Now that it’s Monday night and I’ve had a chance to catch up on my sleep, I started catching up on a lot of my RSS feeds that were not getting much attention last week.  I have to say, the VMware community has a TON of great bloggers out there – if you didn’t make it out then between Twitter, bloggers, podcasts, and vodcasts it was definitely possible to feel like you were there.  I also realized I didn’t walk quite as far as I initially thought I did on Friday.  It turns out it was more like 15 miles after I redid my Google walking directions (makes up for the fact I missed the VMworld Fun Run):

Duncan Epping had a good post on the aftermath of the VMworld Labs and I thought it was interesting that the VMware View 4.5 Install and Config lab was the #1 lab.  Perhaps 2011 will finally be the year of the desktop?  Or was that this year or the year before?  I touched on this in a previous post but some of the big topics this year were:

• VMware View 4.5 and ThinApp 4.6
• vFabric
• vCloud Datacenter Services and vShield
• Project Horizon

I’m looking forward to doing some blogging on NetApp integration with some of these new announcements (namely vCloud and View 4.5) so keep checking back for them.  I’m also looking forward to taking the VCAP-DCA exam, originally I had heard there might be an opportunity to take it at VMworld but now it sounds like it might be able to be scheduled starting September 13th.

Overall there was a lot of great information this year, makes me wonder what will be in store for next year….

Originally posted at: http://mtellin.com/2010/09/06/vmworld-2010-recap/

This is a shot of the registration area, I checked in on Sunday – the lines were pretty long but moved quickly.

This is a shot of the Roadside stop that had snacks and pop:

Note to my employer:  I did not blow off VMworld to try and get into the Apple announcement today:

Everybody is trying to figure it out:

Xsigo was giving away a ride in your choice of 3 sports cars, here was the Bugatti:

That is it for now! Back to the labs for me.

• How to create a Network Pool in VMware vCloud Director
• How to add a catalog to an Organization within VMware vCloud Director
• How to create External Networks in VMware vCloud Director
• Understanding and using the VMware vCloud Director web interface
• How to configure Oracle databases for use with VMware vCloud Director
• How to create Sysprep packages for use with VMware vCloud Director
• How to install and configure vShield Manager for use with VMware vCloud Director
• How to install VMware vCloud Director on the first server
• How to collect diagnostic information for VMware vCloud Director
• How to create an Organization within VMware vCloud Director

Also, since I work for a Xsigo partner, I thought I would mention Xsigo’s annoncement.  Previously the only option you had for the server interconnect was InfiniBand, however they are adding Ethernet to the mix so you will be able to choose from the following interconnects:

• 10 Gbps Ethernet (32 ports)
• 24 Gbps InfiniBand (24 DDR ports)
• 40 Gbps InfiniBand (20 QDR ports)

The Ethernet option (utilizing either 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps ports) is an interesting one, not requiring you to add in an adapter card can allow you to do end-to-end connectivity for under $500 per server – a fraction of the cost of a CNA.  I wonder how long before 40 Gbps will be supported for the interconnect?

I spent a good part of the day in the labs again today, I’ve done most of the vCloud ones as well as the View ones.  The dashboard in the lab area is pretty cool:

It’s probably difficult to see (click the picture for a larger version) but you can in the top left gauge there has been over ~60,000 VMs deployed total.  On the top right gauge there has been almost 6,500 labs started, bottom left shows there is currently about 400 VMs active and the gas gauge on the right shows they are almost at capacity.

Originally posted at: http://mtellin.com/2010/08/31/notes-from-vmworld-day-2-vcloud-and-xsigo/

Originally posted at: http://mtellin.com/2010/08/31/vmworld-2010-keynote/

People
I can’t even begin to describe the people here, I have met some of the best VMware people that are out there and what really struck me is how friendly everyone is. There isn’t anywhere around Moscone you can go and not be able to strike up an impromptu virtualization discussion. I also thought it was funny how many of the MN VMUG people I have met for the first time while in San Francisco. I can’t say enough good things about the networking that is available at VMworld – worth the ticket price alone. As a side note, if you read this and I haven’t met you yet – shoot me an email, leave a comment on the post or preferably send me a tweet on Twitter.

That covers it for Monday, hard to believe it’s only the first day.

Originally posted at: http://mtellin.com/2010/08/31/vmworld-2010-day-1-recap/

• Kiosk Mode: no user authentication, access is based on device MAC address
• Delegated role-based access control
• Smart card authentication for PCoIP
• Online certificate status protocol support
• vShield Endpoint

Some best practices that were mentioned for security in a View deployment:

• Harden virtual desktops (no surprise)
  • Set refresh intervals
  • Patch base OS
  • View agent: If in a high security environment, you may want to disable USB redirection, drive redirection, clipboard redirection and/or printer redirection
• Harden Connection Server, Security Server, and Replica Server
  • Standard Windows and database hardening:
  • Password policy
  • Patching
  • Disabling unneeded services and network protocols (only IPv4 is needed)
  • Changing default certificates (a self-signed certificate is installed by default) with a SSL certificate signed by a recognized CA
  • Disable unneeded ciphers

One thing to note is View 4.5 changes TCP and UDP ports from 50002 to 4172.

Things to consider when deploying:

• Proper authentication methods
• Use of a security server or VPN for remote access (PCoIP would use VPN access)
• Firewall requirements
• Setup administrative role-based access controls
• User entitlements
• Desktop zoning considerations

Role Based Access Control:

• Limit the root admin role to a small number
• For large deployments organize pools into folders and delegate admin roles to the folders by geographic region, business unit, function or compliance requirement

Make sure to set appropriate entitlements for users, different types of users will likely have different desktops eg: internal, remote, contractor, suppliers, compliancy (HIPAA, PCI).  Based on the entitlements assigned zone desktops and restrict access to resources accordingly, for example high risk activity desktops that can only browse the web and email or internal only desktops.

Also covered was vShield – vShield is actually 3 products that consist of:

• vShield Endpoint
  • This is the AV engine which allows you to take the engine out of the VM and do the scans from a central AV server.
  • Can yield a 95%+ reduction in guest footprint and is included with VMware View Premier.  Endpoint is what solves the issue of worrying about staggering Anti Virus scans or Anti Virus definition updates.
• vShield App
  • This is the vNIC level firewall, you can create firewall rules right at the vNIC level.
  • You could, for example, create a rule that would disallow all VM to VM connectivity so that if one users VM was infected, it would not affect other users on the network.
• vShield Edge
  • This is similar to a layer 3 edge firewall for creating multiple virtual datacenters.

This brings us to vChassis: ‘A platform to support and fulfill “distribute virtual network” vision by VMware and its ecosystem’ which consists of:

A standard network management framework
A platform to enable scale-out, on demand, distributed end to end virtual network services like vChassis L2 Switch line card or vChassis Intrusion Detection card.

This is something I am really looking forward to, incorporating more of the stack into the virtualized environment to improve virtual machine mobility and ease management issues with multi-tenancy.

iPad with Bluetooth keyboard for blogging
Sprint Overdrive 3g/4g
iPhone
New Trent IMP880 which has 8900mAh of charging for everything

I land in SFO around 1pm and am planning on making it over to the Moscone to register and pick up my bag so I don’t have to do that tomorrow morning and then the VMworld Fun Run after that. Oh and hopefully there is some time in there to eat as well…

Now to sit and think about what I forgot to pack.

Originally posted at: http://mtellin.com/2010/08/29/vmworld-here-i-come/

This is also posted on my personal blog at: http://mtellin.com/2010/08/10/vmworld-2010-schedule/

One of the features in the new version of Data ONTAP 8.0 is the ability to use 64 bit aggregates, prior to this all aggregates were 32 bit.  The main reason to use a 64bit aggregate is to break the 16TB aggregate limit found in 32 aggregates.

ONTAP 7.3 helped with this in that it changed the way the 16TB was calculated, it no longer counted the parity drives in the 16TB which gave you an extra ~20% usable space in your aggregates (actual savings varied based on disk size).  As mentioned before, to expand beyond the 16TB a 64 bit addressing scheme needed to be used, the following shows the limit of either aggregate type:

32 bit aggregates are calculated by 2^32 * 4KB = ~16TB
64 bit aggregates are calculated by 2^64 * 4KB = ~67,108,864 (67 million petabytes)
Note: There are limits to the maximum sizes of 64 bit aggregates which are based on controller model

Those limits are currently:

A few things to note with that are that the maximum file/LUN size is still 16TB and that the maximum volume sizes for dedupe volumes remains the same.

When sizing your system keep in mind that the root aggregate must be 32 bit, it is also important to note that you cannot currently convert a 32 bit aggregate into a 64 bit aggregate (or vice versa).  The next major release of ONTAP 8 will have the ability to convert 32 bit to 64 bit non-disruptively however.

Along the same lines, you cannot perform block level transfers between aggregate types – Volume SnapMirror(VSM) between 32 bit and 64 bit aggregates will not work.  (Qtree SnapMirror(QSM) however will work as it is file based, as will NDMP)

The default type for creating new aggregates is 32 bit, for 64 bit you need to specify a -B 64 if using CLI or select the checkbox if using FilerView.  After upgrading to ONTAP 8.0 7-mode all existing aggregates will remain 32 bit (as mentioned before you cannot non-disruptively convert them yet to 64 bit)

Originally posted at: http://mtellin.com/2010/01/06/netapp-64-bit-aggregates-in-ontap-8-0/

Obviously you need to be aware that enabling compression will add additional load onto your system but keep in mind you can use FlexShare to set lower priority to system level (e.g. SnapMirror) operations.  Another thing to keep in mind is that FlexShare is assigned per volume, so it doesn’t have to assign ALL of your SnapMirror transfers a low priority.

Enabling compression is as easy as modifying the /etc/snapmirror.conf file, you can enable compression on existing SnapMirror relationships.  The changes you need to make are as follows:

At the top of snapmirror.conf you need to establish a connection name and assign the source and destination filers to it.  For my example this will be:

sm1=multi(940-1,940-2)

<connection name>=multi(<sourcefiler>,<destinationfiler>)

Now you need to modify the existing line for the SnapMirror schedule, my example looks like this:

sm1:test_vol 940-2:test_vol_recv compression=enable – 10 * * *

Example:

For my example I was setting this up on a FAS940, I ran ‘sysstat –s 1’ before running the snapmirror and it averaged about 1% CPU usage

Source NetApp:

Destination NetApp:

After kicking off the initial snapmirror transfer I re-ran the same command and it returned an average CPU usage of 72% on the destination and 100% on the source.

Source NetApp:

Destination NetApp:

So again if you have a busy system, you will need to decide if the decreased WAN traffic outweighs the added load on your system.  I kicked off a ’snapmirror initialize’ and then monitored the transfer with ’snapmirror status -l’ and saw that I was getting a steady 8.0:1 compression ratio on my transfer.

Originally posted at http://mtellin.com/2009/11/23/using-compression-with-snapmirror-transfers-in-ontap-7-3-2/

NetApp released v1.0 of their VSC for VMware vSphere, VSC is a plugin for vCenter which allows anyone connecting with the VI Client to access it.  What is nice about the tool is it allows you to see an overview of your storage environment and ensure things are configured inline with NetApp’s recommended best practices and, if they aren’t, allows you to set the recommended values.

Click on the pictures for a larger view, you can see it adds a new tab called NetApp when the ESX server is selected.  In my environment we are using all NFS for storage to the ESX boxes, so in the next screen I show the ‘Storage Details – NAS’ option:

What is nice about this view is I can quickly see I need to make a couple changes on the NetApp, the ucode settings should be set to on and the atime update should be set to on as well.

As mentioned before, there are also ESX specific settings that should be set to follow best practices, by right clicking on the ESX hosts listed in the NetApp tab (see 1st picture) there is an option to ‘Set Recommended Values’

Finally you can also set guest timeout settings, under the Tools option there is a download link for the .iso for Windows and Linux guests.  For some reason in my environment I couldn’t download the ISO from this page – if you have the same issue you can find it in the Program Files\NetApp\Virtual Storage Console\webapps\public folder.

Once you load the ISO in the VM, double clicking on the CD drive will ask you if you want to add the info in the windows_gos_timeout.reg file to the registry.

While I only have NFS mounted storage, you can also use the VSC to check things like:

• Storage adapter timeout settings
• Multipathing settings
• Collecting diag info from fibre channel switches (or ESX hosts/NetApp controllers)

Also remember to check NetApp TR-3749 for best practices with NetApp and VMware vSphere.

In case you missed it, NetApp announced v2 of SMVI at VMworld this year.  Some of the new features are:

• AutoSupport Integration
• Backup Enhancements & GUI Re-design
• Snapshot Naming Changes
• Scripting
• Restore Enhancements
• Single File Restore
• Self-Service Restore
• Limited Self-Service Restore
• Administrator-Assisted Restore
• Restore Agent