VMware « BasRaayman's technical diatribe

VMware vExpert – Nominations for 2012 now open

16 02 2012

It’s been almost been one year since VMware made a call to nominate folks for the VMware vExpert title, and now it’s time to nominate folks once again. To blatantly quote some figures, here are the number of vExperts over the last coupe of years:

2009 — 253
2010 — 300
2011 — 326

And that number will hopefully again increase this year.

So, what makes up a vExpert? Well, it’s basically simple. You nominate or apply for the title here: http://vmware.com/go/vexpert2012, and that’s all there is to it.

So, what makes someone a vExpert? Let me quote the description from the nomination page:

The VMware vExpert Award is given to individuals who have significantly contributed to the community of VMware users over the past year. vExperts are book authors, bloggers, VMUG leaders, tool builders, and other IT professionals who share their knowledge and passion with others. These vExperts have gone above and beyond their day jobs to share their technical expertise and communicate the value of VMware and virtualization to their colleagues and community.

In the past, this meant that you would apply and be evaluated by a group of folks inside of VMware, and then get awarded the vExpert title, or wouldn’t receive said title. However, all of the vSpecialist were judged by two categories. This year things have changed slightly, and people can classify themselves or the person they are nominating along three categories. To quote some details:

Seeing how well this program has worked so far, we wanted to grow it to include more VMware enthusiasts who may be doing their work of sharing the know-how away from the limelight of the Internet and public events. Our vExperts in the past have for the most part fallen into two implicit groups: bloggers/writers/evangelists and VMUG leaders. This year, we are making explicit three different paths to becoming a vExpert. As always, the common theme for the established and the new vExpert paths will be going above and beyond your day job to help others be successful with VMware solutions.

Evangelist Path
The Evangelist Path includes book authors, bloggers, tool builders, public speakers, and other IT professionals who share their knowledge and passion with others with the leverage of a personal public platform to reach many people. Employees of VMware can also apply via the Evangelist pathway.

Customer Path
The Customer Path is for internal evangelists and community leaders from VMware customer organizations. They have contributed to success stories, customer references, or public interviews and talks, or were active community contributors, such as VMUG leaders.

VPN (VMware Partner Network) Path
The VPN Path is for employees of our partner companies who lead with passion and by example, who are committed to continuous learning and to making their technical knowledge and expertise available to many. This can take shape of event participation, video, IP generation, as well as public speaking engagements.

Although we’re making the three paths explicit this year, there is only a single vExpert designation; we aren’t splitting the program into sections.

The exact details for the three paths can be found on the nomination page, and you will also find the other criteria and guidelines linked from there.

So, what are you waiting for?! Go and check it out, nominate yourself or someone you feel deserves it, and pay it forward!

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Tags: VMware, vExpert
Categories : General, VMware

Problem with the EMC Isilon Storage Replication Adapter

9 01 2012

A lot of folks out there use the VMware vCenter SRM to create and manage disaster recovery scenarios for their virtualized environments.

Besides having a button to click to fail over (parts of) your environment to a different site, it has one benefit: It forces you to think about your systems. You need to consider which systems are vital to your infrastructure, and you need to be aware of dependencies that you may have in your environment. There are numerous other things that SRM can help with, but that’s not what I wanted to highlight here.

A couple of days ago, I was at the VMware office in Munich, and was helping setting up a SRM 5.0 demo that would serve as a hands-on lab for people interested in SRM. The base of this SRM installation is a virtualized Isilon cluster, that offers the ability to easily provision storage, and offers replication between sites (a quick video overview by my colleague Nick Weaver can be found ).

While setting up the Isilon SRA which you can download from the VMware website, I ran in to a problem. When you download and extract the actual SRA, you’ll get a bunch of PDF files, and two executables. One is the installer for the actual storage replication adapter. It’s called “EMCIsilonSRASetup_1_0.exe”, and you need a current Java development kit to get that one running, but it should install correctly.

The second file is called “IsilonReplicationHelperSetup.exe”, and this is used to configure the SRA before using it in SRM. Now, when starting this helper, both me and Jase McCarty have seen errors that refer to a missing Java class (com.izforge.izpack.installer.Installer), for a program called IzPack which was used to create the installer. After extracting the actual executable, it seemed like some classes/libraries were missing from it.

I’ve been in touch with Isilon support after running in to the error, and after checking with them, they gave me an MD5 hash of a working copy of the IsilonReplicationHelperSetup.exe, which is:
416535bc1c7d7f133037af04b5502e3b However, MD5 for the executable that I got was:
4342E880A99EE2ED6DA1205F1018233DWhich obviously is different. The MD5 of the downloaded file, and the MD5 that VMware shows for the actual zip that contains the SRA matched up though.

So, I’m putting this post out there as a word of warning. It seems like one of the Isilon SRA files on the VMware website is non-functional. Should anybody out there see this, make sure to contact Isilon support and reference case 00169080, which is my case number.

I’m still working with the Isilon support to see what the next steps are going to be, and I’m sure this is going to be resolved soon enough, but I wanted to put this information out there for you in the meantime, to avoid people having to go through the same process as I did. It might save some folks a bit of time. And I’ll make sure I update this post when I get a solution from the Isilon support team.

Update – January 16^th 2012:

While I’m still working with the Isilon support group to get everything sorted out, I did get a version of the IsilonReplicationHelperSetup Java archive that seems to be working. Now, I’m sharing this with you all while we try to get things resolved, and to get the working download on the VMware site, but I need to add a large disclaimer:

This file is not officially supported by EMC and/or Isilon, and while this file worked for me, your mileage may vary, and I would recommend that you do not use this file in a production environment! The file might work in a test environment, but please refrain from using it in a productive environment. Use the official files from the VMware download site, or create a case with Isilon and/or VMware support!

Now, to help you verify this file, the MD5 for the Java archive is:
FFAC907E70FD0BFC73076793B9D5FCB4and you can get the file here.

Update – February 10^th 2012:

VMware has updated the Isilon SRA file, and the new MD5 for Version 1.0, (released 01/18/2012) currently is:d8b8408ab259d64ee3f5a83486e2a25eThis actually contains the working files, so you should be all set.

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Tags: EMC, Isilon, Isilon Helper, Site Recovery Manager, SRA, SRM, VMware
Categories : Isilon, SRM, Storage, Virtualization, VMware

VMAX VSA: IT’S ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

31 08 2011

So folks, here’s a shameless copy of a blog post from one of the guys on my team. Dave was just brilliant and actually created a virtual storage appliance of the EMC VMAX. I think that’s downright awesome, and I wanted to help him get attention for what he did, so I asked him if I could copy his blog post, which is what you will find here:

As the title suggests there is indeed a Symmetrix VMAX VSA. I have been working on this project since shortly after EMC World. As I look back through my emails, I received the code on 6/3/11 and I have been working on it in almost all of my free time since then.

Now finally it will make its public debut this week at VMworld 2011 as part of the EMC Interactive Demo booth on the show floor. As part of its grand unveiling I thought I would tell you a little about what makes it work.

Now to make a few things clear up front, this is a science project, I cannot distribute it, it does “work”. As part of the lab (I will publish the guide) the student actually provisions an iSCSI disk from the VSA to a ESXi 5.0 host.

One of the first things I noticed with the code when trying to virtualize it. It’s HUGE. There are 2 parts to the VSA.

1. The Service Processor (SP). In a physical VMAX this is the 1U server that is racked in the system bay. It has a special image of Windows XP and contains all of the proprietary software used to manage a VMAX. If you own a VMAX this is what you will see EMC field service personnel using when they come to work on your system. This is NOT accessible by a end-user as it requires special RSA credentials that change weekly. (one reason we can’t distribute it). Its specs are 2vCPU and 2GB of RAM and about 10GB of disk space.

2. Enginuity. This is the Operating Environment of the Symmetrix. For the purposes of this VSA it runs in a SuSE Enterprise Linux 11VM. One of the big deals with the VMAX was that Enginuity was ported from a PowerPC CPU to a Intel x86 based architecture. Without this change this VSA would never exist. Now this VM is big, so big as a matter of fact i had to use a RC build of vSphere 5 in order to even get it to work. I was finally able to scale it down a bit, but at one point it was using 32 vCPU’s 92GB of RAM and about 250GB of disk space.

Obviously one of the challenges for using this in a lab is that I needed it to use fewer resources. In the beginning this VMAX was a Single Engine model, which means it had 16 “slices” running. Each director has 4 DA (backend) directors, and 4 FA (front end) directors. I quickly found this was the biggest reason i needed so much memory and CPU. After working with one developer Chakib, who totally rocks by the way. We were able to scale this down to 1 FA and 1 DA per director. One interesting side note, when I was going down this path I asked Chakib what kind of VM he was using to test this. His reply was, “I am not using this in a VM, I have a physical Linux box with 200GB of RAM”. So I clearly had some work to do. But in its current state it uses 8 vCPU and “ONLY” 48GB of RAM. Which is still pretty darn big, but a lot better than it was when we started.

The networking requirements are pretty simple, the SP needs 1 Public NIC so that we can use its management tools. 2 Internal NICs which is used for internal communication to the directors. In our case that’s the Linux VM. The Linux VM needed the 2 internal NICs and 1 NIC to present an iSCSI target to. Then we put out ESXi host’s VMkernel NIC on the same vSwitch so it can use the iSCSI target provided by the VSA.

So that’s all great you say, but what actually works? That’s a good question.

What works is using Standard Devices, and very small ones today. One of the things I was told when I was given the code was that this WON’T and CAN’T do any I/O. Which obviously proved to be a bit of an issue. Chakib really worked his butt of to get me something that does I/O. So this is not like the Celerra UBER VSA by @lynxbat, where you can run a VM off of it. We hope we can do that one day. Thin Pools work to the extent you can create them, and put devices in a pool, but when you present it to a host it will not work. This kept me from using the VSI SPM plugin for vSphere as part of my lab, hey we always have next year! The really neat part to me is that the internal tools (SymmWin) that run on the SP fully work. It’s like having an actually VMAX, but without all the fuss of getting a few 50A power drops. As an ex-customer this to me is the coolest part, I got to put on my own BIN files, use Inlines (internal tool used to directly talk to the hardware). As a total nerd this thing is a dream come true.

So what’s next?

Well a lot of that depends on YOU! Since this is a total science project we need to show those in Symmetrix Engineering this is worth putting their time and money into. I need everyone here at VMworld this week to come try this thing, give me feedback, leave comments here, and if you aren’t at the show, express your desire for us to continue working on it. If no one is interested this will ultimately die on the vine. Please fill out this form so we can show how many of you all would like to see this project continue.

I have to give special thanks to Chad Sakac (@sakacc), Chris Horn (@horn_Chris) for getting me involved in this project and letting me run with it. Also all of the support they gave me during this process.

Here is a link to the lab guide being used this week at VMworld. Take a look and let me know what you think!

VMAX Lab Guide

Big thanks to Matt Cowger (@mcowger), Scott Lowe (@scott_lowe), and Tee Glasgow (@teeglasgow) for their help with the lab guide. Also to Rick Scherer (@rick_vmwaretips) for the blog help

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Tags: EMC, VMAX, VMware, VSA
Categories : EMC, Storage, V-MAX, Virtualization, VMware

vSphere 5, it’s here! What’s new?

12 07 2011

It’s here, it’s here.

VMware just announced their new version of vSphere 5, and as you have probably found out, general availability is targeted toward August this year. There is a whole bunch, and I mean a whole bunch, of new stuff coming out, and everyone knows what we can expect at VMworld this year.

Let me be clear that this post is in no way trying to sum up all the new things that are introduced with vSphere 5, but this is mean to give you a quick and easy to consume overview of some of the major new features.

Key stuff that is new or has changed in vSphere 5:

Virtual hardware limits. We can now address 32 virtual CPUs and a maximum of 1TB of RAM (note that virtual machine hardware type 8 is required). We see people running larger and larger workloads, and are seeing more and more people moving their tier 1 applications to a virtualized environent. Anyone who has tried to virtualize a large database or business warehouse system will know what I mean.
One word of caution though. Even though we can now create very large installations, be careful. This is not a sensible size for all applications, and you should check on an application specific basis if you really need something this big, and are able to leverage all of the resources it offers.
VMFS version 5. With the updated version of the VMFS there are some modifications being made. For one, you no longer need to use extents to create volumes over 2TB in size, and they have added support for physical RDMs that are over 2TB.
The service console is missing. Well, it's not really missing, but there is no more service console, due to the fact that you will now only find ESXi as the hypervisor. Although some people might be missing some things without the traditional ESX service console, this does offer some advantages like having only a single vSphere package, hardened security and less patches. But this should probably be one of the changes that almost everyone has seen coming, so I'm not going to go in to the depths on the pros and cons of this choice.
VAAI has again been enhanced. With vSphere 5, there are enhancements for both block and file based storage:
- for block:
  - Thin provision stun has been added, which is basically an option to get feedback when a thinly provisioned LUN is full. You will now get a message back from the array, and the affected guests are “stunned”. This allows the admin to add some more free space to the LUN, after which the guests can resume normal operation.
  - Space reclaim is the second feature that has been added. Now, one caveat is that this hardware offload is dependent of VMFS version 5. Anything prior to that won’t do the job. If that prerequisite is in place, any blocks that are freed up by VMFS operations, things like VM deletion or snapshot deletion, will now return their blocks to the pool of free blocks.
- For file:
  - You can now use NFS full copy. Somewhat similar to the block version, copying of files can now be offloaded to the array, which of course should speed up things like clone creation.
  - Extended stats adds the ability to get the extended information from files. Information about actual space allocation or the fact if the file is deduplicated can now be retrieved.
  - We can now use space reservation, to actually pre-initialize a disk and allocate all of the required space right off the bat.
VMware has redesigned HA. The new architecture should help people who want to work with streched clusters.
Basically, VMware has moved away from underlying EMC Autostart based construct to an entirely new model. The HA agent is now called the FDM, and one of the nodes in the cluster will now take on the role of master. All of the remaining nodes in the cluster are slaves to this master, which means that we are no longer using the primary/secondary concept that was common with the previous version of HA. During normal operation, we should only see one master node per cluster.

Benefits of the new construct are that we are no longer that susceptible to DNS issues. Also, VMware has added additional communication paths, -we can now also leverage so called “Heartbeat datastores”-, that will aid us in the detection of failures. And, as a bonus VMware has also added support for IPv6.

Since the entire HA stack has been rewritten, there are a lot of changes coming, and I’m planning on getting down to the nitty gritty in a future post, and I’m sure that my friend Duncan will also be explaining this in great detail on his blog.
VASA, or “vSphere Storage API for Storage Awareness” is basically a way for the storage array to actually tell vSphere what it can do, or what it is currently doing. Imagine getting feedback if your storage is cable of VAAI. Or something more simple like telling vSphere what RAID level a datastore has. Sounds sensible right? Now combine that with the new Storage DRS in vSphere 5, and you get a pretty good picture of what VASA can help you with.
Storage DRS. The DRS feature in vSphere is already pretty well known, and it’s something that I see in use a lot at customer sites.
Well, now you can also use DRS for your storage. To enable this feature, you create a so called “datastore cluster”, which is in essence nothing more than several datastores combined. Now, when you create a new VM, it is placed inside of a datastore cluster, and storage DRS balances everything out based on some key criteria like space utilization and I/O latencies. More to follow in a different post.

Now, this is by no means a complete overview, and I’ll be going in to these an other new features in upcoming posts. And I don’t want to flood you with information that can also be found on plenty of other blogs out there, but this should give you a good start. Look back for the things mentioned up here, but also for things like the added support for software based FCoE initiators, APD / PDL, the vSphere storage appliance, the new SRM 5 or vCloud Director 1.5.

Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: Cloud, DRS, ESX, ESXi, VAAI, VASA, VMware, VMware HA, VMworld, vSphere
Categories : GestaltIT, VAAI, vCloud Director, Virtualization, VMware, VMworld, vSphere

VMworld session voting has opened | Update: And has now closed

14 05 2011

Vote for someone else!

There, i’ve said it. And if you’re wondering if I took something, you are actually wrong.

As you most likely will know when you read my blog, I work for a company that is well known for their storage products, and is also known for software solutions in a boat load of ranges like backup, replication, business continuity and much more. And a large part of my job is working with customers that use, or considering using, virtualization technologies like VMware.

VMware has a big convention each year called VMworld, which brings the top speakers and topics to a central location for a couple of days to talk shop and show people what’s new and what’s good.

This year, like every year, there was a call for papers. Basically A request for people to send in their ideas and suggestions for topics and sessions that should be presented. And boy, did they get some feedback on their call. There were boatloads of papers submitted and reviewed by the VMware guys and girls, and in the end they left roughly 800 session in their system.

Now, 800 sessions might be a bit much for one convention, which means they need help in selecting the best ideas and the hottest topics, and they need your help.

How? Just go to the VMworld, register an account if you don’t already have one, and go through the list with session abstracts and vote for the ones that you think are best.

Did I also submit a session? Yep, and if you want to look it up, it’s session number 1863 and goes by the title of “vStorage APIs – What has changed since the introduction / How does it help me in real life?”.

But as I stated in the first sentence, vote for someone else. I’ve only partially seen the list of topics, but there are so many good sessions proposals out there! I’ve seen so many folks blowing their own horn over their sessions, and I’ve decided to take a different route. Take your time, go through the list, and pick the ones you like best. If that should include my session? Great! If not? No problem, since you get to decide what sessions should be included, and you make the difference in making sure that VMworld will be a rocking event with only the best info and sessions. And the only way to do that, is by making sure you vote for the sessions you want to see.

So go out there and vote and help make it a rocking event, and who knows, maybe we’ll get to see each other there!

Update: May 19th 2011

And the voting has now closed. Thanks for voting folks!

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Tags: API, Sessions, VAAI, VMware, VMworld, vStorage API
Categories : Virtualization, VMware, VMworld

Shorts: VMware vCloud Director not displaying the web portal

30 03 2011

A colleague of mine approached me today with a question on our vCloud Director environment. He tried to log in to the vCloud Director portal, and was unable to log in, because there was no page being displayed at all.

After checking if I was able to ping the interface, I logged on to the machine to see if there were any obvious errors. The vCloud Director daemon was still running and so was the database, but a netstat did not show any listeners on the vCloud Director IP. So, after going over the vCloud Director log files, there was a pretty obvious error in the vcloud-container-info.log:

ORA-28001: the password has expired

So, you now stop your vCloud Director daemon and switch to your Oracle user to see what was going on inside of the DB:
sqlplus "/ as sysdba"

Now, list all the users to see if they have an expired password:
select username,ACCOUNT_STATUS,EXPIRY_DATE from dba_users;

Or display just the specific user:
select username,ACCOUNT_STATUS,EXPIRY_DATE from dba_users where username='VCLOUD';

And guess what came up:
USERNAME ACCOUNT_STATUS EXPIRY_DA -------- -------------- --------- VCLOUD EXPIRED 17-MAR-11

Expired is something that you don’t want to see for a user that is being used actively. So, let’s set the password again and unlock the user:
alter user VCLOUD identified by replace_this_with_your_password; alter user VCLOUD account unlock;

So, once that is done, let’s check one more time:
SQL> select username,ACCOUNT_STATUS,EXPIRY_DATE from dba_users where username='VCLOUD'; USERNAME ACCOUNT_STATUS EXPIRY_DA -------- -------------- --------- VCLOUD OPEN 26-SEP-11

Now, start your vCloud Director daemon again, and in the log file you should no longer see the error, and the web interface should be working normally again.

Update – April 11^th 2011:

One of my other colleagues actually ran in to the same issue and found my blog post. He gave me some feedback asking if I would not be able to add how to find the sqlplus binaries since not everyone is a Linux master, so here goes:

Normally, if Oracle is installed on Linux, it is one of the prerequisites to set the environment variables. Basically this means that you tune your system to allow Oracle to run on it. You perform tasks like telling the system how much shared memory to use, you set semaphores and create a seperate user under which the Oracle installation runs.

Part of these tasks usually also means setting the path to the Oracle binaries for this user I just mentioned. Now, in some situations, your database is already installed, but you don’t know as what user or in what directory. This is not necessarily an issue. Just use the “ps” command to list all processes from all users. Use something like:

ps -efor
ps auxf

and look for the Oracle processes. At the start of the line you should see as which user these processes are running.

Once you have identified the user, switch to said user, using the following command:

su - user_name
Obviously, replace the user_name with the actual username. The “su” (or “switch user” if you will) is a command to actually switch to a different user. The dash or minus sign that is appended after the “su” command, makes “su” pass the environment along unchanged, as if you were actually logged in as the specified user.

The benefit of adding the dash, is that the user environment is set correspondingly, meaning that your path for the Oracle user is also set. This in turn means, that you normally don’t have to worry about the exact path to the Oracle installation. Normally you can just enter “sqlplus” in the way described above, and you should be set.

Should you still not be able to find sqlplus, you can try using the “find” command to search for sqlplus. Try using something like this:

find / -name sqlplus
This actually tells the find command to start searching in the “/” or root-directory for files with sqlplus in their names. Depending on your Linux release, you could also change the “-name” option to “-iname”, which changes the search to ignore the case in your search. This way, your search would also return a result if the binary would be called SQLplus (most Unices and Linux installations are case sensitive).

Once you have found your sqlplus binary, just enter the full path to the binary and you should be set.

If you have any other feedback, just let me know folks, and I’ll be more than happy to append it to my post.

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Tags: Expired, Oracle, Portal, vCloud Director, VMware
Categories : GestaltIT, vCloud Director, VMware, vSphere

What is VAAI, and how does it add spice to my life as a VMware admin?

27 11 2010

EMC EBC Cork

I spent some days in Cork, Ireland this week presenting to a customer. Besides the fact that I’m now almost two months in to my new job, and I’m loving every part of it, there is one part that is extremely cool about my job.

I get to talk to customers about very cool and new technology that can help them get their job done! And while it’s in the heart of every techno loving geek to get caught up in bits and bytes, I’ve noticed one thing very quickly. The technology is usually not the part that is limiting the customer from doing new things.

Everybody know about that last part. Sometimes you will actually run in to a problem, where some new piece of kit is wreaking havoc and we can’t seem to put our finger on what the problem is. But most of the time, we get caught up in entirely different problems altogether. Things like processes, certifications (think of ISO, SOX, ITIL), compliance, security or just something “simple” as people who don’t want to learn something new or feel threatened about their role that might be changing.

And this is where technology comes in again. I had the ability to talk about several things to this customer, but one of the key points was that technology should help make my life easier. One of the cool new things that will actually help me in that area was a topic that was part of my presentation.

Some of the VMware admins already know about this technology, and I would say that most of the folks that read blogs have already heard about it in some form. But when talking to people at conventions or in customer briefings, I get to introduce folks over and over to a new technology called VAAI (vStorage API for Array Integration), and I want to explain again in this blog post what it is, and how it might be able to help you.

So where does it come from?

Well, you might think that it is something new. And you would be wrong. VAAI was introduced as a part of the vStorage API during VMworld 2008, even though the release of the VAAI functionality to the customers was part of the vSphere 4.1 update (4.1 Enterprise and Enterprise Plus). But VAAI isn’t the entire vStorage API, since that consists of a family of APIs:

vStorage API for Site Recovery Manager
vStorage API for Data Protection
vStorage API for Multipathing
vStorage API for Array Integration

Now, the “only API” that was added with the update from vSphere 4.0 to vSphere 4.1 was the last API, called VAAI. I haven’t seen any of the roadmaps yet that contain more info about future vStorage APIs, but personally I would expect to see even more functionality coming in the future.

And how does VAAI make my life easier?

If you read back a couple of lines, you will notice that I said that technology should make my life easier. Well, with VAAI this is actually the case. Basically what VAAI allows you to do is offload operations on data to something that was made to do just that: the array. And it does that at the ESX storage stack.

As an admin, you don’t want your ESX(i) machines to be busy copying blocks or creating clones. You don’t want your network being clogged up with storage vMotion traffic. You want your host to be busy with compute operations and with the management of your memory, and that’s about it. You want as much reserve as you can on your machine, because that allows you to leverage virtualization more effectively!

So, this is where VAAI comes in. Using the API that was created by VMware, you can now use a set of SCSI commands:

ATS: This command helps you out with hardware assisted locking, meaning that you don’t have to lock an entire LUN anymore but can now just lock the blocks that are allocated to the VMDK. This can be of benefit, for example when you have multiple machines on the same datastore and would like to create a clone.
XSET: This one is also called “full copy” and is used to copy data and/or create clones, avoiding that all data is sent back and forth to your host. After all, why would your host need the data if everything is stored on the array already?
WRITE-SAME: This is one that is also know as “bulk zero” and will come in handy when you create the VM. The array takes care of writing zeroes on your thin and thick VMDKs, and helps out at creation time for eager zeroed thick (EZT) guests.

Sounds great, but how do I notice this in reality?

Well, I’ve seen several scenarios where for example during a storage vMotion, you would see a reduction in CPU utilization of 20% or even more. In the other scenarios, you normally should also see a reduction in the time it takes to complete an operation, and the resources that are allocated to perform such an operation (usually CPU).

Does that mean that VAAI always reduces my CPU usage? Well, in a sense: yes. You won’t always notice a CPU reduction, but one of the key criteria is that with VAAI enabled, all of the SCSI operations mentioned above should always perform faster then without VAAI enabled. That means that even when you don’t see a reduction in CPU usage (which is normally the case), you will see that since the operations are faster, you get your CPU power back more quickly.

Ok, so what do I need, how do I enable it, and what are the caveats?

Let’s start off with the caveats, because some of these are easy to overlook:

The source and destination VMFS volumes have different block sizes
The source file type is RDM and the destination file type is non-RDM (regular file)
The source VMDK type is eagerzeroedthick and the destination VMDK type is thin
The source or destination VMDK is any sort of sparse or hosted format
The logical address and/or transfer length in the requested operation are not aligned to the minimum alignment required by the storage device (all datastores created with the vSphere Client are aligned automatically)
The VMFS has multiple LUNs/extents and they are all on different arrays

Or short and simple: “Make sure your source and target are the same”.

Key criteria to use VAAI are the use of vSphere 4.1 and an array that supports VAAI. If you have those two prerequisites set up you should be set to go. And if you want to be certain you are leveraging VAAI, check these things:

In the vSphere Client inventory panel, select the host
Click the Configuration tab, and click Advanced Settings under Software
Check that these options are set to 1 (enabled):
- DataMover/HardwareAcceleratedMove
- DataMover/HardwareAcceleratedInit
- VMFS3/HardwareAcceleratedLocking

Note that these are enabled by default. And if you need more info, please make sure that you check out the following VMware knowledge base article: >1021976.

Also, one last word on this. I really feel that this is a technology that will make your life as a VMware admin easier, so talk to your storage admins (if that person isn’t you in the first case) or your storage vendor and ask if their arrays support VAAI. If not, ask them when they will support it. Not because it’s cool technology, but because it’s cool technology that makes your job easier.

And, if you have any questions or comments, please hit me up in the remarks. I would love to see your opinions on this.

Update: 2010-11-30
VMware guru and Yellow Bricks mastermind Duncan Epping was kind enough to point me to a post of his from earlier this week, that went in to more detail on some of the upcoming features. Make sure you check it out right here.

Comments : 8 Comments »
Tags: Storage, VAAI, VMware, vSphere
Categories : GestaltIT, Performance, Storage, VAAI, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere

BasRaayman's technical diatribe

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