Video

Slides

Notes

• Thin on Thin? Where should you do Thin Provisioning ñ vSphere 4.0 or Array-Level? http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/04/thin-on-thin-where-should-you-do-thin-provisioning-vsphere-40-or-array-level.html
• Calculating Capacity of a VSA Cluster with RAID10 Configuration http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.vsa.doc_10/GUID-8941D7EA-A876-4630-A165-80C46D81E219.html
• http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/02/18/blocksize-impact/
• vStorage APIs for Array Integration FAQ http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1021976

This time around, it’s audio only, so either view/listen below, or pick us up on iTunes.

Recording

Follow-Up Questions

There is one round of questions that made it’s way on to the web:
http://virtualistmanifesto.com/2011/12/06/storage-smackdown-brownbag-127-a-call-for-questions/

There may yet be more. If anyone feels like transcribing, drop me a line.

This week’s BrownBag is a revisit of the popular VMworld session of the same name (for reference). This time around, due to timing and finding representatives, we will only have EMC and NetApp available to throw down. That said, if you’ve followed either Chad Sakac or Vaughn Stewart on Twitter or the blogs for any length of time, you know it will be an entertaining show.

Smackdown Details

Date/Time: Wed, December 7th, 2011 @ 7:00p CST
Register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/945190048

To be honest, I’ve not poked at the vSphere Storage Appliance since the vSphere 5.x Beta. That said, the technology itself looks promising, and as will be discussed on the BrownBag this week, it will become part of some of your vSphere designs. To help prep for the BrownBag or to learn overall about the VSA, I’ve collected some links:

Useful Links

• BrownBag – http://professionalvmware.com/2011/10/brownbag-design-vsphere-storage-appliance/
• More Useful Links – http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/09/vsphere-storage-appliance-vsa-useful-links.html
• Resiliency:
• http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/09/vsphere-storage-appliance-vsa-network-outage-scenario-1-back-end.html
• http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/09/vsphere-storage-appliance-vsa-resilience-network-outage-scenario-2-front-end.html
• SRM – http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/page/2/
• More info – http://vmguy.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/1685
• Duncan is on board – http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/09/19/vsphere-storage-appliance-why-i-think-it-is-cool/
• What doesn’t it do – http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/19/vsa_virtual_filer/
• Sean Crookston’s Design Considerations – http://www.seancrookston.com/2011/08/30/design-considerations-for-the-vmware-vsa/
• William Lam, running the storage vm in a vm… “Yo Dawg” – http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2011/09/how-to-install-vmware-vsa-in-nested.html
• Vladan’s Installation video – http://www.vladan.fr/video-of-installation-of-vmware-vsa-vsphere-storage-appliance/

Summary

With luck you’ll find these useful. If you have any VSA resources that are not listed, drop a line in the comments and I’ll update the list.

Per Damian’s blog, this week’s BrownBag technical deep dive will center around vSphere design and the vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA). Damian will be joined by Sean Crookston, Chris Wahl, and Bill Hill to deep dive into designing vSphere environments with the VSA.

BrownBag – Desigh & vSphere Storage Appliance

Register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/945190048
Date/Time: 10/5 @ 7:30PM CST

The Summary! No, it’s not that I was too lazy to fill out the template for the post, really. In fact, it was an excellent call with Julian Cates from NetApp. All in all a pretty good discussion.

Video

ProfessionalVMware BrownBags – NetApp & Virtualization Storage from ProfessionalVMware on Vimeo.

Summary

So there we go, storage and virt in the bag, up to and including a VMworld preview.

This week’s BrownBag (the one on 7/6 that is) we will be talking all about storage and virtualization with NetApp’s Julian Cates.

“Julian Cates is a 14 year IT pro who has spent the last half of his career at NetApp as a consultant, engineer, and architect.  He is currently focused on NetApp storage solutions in the virtualization space.”

Details:

Date/Time: 7/6 @ 7PM CST
Register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/351927521

Notes:

We’re here to talk storage, virtualization, and cloud. Not so much with the “TwitPiss” or so. So bring your questions, prepare to get deep into the techie bits, etc, but let’s try to keep the competitive/salesish talk to a minimum. Besides, I’ve got something special coming in that regard for Post VMworld. *Grin*

NetApp is only the first of many to come. If you are a storage vendor (or anyone for that matter) and want to talk tech on the BrownBags, feel free to drop me a line on twitter, in the comments or via e-mail.

IOPS? No, it’s not where you go to get pancakes. Last night we were joined by two all-stars in VDI sizing and had an awesome audience conversation around VDI and it’s potential impact on storage. What follows is the video and some selected bits from the chat.

The Video

ProfessionalVMware BrownBags – VDI & Storage Impacts from ProfessionalVMware on Vimeo.

The Links

Well, honestly, when I wrote the post I thought they were there. Seemingly gotowebinar ate them. If you were on the BrownBag last night, drop a line in the comments with any of the formulas and sizing links (raid penalty’s etc) that you found useful. Sorry.

Woot! We’ve touched on storage before (here) but we have not yet scratched the surface of VDI let alone how it effects storage. More than that, we’ll have some VDI experts from around the community to talk to us. First, the critical details:

Critical Details:

Date/Time: 6/22 @ 7PM CST
Register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/351927521

Speaker Bios:

Michael Letschin

As Lead VMware and Storage Integration Architect for Convergence Technology Consulting, my focus is on developing full solution sets for enterprise customers looking to virtualize servers, desktops and application.   An techie at heart who has gone through IT management and now tries to keep on top of the latest and greatest to help whoever he can.

Mike Blogs at http://solutionsarchitect.wordpress.com/

Jon Spallone

Jon Spallone is a Lead Integration Architect at Convergence, responsible for the oversight and development of all coordinated designs, plans and deployments for the company’s Citrix practices. Jon has experience in application delivery, IT infrastructure and virtualization technologies within the public and private sectors.

Jon Blogs at: http://jonspallone.com/

One post, two parts. Not because they’re short, but because the days were so intense I only had a chance to jot down notes & start to expand on them now.

TL;DR – For those at the show, you’ll understand. For those that couldn’t make it… you’ll want to stay tuned to EMC & VMware… Big things coming.

Day 2 – Who Peed in Your Resource Pool

Day 2 was interesting on a number of accounts:

Keynote:

• It costs VMWare .06 per vm per hour to provision a VM.
• The hypervisor is no longer the secret sauce. That is now in management and orchestration
• Real time statistical analysis of your environment will help you identify the kid that peed in the resource pool.
• There are lots of new animals in the IT zoo (read: end user Devices)

VMWare End User Computing 2015

This one identified the state of things today, and how they’ll play out into the future. Unfortunately, I’ve still not made sense of my notes. I figure that’s because he iPad autocorrected them for me. Blah.

vLab – VSI

Boom! This lab was slick in that it walked you through installing, configuring & working with the EMC VSI plugin for vCenter. The plugin itself operated slowly, but this was more due to the nested VM nature of the lab.

Chad Sakac!

Chad did a “Social City” session after which I cornered him to ask about a BrownBag. I’ll have to work out some scheduling… but, expect some “face melting awesomesauce” coming to a BrownBag near you.

Day 3 – Hookah Smoking Caterpillars

A bit tired after yesterday, but some additional things talked about/covered that I came for.

PowerPath/VE Ask the Experts

This was a panel session, with a large number of folks from the PowerPath team. The questions were all over the place, so I’ll try to highlight a few that were interesting:

• Q: “I have customers who try to migrate either the quorum or MSCS volumes without taking the other node down, this makes pain. Is there a way to have the PowerPath migration tools notify the user of this pitfalls?” A: Crowd: “Wait what?” A: Panel: “Suggestion Taken”
• Q: “I have an issue when deploying PowerPath/VE to ESXi hosts that causes a PSOD. There is an open issue, but can you provide some perspective?” A: Engineering is working on it. The issue is a hard one to pin down as there don’t seem to be many consistencies with it, but they’re digging in.
• Q: “Does PowerPath/VE Support RDMs on Virtual Machines?” A: Yes… No… well, we’ll need to follow-up on that, here’s a card.

Virtual Storage Overview & Direction

I’m just going to leave these here and let you make of them what you will. I think you’ll find them curious indeed.

Disclaimer: EMC stated at the beginning of the session that well, these are “vision” slides. The future is uncertain, so take them with a grain of salt.

Nerd Herd

This was a “Social City” event put on / arranged by NerdBlurt (Luigi Danakos / @NerdBlurt). The panelists:

The conversation went round and round on the various bits of the show that each liked, thoughts on the vision, etc. I believe there will be a recording of the session here.

Summary:

On the whole, I didn’t get to a number of the sessions I was after, but still feel I got a huge amount of info from the ones I did make, as well as from the conversations with other expert folks at the show. The conversation with the PowerPath/VE engineers on deployment, FlexLM, and VUM told me quite a bit about what I rolled in there for. Additionally I got to corner any number of vSpecalists & other experts both VMware & EMC alike to get some direct questions addressed.

Further the show floor had any number of interesting things outside the typical key players. There was a small time SSD player with whom I had a great conversation (he wasn’t giving away an iPad2, so I got to talk to him for a bit). The storage/virt space is going to be interesting for a while to come & it’s good to see the small guys innovating also.

Pool Pee picture by this guy here.