One of the most interesting areas covered at VMworld 2010 was the new storage features in vSphere 4.1. There are two main features I want to cover in depth as I feel they are important indicators of the direction that storage for VMware is heading: Storage I/O Control (SIOC) and vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI).
Symantec have been looking at why customers are not going “the last mile†with virtualisation. Why are customers not deploying their Tier 1 applications on their virtual platforms? Symantec’s view on this was that customers still have issues with application level failure within guest VM’s. This product has been designed to fill that void and at present is a product with no real competitors.
Following my return from my first Tech Field Day I have been reading through my notes and reflecting on the vendors I saw when I was in Seattle. Of the vendors I saw the one that surprised me most was NEC, everyone has heard of them but not everyone actually knows what they do or what products they make. As we found out during our visit, NEC have a broad technology portfolio and have quite an interesting offering in the storage space.
It’s now been a couple of days since the second day of the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day, I’m actually taking the opportunity to write this on the plane on the way back from Seattle. So once again I thought I would do a summary post until I get the chance to write up a detailed post on each vendor.
So that is Day 1 of the Seattle Tech Field Day out of the way and what a day it has been. We’ve been out to Microsoft Redmond HQ, or “the temple†as John Obeto calls it. We saw some new products from Veeam and were privileged enough to be the first port of call for a new and very exciting storage start-up, Nimble Storage.
I try and avoid licensing at all costs, it’s a horrible subject and one that strikes fear in to many. When you add virtualisation in to the mix it tends to get a little more complicated and you often find that the rules change on a reasonably regular basis. I was involved in a discussion today about Citrix XenDesktop and an interesting point came up when discussing licensing Virtual PCs. Someone mentioned something called the Microsoft VDA, I hadn’t a clue what they were talking about so I did a little digging around to find out more.
Following a recent implementation of VMware Data Recovery manager we ran into a few issues. We eventually had to kill the virtual appliances due to the issue we were having and as a result we had a couple of virtual machines with outstanding snapshots. These snapshots were taken by VDR and as a result could not be viewed or deleted using the snapshot manager.
IO DRS provides performance Isolation to VMs in shared storage environments, and it might not be as far away as first thought.
One of the major new components in Virtual Machine Hardware 7 is the new Para Virtualised SCSI (PVSCSI) adapter. When it first came out there were a number of posts regarding the much improved I/O Performance and latency reduction this new adapter delivered, such as Chad Sakac’s I/O vSphere performance test post.
I was doing some work out of hours the other night on my employers Virtual Infrastructure when bang on time the little red triangles started popping up against certain ESX hosts in vCenter. Why you ask? well it’s AV scanning time on our VM’s of course, or the Sophos summit as we affectionately call it due to its uncanny resemblance to a mountain range when you look at the CPU performance stats in vCenter.
