I had a really great day at the first UK National VMware User Group (VMUG) event last week. Congratulations must go to the organizers. Everything went really well, and my understanding was that there was upwards of 300 or so attendees. The event itself was held at the UK National Motorcycle Museum, just outside of Birmingham in the UK, which is a really cool venue to hold an event like this. The night before the event, we were treated to some food and drinks by our good friends at Veeam, and had private access to museum for a few hours.
I delivered two sessions at the VMUG, both on vSphere 5.0 New Storage Features. It was the same presentation that I delivered at VMworld 2011, and most of the content you'll find dotted around this blog in various posts. VAAI (vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration) & the new VSA (vSphere Storage Appliance) seemed to be the topics which interested attendees the most.
In between my sessions, I took the opportunity to attend some break-out sessions from our partners.
My Usual Disclaimer – I have to remain vendor neutral on anything I post here, so once again I want to make it clear that VMware doesn't favour any one storage partner over another. I'm not personally endorsing any of these vendor products either. Please do your own research if considering using any of these products.
Symantec
The first session I attended was from Symantec. I have to admit that it is some time since I looked at their product set. I used to support VCB (VMware Consolidated Backup) back in the day, and understanding the integration with third party products like Backup Exec and NetBackup was part of that role. But it had been a while since I'd used the products so I was looking forward to learning about the new enhancements. The presentation was delivered by Rob Kernutt who is a Senior Principal Technology Specialist at Symantec.
Rob introduced us to V-Ray, which is essentially a collection or bundle of Symantec Backup, Application and Security technologies which are fully integrated with VADP (vSphere APIs for Data Protection). We got an overview of some of the many enhancements that are now included (or will soon be included) in both their Backup Exec and NetBackup product lines. We were told about the current feature set which detailed the deduplication mechanisms to reduce the backup footprint (interestingly, their dedupe is based on files and folders, not blocks) and their ability to do granular restores of files even when the backup is at the VMDK level. We also learnt about V-Ray's ability to track VMs when they are moved between hosts by vMotion or vSphere HA and their VIP (Virtual Intelligent Policy) which spreads the backup load by selecting VMs across different hosts in a cluster to backup during the backup window.
vSphere 5.0 Feature Enhancements
Rob then moved on to tell us about some of the enhancements to their product line for vSphere 5.0. He first pointed out that to work with vSphere 5.0, you need to use Backup Exec 2010 R3 Service Pack 1 and hotfix 164220. Users can get Backup Exec to check this is installed using the LiveUpdate feature. Be sure and check for this patch before backing up any 5.0 Virtual Machines.
We then heard about the features such as a new vCenter UI Plugin which means you can manage your backups and restores from the vSphere client.
The next cool feature was the Virtual Machine Validator – This tests full virtual machine backups by booting the virtual machine backup in a separate and specialized recovery environment, thereby ensuring backups are recoverable every time. Very neat.
We were then told about a new Application HA feature which uses Veritas Cluster Service monitoring technology. This involves running an agent inside of the VM and if an application within the VM fails, the agent will try to restart the services belonging to the application. If the application continues to fail after the services have been restarted, then the agent can trigger vSphere HA to restart the VM. If the application still fails to start, then a new feature can get Backup Exec to automatically restore the VM from the last known good backup. I have to admit that there were a few raised eyebrows at this particular concept (I'm pretty sure a lot of folks would want to get in and troubleshoot the issue), but I think that there is definitely a market for this type of feature. Nice presentation Rob.
The next presentation that I managed to get to was from Xsigo.
Xsigo
The first thing I learnt in this presentation from Neil Miller, Systems Engineer with Xsigo, was how to pronounce the name of the company. It's actually pronounced See-go. I bet a lot of people didn't know that. I didn't :-).
The big selling points for Xsigo is the reduction in infrastructure complexity and cost, and increased bandwidth to your ESXi hosts, both in terms of networking and storage. Neil showed us how implementing a Xsigo I/O Director along with a pair of Infiniband adapters (Mellanox) per host could replace all of the NICs and all of the storage HBAs on your host. Through patented technology, Xsigo creates "virtual" NICs (Network Interface Cards) and "virtual" HBAs (Host Bus Adapters) on the I/O Director which are then presented to each of your ESXi hosts. From an ESXi perspective, these NICs and HBAs appear as standard NIC and HBAs on the host. Essentially Xsigo are virtualizing the infrastructure layer. The cool thing is that because these connections are virtual, it means the NICs and HBAs can be migrated across hosts too. A very interesting concept.
Neil shared with us a case study from a customer who had to upgrade 300 servers from 4GB Fiber-Channel to 8GB Fiber-Channel. Apparently the whole process took them 20 minutes!
From a bandwidth perspective, each pair of Infiniband channels can run at either 20GB or 40GB bandwidth each, giving you a maximum total of 80GB bandwidth to each ESXi host. This is pretty cool, but there is some considerations here to make sure you allocate enough bandwidth to your NICs and HBAs, and also not to over-commit.
The creation of the virtual NIC and virtual HBAs is all done via the Xsigo XMS 3 management interface. Xsigo also provide a vCenter UI plugin for XMS 3, so the management can all be done from the vSphere client.
I dropped around to the Xsigo stand after the presentation and was given a first hand view on how the product surfaced the NIC & HBAs to ESXi. Pretty impressive technology.
I suppose the only question is around Infiniband, and whether you are comfortable with moving to this technology for your infrastructure back-bone. Well, if this is a concern, you'll be pleased to hear that Xsigo now offer their I/O Director product with Ethernet too.
Conclusion
I've only heard good things about the VMUG UK National conference since my return and I think it was a great success. If you live in the UK and didn't make it to this one, I'd put a date in my diary for next year's event.
Later that evening, I went to dinner with some of my colleagues where we found the world's largest naan bread, but that's another story 🙂
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