Tag: VMUG

2015 Silicon Valley VMUG UserCon

JanLeave a Reply

VMUG_USERCONI wanted to recap what has been presented at the 2015 Silicon Valley VMUG UserCon.

The Silicon Valley VMUG Team organized a fantastic UserCon with a packed agenda which started 8:45am and ended at 6:30pm.

Sessions were provided by several vendors, including PernixData, Nimble Storage, EMC and so on.

All session were categorized in the following areas:

  • Data Center Management
  • Demo Sessions & VMware HOL
  • Desktop Virtualization
  • General Sessions
  • Hybrid Cloud & Emerging Technologies
  • Storage & Availability
  • vSphere & Virtualization

As you can see on the list of areas, most aspects of today’s virtualization was covered with at least one session.

 

Personally, the following were my highlights of the UserCon:

 

Oh and before I forgot, there was obviously lots of swag from all vendors.

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All available slides of the 2015 Silicon Valley VMUG UserCon are attached to this article.

Silicon Valley VMUG – Double-Take & VSAN

JanLeave a Reply

Today, I attended my first Silicon Valley VMUG at the Biltmore Hotel and Suites in San Jose, CA. Vision Solutions presented their software Double–Take which provides real-time high availability. Joe Cook, Senior Technical Marketing Manager at VMware, provided an overview of VSAN and its requirements.

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I took a couple of notes for both presentations and summarized the most important points below:

Double-Take Availability

  • Allow migration P2V, V2P, P2P, V2V cross-hypervisor
  • Provides HW and Application independent failover
  • Monitors availability and provides alerting functionality by SNMP and Email
  • Supports VMware 5.0 and 5.1, as well as Microsoft Hyper-V Server and Role 2008 R2 and 2012
  • Full server migration and failover only available for Windows. Linux version will be available in Q4.

Double-Take Replication

  • Uses byte-level replication which continuously looks out for changes and transfers them
  • Either real-time or scheduled
  • Replication can be throttled

Double-Take Move

  • Provides file and folder migration
  • Does NOT support mounted file shares. Disk needs to show as a local drive

 

VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) by Joe Cook

Hardware requirements:

  • Any Server on the VMware Compatibility Guide
  • At least 1 of each
    • SAS/SATA/PCIe SSD
    • SAS/NL-SAS/SATA HDD
  • 1Gb/10Gb NIC
  • SAS/SATA Controllers (RAID Controllers must work in “pass-through” or RAID0
  • 4GB to 8GB (preferred) USB, SD Cards

Implementation requirements:

  • Minimum of 3 hosts in a cluster configuration
  • All 3 host must contribute storage
  • vSphere 5.5 U1 or later
  • Maximum of 32 hosts
  • Locally attached disks
    • Magnetic disks (HDD)
    • Flash-based devices (SSD)
  • 1Gb or 10Gb (preferred) Ethernet connectivity

Virtual SAN Datastore

  • Distributed datastore capacity, aggregating disk groups found across multiple hosts within the same vSphere cluster
  • Total capacity is based on magnetic disks (HDDs) only.
  • Flash based devices (SSDs) are dedicated to VSAN’s caching layer

Virtual SAN Network

  • RequiredadedicatedVMkernel interface for Virtual SAN traffic
    • Used for intra-cluster communication and data replication
  • Standard and Distributed vSwitches are supported
  • NIC teaming – used for availability not for bandwidth
  • Layer 2 Multicast must be enabled on physical switches

Virtual SAN Scalable Architecture

  • VSAN provides scale up and scale out architecture
    • HDDs are used for capacity
    • SSDs are used for performance
    • Disk Groups are used for performance and capacity
    • Nodes are used for compute capacity

Additional information

  • VSAN is a cluster level feature like DRS and HA
  • VSAN will be deployed, configured and manages through the vSphere Web Client only
  • Hands-on labs are available here