VMworld 2014, day after

How do you get from beginning of autumn to end of autumn in four hours? Fly from Barcelona to Helsinki :)

So, VMworld is now behind and it's time to summarize my feelings right after the event.

Was it worth it? 

As a whole, absolutely. But I have to open this a little bit.

I'm 100% technical guy, so I'm quite bad target for a marketing propaganda. And on a conference like that, there is lot's of propaganda for you to watch and hear. For example partner day did not give me much, BUT, as a first timer, it was not total waste either (I'll explain this later)

Some of the brake-out sessions were awesome (example: VAPP2979 - Advanced SQL Server on vSphere Techniques and Best Practices), but some were not that great. Even some deepdive sessions feel more like a marketing sessions than technical sessions. But mostly those sessions that I attended, were good.

In Solutions Exchange there were lots of vendors marketing their own products and solutions. I had some good discussions with different vendors over there. But did I really get much out from it? To be honest, maybe not us much us I could have.

There was also place where to do Hands-On-Labs, aka. HOL's. Of course, you can do those anytime, anywhere, if you just have internet connection. But do you have time to do those at work? Or do you want to spend your evenings doing these at home? Most of us don't have that time. So, VMworld was good place to to those also.

And of course, certification center. This year it was possible to do with tests with 50% discount.

How it felt for a first timer?

First of all, this was first big IT-congress for me, so in that way, everything was new and exciting. And for being there for the first time, that partner day was not that waste. It was a good day to walk around and find out where everything is. And to do HOL's, because even in VMworld, you don't have time to do those because there is so many interesting sessions.

Schedule building was challenge, but I think that I did it quite well. One sad thing was, that it was only two weeks before conference that I had possibility to register to event, and start scheduling break-out sessions. So, some of the most interesting sessions were already full. So, book early, get to the best sessions.

Schedule was also challenge from different angle. Congress center was huge, and it took time to walk from one place to another. For example, if you had 30 minutes time between sessions, it didn't make sense to walk to Solutions Exchange because you would need to go back to sessions hall almost immediately. For that reason I skipped some sessions to crawl around Solutions Exchange. And on one day, I actually missed warm meal because I had built myself too tight schedule.

Some days were also quite long, on Wednesday last session ended at 18:30 (and after that, there was VMworld party :) )

Again on next year?

I missed some very interesting session because they were fully booked, so why not. Tt's hard to say at this point if is it possible for me to go there next year. But one thing is sure, if I'm going, I have to be able to get my conference registration done way earlier than this year.

This years event was great for me, I learned some new things and got lot's of small tips. And, I also made some new friends and got new contacts, things that are often underestimated, but are something that money cannot buy.

VMworld 2014 Europe, day four

(Note! This blog post is a personal notepad for the day, so it might be a little bit confusing to read :))

Last day starting, first session:

STO1153 - Performance Best Practices to Run Virtualized Applications on Virtual SAN

Some benchmark info, tested with 32 node cluster.

What marketing slides say, when you scale out VSAN, you get linear performance boost..

Some slides:

Some testing applications that had been used:

VIP 2.0 (Beta): VSAN Qualification Assessment

• Can be used to collect and analyze information from your current environment, and gives you suggestion on which VMs will work well on VSAN and how to size VSAN environment.

When using SSD cache, you need to give it some time to 'warm up'

Tools for VSAN, VSAN Observer (KB 2064240)

When configuring for performance:

• Check read & write performance of SSD disks
• Controllers, queue depth is important

VAPP2979 - Advanced SQL Server on vSphere Techniques and Best Practices

One of the sessions that I have been waiting for, let's hope that this is good.

Virtualizing business critical applications

http://www.vmware.com/solutions/business-critical-apps

Design for Performance, not just Capacity!

Storage multipahting, minimum of four paths from ESX server to storage array.

Dedicated datastores for DB servers is recommended.

Configure max queue depth if needed (KB1267)

When to use RDM:

• shared disk failover clusters
• SAN management tools in use

On all other situations, use VMFS!

Always create vmdk files with eager zeroed thick disks.

Ensure that blocks are aligned at both the ESXi and Windows levels.

Small LUNs = Better performance

Use multiple vSCSI adapters to evenly distribute workload.

Configure ESXi Large Pages (2MB) when running Tier 1 applications. Improves performance.

Use larges pages on Windows guest level also.

Make sure that there is no swapping in either host or guest level!

• set memory reservation for VMs to avoid ballooning/swapping
• do not overcommit memory 

ESXi memory features that help avoiding swapping:

• Transparent Page Sharing
• Ballooning
• Do not turn those on when running Tier 1 applications like SQL!

Use VMXNET3 Paravirtualized adapter to increase performance

Tune Guest OS network buffers, maximum ports

Cores per Socket? Keep default, so 1 core per socket.

PVSCSI adapters

• Less CPU overhead
• Not supported for ANY type of Windows Clustering configuration!
• Applies also on Always-on clusters, but there is no technical limitation to use it on Always-on

Memory optimization on SQL side:

Check block alignment on disks!

Consolidation options.

Scale out approach gives some benefits. Don't build up too huge VMs for SQL.

Use DRS as your insurance policy, but don't rely on it for resource planning.

VMware support for MS Clustering on vSphere, KB1037959

So far, that was most interesting breakout session that I have attended.

INF2427 - DRS: Advanced Concepts, Best Practices and Future Directions

Mechanisms:

• Initial placement -> maximize cluster utilization
• Load balancing
• Resource control (reservations, shares, limits, resource pools)
• Cluster rules (like. affinity / anti-affinity)

DRS Load balancing:

• Goal -> keep the cluster imbalance within a target threshold
• Does not try to completely balance the cluster
• Challenges
• Dynamic load in VMs
• Balance both memory and CPU
• Goal should be achieved with the least impact on VM performance

Measuring imbalance

No load-balancing if imbalance < target threshold

Load balancing Key points:

• Cluster imbalance is not a bad thing
• constraints may prevent DRS from load-balancing the cluster
• you should look at wheter VMs are happy
• Don't use too aggressive migration threshold settings -> will lead to more vmotions in system
• Default setting of 3 works great in most cases

CPU and Memory over-commitment

• Is over-commitment good?
• Yes, as long as the VMs get what they want/need
• Enables efficient utilization of resources
• don't go too far with over-commitment
• Use reservations on important servers

Options: Control CPU Over-commitment

• Option: MaxVcpusPerClusterPct

Control MEM over-commitment

• Option: MaxClusterMemOvercommitPct & MaxHostMemOvercommitPct

CPU Ready Time tips

• Ready time is a good indicator of contention
• Reality: Some ready time is ok in virtualized environments
• DRS demand calculation takes ready time into account
• High CPU ready? -> Sometimes manual vMotion is answer to get improved performance
• Don't use power management options in bios (or give control to OS)

vSphere 60 new things:

•  Network awareness
• Network bandwidth reservations for VMs
• DRS Placement Across clusters
• Support placement of VMs across clusters

• Provide placement recommendations for cross-VirtualCenter vMotions.
• Improved Static Memory Overhead Estimation
• Reduces overhead memory on VMs

Future Directions

https://labs.vmware.com/flings/proactive-drs

MGT2487 - Built to be Extended: vCloud Automation Center

It's now vRealize Automation....

For some reason, I had hard time writing up anything about this session to blog :)

INF1601 - Taking reporting and command line automation to the next level with PowerCLI

Last session of this day, and actually last session of VMworld for me. They are already shutting things down at congress center.

PowerCLI 5.8, what's new:

Best practices:

• Learn RegEx expression!
• Retrieve information from outside, and use it on your scripts (fetch data from external web-pages and use that information on your scripts)
• From idea to Function
• Start with simple script, but if possible, develop and generalize your script so that you can share it to community

Reporting:

• vSphere reporting is safest place to start :)
• vCheck (http://virtu-al.net)
• Statistical reporting, Get-Stat, Get-StatInterval
• Stats toolbox: http://www.lucd.info/2014/09/02/stats-toolbox/

Desired State Configuration (DSC)

• Introducd with PS v4
• Two modes: push & pull
• Main purpose: capture configuration drifs
• Also:
• initial deployment
• monitoring

That's it, VMworld is over.

I will write up some thoughts about the event later on.

VMworld 2014 Europe, day three

(Note! This blog post is a personal notepad for the day, so it might be a little bit confusing to read :))

Morning started again with General Session. Maybe biggest thing for me was enhancements to Fault Tolerance and vMotion. But, all this was already announced in VMworld 2014 US..

BTW. you can watch keynote speeches and many other videos from VMworld here


HBC2638 - Ten Vital Best Practices for Effective Hybrid Cloud Security

If you have tools like IPS/IDS, AV, automation etc used in your private cloud, extend those components to public cloud too.

Make sure that path between public and private cloud is secure.

How does public cloud do secure data destruction for failed devices?

Examples of commonly ignored threats

• Social engineering
• 'Watering holed' (social meetings, pubs, bars etc.)
• Logical
• Crack / Penetration
• DDOS
• Physical

What to do:

• Design review
• Penetration testing
• Use NIDS (Network Intrusion Detection System) + HIDS (Host-based Intrusion Detection System)
• Host based AV / Filtering

Educate, not only you IT staff, but also your other employees!

Threat your credentials like cattle, not pets

Threat all systems like cattle, not pets.

Automate us much as possible, treat all manual system interaction as a liability

INF3014-SPO Scripting & Automation

Good discussion about scripting and automation in general, discussion on recursive treewalks with scripts and collecting performance data.

Request for all: share you scripts to community!

Vagrant, development environment, worth checking out

• automated setup of operatins systems & applications
• testing your automation

vCenter server simulator, this is something that I had never heard of, but immediately found some links like this

NET1974 Multi-Site Data Center Solutions with VMware NSX

Yet another NSX session, all of these are big sessions, so interest on NSX is huge. In a nutshell, everything told is in a topic, you can build quite nice multi-site solution with NSX. :)

STO2997-SPO The vExpert storage game show EMEA 

Jeopardy style gameshow, PureStorage vs. VMware. Quite fun to watch and lot's of small information. But impossible to even try to write up this stuff.

Last session of this day: SDDC1176 - Aske the Experts vBloggers

Link tip: http://vmwaretips.com/

Interesting chat with four vBloggers, and hosted by VCDX, lot's of VMware experience on same stage.

On those last two sessions of day, lot's of little and interesting things, but nothing to write on a blog about :)

Day will end with a VMworld 2014 Europe party...

VMworld 2014 Europe, day two

(Note! This blog post is a personal notepad for the day, so it might be a little bit confusing to read :))

Day started with a General Session. Lot's of hype and marketing jargon, also some new product releases (most of them already done at VMworld US)

Good list of new releases can be found here.

Lots or rebranding

STO 2197 - Storage DRS: Deepdive and Best Practices:

Storage DRS basic functionality:

• Ease of Storage Management
• Initial placement (automatically select datastore)
• Out of Space Avoidance
• IO Load Balancing
• Virtual Disk Affinity (Anti-Affinity)
• Datastore maintenance mode

Storage DRS can handle space over-commit either in Hypervisor level or in Datastore level through VASA integraion..
Best practice: never combine those!

Many new features are in vSpere 6.0

• Brake large I/O to 32KB
• Reservations to storage I/O
• If reservation cannot be satisfied, Storage DRS will kick in.
• Fine grain automatic actions

Best practices:

• avoid mixing of vSphere LUNs and non-vSphere LUNs on the same physical storage
• Configure host IO queue size with highest allowed value
• Keep congestion threshold conservatively high
• More datastores = better IO control, bigger datastore = better storage management

After that session, I went to do VCP5-DCV test, and...... Finally, achieved VCP status! :)

NET1743 - VMware NSX - A Technical Deep Dive

VMware is talking a lot about NSX, but at least in Finland, when can you buy it? How much does it cost? Technology is very interesting, might even say very cool.

I'm not going to cover this NSX  session, since lot of that information is already available on VMware blogs and documents. One link: www.vmware.com/products/nsx/resources.html

NET1586 - Advanced Network Services with NSX

NSX: offers:

• Switching / DCHP server-or-relay / DNS
• Routing / NAT
• Firewalling
• Load Balancing
• L2 / L3 VPN

Firewall is centrally managed, distributed FW. Works in front of VMNIC.

Security within the same IP-subnet.

Buzzword: micro-segmentation!

FW rules are not dependent on IP-addresses, you can use object names VMware to build rules. And those rules can be dynamic.

INF1469 - Extreme Performance Series: Monster VM Performance

Do idle vCPU cause co-stop? No they don't, there is no co-stop overhead on idle vCPUs.

Single threaded app -> multiple vCPU -> might even hurt performance

Over-provisioning vCPUs is not free -> Only configure as many vCPUs as the app needs!

Is %CSTP (co-stop) indicating a performance issue?

• %RDY + %CSTP = less than a few percent per vCPU should be ok

To avoid co-stop, address the slowest vCPU

• co-stop begins if Progress(vCPU) - Progress(vCPU_slowest) > costop_threshold
• Possible causes for vCPU_slowest
• High ready time (%RDY)
• High wait time (%VMWAIT = %WAIT - %IDLE)
• Snapshot, delta-disks, linked-clones
• VMM-level synchronization (memory manipulation: page sharing, NUMA remapping etc)

NUMA

• non-uniform memory access system architecture
• each node consists of CPU cores and memory
• pCPU can cross NUMA nodes, but at a performance cst

vNUMA

• Problem
• BIG VM has more vCPUs than # cores per NUMA node
• Guest app/OS has no knowledge of underlying NUMA
• Solutions:
• Expose virtual NUMA to VM
• Guest app/os achieves optimal placement of processes and memory

vNUMA is enabled:

• HW version higher than 8
• VM is wide (More vCPU per VM than # cores per NUMA node)
• Hyperthreading does not count
• by default, is configured with VMs with more than 8vCPU

How to ensure optimal vNUMA?

• Size VM to be multiples of pNUMA size
• 8/16/24... vCPU VMs for 8core/node
• 10/20/30... vCPU VMs for 10 cores/node

Virtual Sockets & Virtual Cores per Socket

• Add sockets, don't cores (if licensing allows you to)

Memory overcommitting = not recommended. Leave 10% room for ESXi.

• On huge VMs (large memory), consider using memory reservation to avoid creating huge swap files (.vswp) on datastore

Now the day is over (1800 local time), and it's time to celebrate my VCP status! 

VMworld 2014 Europe, day one

First day on VMworld 2014 Europe, and first time in VMworld ever.

Congress center (Fira Barcelona Gran Fia) is huge so there is going to be a lot of walking during next days.

First day is only for partners, and most of the sessions are marketing material. So, it was a great day to do at least one HOL (Hands-On-Lab). I tested how OpenStack can be used to manage vSphere, and there was also NSX in use (LAB: "OpenStack with VMware vSphere and NSX, SPL-SDC-1420). Very interesting lab I must say. Also it was good to explore the whole area, so on next days I will know where to find everything.

Technical sessions will start tomorrow and I’m also going to do (or at least trying to J) VCP exam, an hopefully gaining (finally) VCP status.