coming start-up Veeam basically claiming that they invented virtualization backup and Veeam was violating several of Symantec’s patent’s, they also files a similar lawsuit against Acronis. Symantec’s claim was that Veeam was “free riding” on the backup technologies that Symantec invented:

[important]Symantec recently filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Acronis and yesterday filed suit against Veeam Software. Symantec invests deeply in its research and development in order to provide its customers with innovative technologies. Acronis and Veeam unlawfully leverage Symantec patented technologies in their respective backup and replication products. This free riding on Symantec is wrong and Symantec has filed these lawsuits to protect its intellectual property.[/important]

You can read the full court filing against Veeam at this link. I’m not sure how the Acronis case ended up, they counter-sued Symantec and it sounds like Acronis will win that case. As far as Veeam goes it looks like they too will be victorious as they went after the patents in question as being unpatentable and several of the patents listed in the case were recently invalidated. The patents in question have to do with techniques for backing up VMs in virtual environments, lets take a look at them:

[important]US 7093086 B1 – Disaster recovery and backup using virtual machines
Filing date Mar 28, 2002 – Publication date Aug 15, 2006
One or more computer systems, a carrier medium, and a method are provided for backing up virtual machines. The backup may occur, e.g., to a backup medium or to a disaster recovery site, in various embodiments. In one embodiment, an apparatus includes a computer system configured to execute at least a first virtual machine, wherein the computer system is configured to: (i) capture a state of the first virtual machine, the state corresponding to a point in time in the execution of the first virtual machine; and (ii) copy at least a portion of the state to a destination separate from a storage device to which the first virtual machine is suspendable. A carrier medium may include instructions which, when executed, cause the above operation on the computer system. The method may comprise the above highlighted operations.[/important]

This patent basically describes how every backup vendor performs a backup of a VM in a virtualized environment by taking a snapshot of a VM  and then copying the read-only image of that VM’s virtual disk to any target destination. VM snapshots are certainly not a Symantec innovation and this patent describes the common sense method of backing up VMs. If this is indeed patent-able there are a lot more backup vendors in peril from this. This patent was one of the ones that had parts of it recently invalidated.

[important]US 6931558 B1 – Computer restoration systems and methods
Filing date Nov 30, 2001 – Publication date Aug 16, 2005
A method restores a client device of a network on major failure of the client device. The client device is incapable of automatically booting on its own. The network includes a server computer. The method includes booting the client device over the network in the restoration operation, configuring the client device according to the boot program and saved configuration states for the client device, and copying files to the client device in accordance with the configuration. The client computer has access to a storage manager application, such as a server computer of the network operating a storage management software program. All client files, including configuration files, as well as application and data files, of the client device are saved on the network by the storage manager application. The client device is booted over the network, rather than locally to the client device by boot disk or otherwise. The boot program is loaded to the client device, and the client device retrieves configuration and file information over the network from the storage manager application. The client device configures its disk according to the configuration information, and then all other files and data of the client device at the time of failure of the client device are saved on the disk substantially in the condition and state just prior to the failure and as most recently backed up to the storage manager application. Alternatively, the client device is reset and booted via a control device either locally or otherwise connected to the client device, and substantially according to the method of the network boot.[/important]

This one has to do with restoring a server and is not really specific to virtualization. It describes the process of doing a bare metal restore of a server by booting a server over a network (i.e. PXE) and completely restoring it. I suppose you could loosely tie it in to virtualization as when you are performing an image level restore of a VM you are doing a similar operation, this one is pretty weak though. Again parts of this patent were recently invalidated.

[important]US 7191299 B1 – Method and system of providing periodic replication
Filing date May 12, 2003 – Publication date Mar 13, 2007
A method and system of providing periodic replication is disclosed. According to one embodiment, a method is provided which comprises creating a storage object corresponding to a data volume, wherein the storage object comprises a point-in-time copy of the data volume and a data volume map; and replicating the data volume utilizing the storage object.[/important]

This one is pretty vague as it describes replication of storage via either hardware or software and at various levels within an enterprise (e.g., database transaction, file system, or block-level access) via either synchronous or asynchronous methods. Again this patent describes a conceptual method of replicating data and if it was upheld almost every storage vendor and hundreds of other companies would be guilty of violating it. Again parts of this patent were recently invalidated.

[important]US 7254682 B1 – Selective file and folder snapshot image creation
Filing date Jul 28, 2004 – Publication date Aug 7, 2007
Tools and techniques are provided for using a snapshot, not a full volume copy, to preserve deleted items when creating an image file with other items from a computer storage volume. One method classifies items as desired or not, enables snapshotting, then deletes undesired items, then creates a blockwise volume image in which the deleted items are not imaged, and finally disables snapshotting. Systems and configured storage media for imaging selected files and folders are also provided.[/important]

This final one has is a bit more specific and has to do with image-level snapshots and methods for using a snapshot and creating an image file that holds selected items found on a computer-readable storage volume, without permanently removing data from the volume. This includes methods for using a snapshot, rather than a full volume copy, to preserve deleted items when creating an image file with other items from a computer storage volume. Veeam challenged this one as well but it looks like this one was not invalidated and I’m not sure what the state of this one is.

Patent laws can be notoriously troublesome and it’s good to see common sense prevail as it seems like companies are trying to patent just about anything these days, even simple things that everyone takes for granted. Symantec ending up dismissing with prejudice the ’558, ’299, and ’682 patents from the case in 2013 and the ‘086 patent was the only one that remained in the case. They did file an additional case concerning different patents (US 7024527 B1,US 8117168 B1, US 7831861 B1, US 7480822 B1) after their initial filing that Veeam also challenged and is still pending although I’m confident they will prevail there as well.

I know often times these types of cases are about money and protecting intellectual property but these patents were too generalized to hold up to a serious challenge. Personally I think Symantec felt threatened by Veeam’s success and tried to put the squeeze on them to hurt their business. If this was truly about money they would be suing a lot more companies than just Veeam. It’s good to see the little guys win, although Veeam is certainly not the little company today that they were years ago. Symantec picked a fight with Veeam and the bully in this case got his butt kicked. While this has all been playing out in the courtrooms it hasn’t impacted Veeam’s growth and success one bit, in a sense it serves to validate their success from the attention that Symantec gave them: If you can’t beat em, sue em.

You can read Veeam’s news release on the ongoing cases with Symantec here.

The pre-voting category nominations have started and general voting will begin soon. For all the details check out the Top vBlog 2015 landing page and thank you to Infinio for sponsoring it this year. Bloggers don’t miss your chance to score one of these cool commemorative coins.

VSAN in vSphere 6 reminds me of Steve Austin, the Bionic Man:

“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better…stronger…faster.”

The version of VSAN goes from 1.0 in vSphere 5.5, to VSAN 6.0 which is in line with the new version of vSphere. I’m sure VMware did this to avoid confusion and ensure people didn’t think of it as a separate product from vSphere. This big jump from 1.0 to 6.0 is warranted though as there is a ton of new features and enhancements under the covers that greatly improve the usability, scalability and availability of VSAN and make it a truly enterprise worthy storage array. Here a summary of the big things that are new with VSAN in vSphere 6:

Two deployment modes, Hybrid or All-Flash

SSD’s are no longer just used for read caching and write buffering, they can now be used as primary storage as well in an All-Flash mode. The traditional model of magnetic hard disks and SSD’s is now referred to as Hybrid Mode. In Hybrid mode the SSDs function only as a read cache and write buffer as they did in vSphere 5.5, persistent data cannot be written to the SSD tier in Hybrid Mode.

All-Flash VSAN

No more spinning disk requirement, VMware is now an All-Flash vendor as SSD’s can be used to store persistent data. In this mode SSDs are still used for caching if you want to use different SSD classes for storages tiers. All-Flash VSAN supports a new more cost-effective all-flash 2-tier model that uses write-intensive, higher grade flash-based devices (i.e. SLC) for 100% of all write buffering and lower cost read-intensive flash-based devices (i.e. MLC or TLC) for data persistent.

Faster and bigger VSAN clusters

In vSphere 6 the number of hosts per cluster has increased from 32 to 64 (2x), the number of IOPS per host has increased from 20K to 100K (5x), the number of VMs per host has increased from 100 to 200 (2x) and the number of VMs per cluster has increased from 3200 to 6000. In addition the maximum supported virtual disk size has increased from 2TB to 62TB.

Enterprise performance & scale

In vSphere 5.5 VMware had outlined specific use cases for VSAN which included just about everything but Tier-1 apps. Now with the increase in IOPS from an All-Flash configuration and increased scaling up to 64 nodes VMware has now declared VSAN ready for Tier-1 enterprise apps.

New file system

VSAN in vSphere 5.5 used a modified file-system based on VMFS with the locking mechanisms removed that was called VMFS-L. Now in vSphere 6 they are using a whole new file system called VSAN FS that is optimized for the VSAN architecture. The upgrade to the new file system is optional but you’ll want to do it so you don’t miss out on some of the new features and scalability that VSAN has. It was reported a while back that this would be disruptive which would make it a royal pain to do but VMware claims there is now an online migration from VMFS-L to VSAN FS.

Network improvements

On the network side VSAN now supports Layer 3 network configurations, apparently this was frequently requested. VSAN also now supports Jumbo Frames that may give a tiny boost in performance and also help reduce CPU overhead in larger deployments. VSAN also support both Standard & Distributed vSwitches but vDS is recommended so you can leverage Network I/O Control.

High Density Attached Storage

This new hardware support allows for denser VSAN nodes using external JBOD disk and also opens the door for using blade servers as hosts that were previously not good candidates for VSAN due to limited internal disk. The support for this will be tightly controlled by VMware’s HCL for VSAN.

New vsanSparse VMDK type

This new VMDK type was created to address efficiency concerns with snapshots and clones that were previously based on the traditional redo VM snapshot. This new highly efficient VMDK type takes advantage of the new VSAN FS writing and extended caching capabilities to deliver much better performance. VMware claims that this put VSAN snapshots on par with native SAN snapshots.

Improved Disk/Disk Group Evacuation

Replacing a disk in vSphere 5.5 was a pain as you had to put a host in maintenance mode prior to doing it. Now in vSphere 6 you have the ability to evacuate data from individual disks and disk groups to make the process much less disruptive.

New Disk Serviceability

vSphere 6 makes it easier to map out physical disks in a VSAN node by introducing a new disk serviceability feature that will allow you to view individual disk from within the vSphere client. There is also more interaction with disk hardware as you can now turn disk lights on and off so you can make sure you are yanking the correct drive while replacing it. You can also now specifically tag disks as SSD and local disk that might otherwise not be recognized correctly.

New Resynchronization Dashboard

A new Resynchronization Dashboard in the vSphere Client allows you to monitor the status of VMs and objects that might be resyncing due to policy changes, failures, etc. It provides you information on the bytes left to sync and the approximate time that it will finish.

Better Fault Domains

You can now define Fault Domains to group multiples host within a cluster that ensure VM replicas are spread across defined Fault Domains. This new ability helps improve resiliency and helps protect against specific failure scenarios that might be highly disruptive to VSAN such as a rack, network or power failure.

New 3^rd Party File Services

This new ability allows 3^rd parties to add additional capabilities and services on top of VSAN to provide value-added services. The one that is being featured with this is called File Services with NexentaConnect which essentially adds additional protocol support (SMB, NFS) to VSAN. This allows VSAN to be leveraged beyond the vSphere hosts in a cluster by any server in a data center that can use those protocols.

PowerCLI cmdlets

In vSphere 5.5 VMware developed unofficial support for VSAN using PowerCLI through one of their Flings. Now in vSphere 6 these are officially integrated and supported along with some new cmdlets.

VSAN Health Services

No VMware isn’t branching out into healthcare, VSAN Health Services provides in-depth health information on VSAN subsystems and their dependencies so you can better stay on top of the health of your VSAN environment and call a doctor when it needs it.

vSphere 6 is the newest major release of vSphere since vSphere 5.5 and with any major release it comes packed with lots of new and enhanced features along with increased scalability. While the vSphere 6 release is very storage focused with big improvements to VSAN and the launch of the VVOLs architecture there are still plenty of other things that make this an exciting release. The following is a summary of some of the big things that are new in vSphere 6, I’ll be doing additional posts that focus specifically on VSAN and VVOLs. Note while vSphere 6 has now been formally announced, it will not GA and be publicly available until March.

The Monster Host is born

We’ve had monster VMs in the past that could be sized ridiculously large, now we’re getting monster hosts as well. In vSphere 5.5 the maximum supported host memory was 4TB, in vSphere 6 that jumps up to 12TB. In vSphere 5.5 the maximum supported # of logical (physical) CPUs per host was 320 CPUs, in vSphere 6 that increases to 480 CPUs. Finally the maximum number of VMs per host increases from 512 in vSphere 5.5 to 1000 VMs per host in vSphere 6. While this is greatly increased I’m not sure there are many people brave enough to put that many VMs on a single host, imagine the fun of HA having to handle that many when a host fails.

vSphere clusters get twice as big

It’s not just host maximums that are increasing in vSphere 6, cluster sizes are increasing as well. vSphere 5.5 supported only 32 hosts and 4000 VMs per cluster, vSphere 6 doubles that to 64 hosts and 8000 VMs in a cluster. Note the host maximums don’t line up with the cluster maximums, 64 hosts x 1000 VMs per host equals 64000 VMs, the 8000 VMs is a limitation of vCenter Server not of the ESXi hosts.

VMs get a little bigger as well

In vSphere 5.5 a VM could be configured with up to 64 vCPUs, in vSphere 6.0 that has doubled do 128 vCPUs. It’s crazy to think a VM would ever need that many but if you have a super mega threaded application that could use them you now have more. I thought serial ports were basically dead these days but apparently there are VMs that need a lot of them as they also increased the number of serial ports that you can assign to a VM from 4 to 32. You can also remove serial and parallel ports from a VM if you don’t want them at all.

Fault Tolerance is finally ready for prime time

The Fault Tolerance (FT) feature that was first introduced in vSphere 4 which provides the best protection of VMs by preventing any downtime in case of a host failure has always been limited to supporting a single vCPU. This prevented anyone that has an application that might require multiple vCPUs from using FT. Supporting more than one vCPU is not as simple as you might think as the 2 VMs running on separate hosts need to be kept in complete lockstep and synchronized for FT to work. VMware has spent a lot of time trying to engineer this and has teased multi-CPU FT support at VMworld sessions the last few years. Now in vSphere 6 they finally deliver it with support up to 4 vCPUs.

VMware also changed the design of how Fault Tolerance is implemented. Previously FT worked by having 2 VMs on separate hosts, one as a primary and the other as a secondary but both VMs relied on a single virtual disk that resides on shared storage. Presumably it was done this way as keeping two virtual disks (VMDK) in perfect sync may have slowed down the VM and impacted performance. In vSphere 6 this has changed with each VM having their own virtual disk that can be located on different datastores. This change probably helped VMware overcome the lack of snapshot support in previous versions.

In addition they have also improved some of the limitations that FT had, Eager Zeroed Thick (EZT) virtual disks are no longer required, any virtual disk type can now be used. In addition another big limitation has also been eliminated, previously you could not take VM snapshots of a FT enabled VM. While this may not sound like too big a deal remember most VM backup solutions have to take a snapshot before backing up a VM to halt writes to the virtual disk so it can be backed up. Not having support for snapshots meant you had to do it the old fashioned way using a backup agent running inside the guest OS, something that not all modern VM-only backup solutions do not support. So now you can finally backups Ft enabled VMs more easily, in addition you can also use the vSphere APIs for Data Protection with FT.

One other thing to note about FT, it only supports a VM running on VMFS, VSAN and VVOLs is not supported. Below is a full comparison of feature support of FT on vSphere 5.5 and vSphere 6.

vMotion anything, anywhere, anytime

A lot of new enhancements have been made to vMotion to greatly increase the range and capabilities of moving a VM around in your virtual infrastructure. First off you can now vMotion a VM between vSwitches, this includes moving between different types of virtual switches. So a VM can be moved from a Standard vSwitch to a Distributed vSwitch without changing its IP address and without network disruption.

vMotion has always been restricted to moving a VM from host to host on the same vCenter Server. Now with vSphere 6 those walls come tumbling down and you can vMotion a VM from a host on one vCenter Server to another host on a different vCenter server. This does not require common shared storage between the hosts and vCenter Servers and is intended to eliminate the traditional distance boundaries of vMotion allowing you to move VMs either between local data centers, across regional data centers or even across continental data centers.

Another vMotion enhancement has to do with latency requirements which have long dictated how far you can vMotion a VM. In vSphere 5.5 the maximum vMotion latency was 10ms which is typical of metropolitan distances (<100 miles). Now in vSphere 6 that goes way up to 100ms so you can move VMs much greater distances more in line with cross-continental distances. Some use cases for this include disaster avoidance (i.e. hurricane inbound), permanent migrations and multi-site load balancing. This really opens up the door for implementing new BC/DR possibilities.

If that wasn’t enough vMotion also has increased network flexibility, as vMotion now has it’s very own TCP/IP stack and can cross layer 3 network boundaries.

Yes your beloved vSphere Client is still here

Your classic Windows-based C# vSphere Client is still around, VMware hasn’t managed to kill it off yet as much as they want to. Despite it still being around, it doesn’t support any new vSphere features or functionality since vSphere 5.1 so you might only want to use it for nostalgia sake. I foresee this as the last major release of vSphere that includes it so you better get used to the vSphere Web Client. In vSphere 6 the vSphere can be used for things like Direct Access to hosts, VUM remediation or if you’re still pissed at the Web Client. They did add read only support for virtual hardware versions 10 and 11 in vSphere 6.

The vSphere Web Client gets a lot better (and faster)

This might help change your mind about using the vSphere Web Client, there have been tons of complaints about speed and performance of it impacting usability and overall concerns with things just not being as good as they were in the class vSphere Client. Apparently VMware has heard all your griping and is finally listening as they have spent significant effort in this release of improving the performance and usability of the vSphere Web Client. Performance improvements include: improved login time, faster right click menu load and faster performance charts. Usability improvements include: recent Tasks moved to bottom (a big gripe before), flattened right click menus and deep lateral linking. The improvements are quite impressive as shown in following slide and should finally help convince admins to ditch the classic vSphere Client. One thing to note is that the Web Client does not support HTML5 yet, VMware has focused on making it better and will move to HTML5 in a later release of vSphere.

The vCenter Server Appliance gets super-sized

Deploying and maintaining vCenter Server has always been a pain; you have to deal with Windows, the vCenter Server application, certificates, permissions, databases etc. The vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) eliminates most of that and makes deploying and upgrading vCenter Server simple and easy. The one big limitation with it though has been its lack of scalability, now in vSphere 6 the VCSA fully scales to the same limits that the vCenter Server on Windows scales to. As a result it now supports 1,000 hosts, 10,000 VMs and linked mode.

Speaking of vCenter Server Linked Mode it gets some improvements and better support as well.

vCenter Server authentication finally gets less complicate

A new Platform Services Controller groups together Single Sign-on, Licensing and the Certificate Authority (Root CA). It comes in 2 deployment models, an embedded model that is installed alongside vCenter Server and is intended for smaller sites with less than 2 SSO integrated solutions or an external model that can be deployed independently of vCenter Server.

vCenter Server Certificate Lifecycle Management is your new keymaster

Dealing with security certificates has always been a royal pain in the butt in vSphere. VMware is trying to ease that pain and make it easier with 2 new solutions for complete certificate lifecycle management. The VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA) is the solution that signs and provisions certificates to vCenter Server and ESXi hosts. The VMware Endpoint Certificate Service (VECS) then stores all certificates and private keys for vCenter Server, all ESXi host certificates are stored locally on each host.

Networking does get a little bit of love also

This release is mostly dominated by storage and vCenter improvements but Network I/O Control gets some new stuff with the ability to reserve network bandwidth to guarantee service levels as outlined below.

We live in a world were security is very top of mind and companies and individuals are going to great lengths to protect their valuable data and assets. One of the trade-offs of having good security is that it tends to be very intrusive, this is just the nature of the job though, you have to examine and keep a very close eye on things to be able to effectively protect them. If you aren’t looking for anything then you’re not going to find anything until it’s too late.

In a computing environment this means you have to have special security applications running in the background to monitor for any malicious behavior or applications that might harm your files and data. This of course requires computing resources that add overhead to your computer which can take away resources and slow down the applications that you use. In a virtual environment this effect is amplified even more, because resources are shared by many VMs, the combined effect of all those VMs trying to protect themselves can really impact performance and steal away your valuable resources.

As a result of this performance vs security dilemma you need to ensure that you use good security products that are designed to to protect virtual environments with minimal impact on performance. To achieve this you need as small a security footprint as possible inside a VM, centralized security management and monitoring along with security tools that can integrate with vSphere using the vShield security APIs as shown below:

To help with you understand this better Bitdefender has published a white paper entitled “Newest Data Center Dilemma:
Security vs. Performance” that highlights the following:

• Traditional IT security solutions rely on agents, which are not designed to operate in today’s complex virtual environments
• The agent-based approach to security diminishes the business value of virtualization and complicates management
• Virtualized data centers require a centralized approach that eliminates the need for agents on every VM

The paper helps you understand the challenges with security in a virtual environment, Bitdefender has also published a white paper entitled “Securing the virtual infrastructure without impacting performance” which demonstrates the impact that traditional A/V tools can have in a virtual environment compared to security tools that are optimized for virtualization. An example of the performance impact that they found is shown below:

Most notable is the impact that traditional A/V tools have on CPU which is pretty significant. To help provide the best security in your virtual environment with minimal performance impact I encourage you to give this papers a read and also check out their security tool designed specifically for virtualization, Gravity Zone: Security of Virtualized Environments. Based on competitive performance testing run with Login Virtual Session Indexer, (Login VSI), GravityZone – SVE has the lowest impact on applications running in virtualized environments, when compared to other virtualization security solutions. The net result of this is overall improved performance, increased resource availability and and better ROI on your investment in virtualization.