What’s New in vSAN 7.0 U1?

Earlier this year, VMware brought a dramatic chance to their virtualization platform with vSphere 7.  Now its time to bring in bug fixes as well as usher in new features with the U1 update.  This post will focus on changes coming to the vSAN software.  This software was designed with enhancements in 4 key areas:

  • Deliver a developer ready architecture
  • Increased scalability
  • Simplify day to day operations
  • Extend File Services

Developer Ready Architecture

Building on an already powerful Kubernetes offering with Tanzu, VMware has enhanced VSANs ability to work with containers and stateful cloud native applications thought the use of a Data Persistence platform (DPp).  This service provides the proper framework required for integrating stateful apps into vSAN.  By utilizing this framework, applications can assume the resilience responsibilities, cutting down on the overhead required by VSAN and allowing the applications to consume storage that would be equal to VMFS & RDMS.

Increased scalability

One of the biggest issues I’ve had with vSAN storage was that it was only dedicated to the same compute cluster.  This meant that things had to be incredibly right sized.  Otherwise, you had a lot of wasted space or had to add extra compute just to add storage.  This is where HCI Mesh comes into play.  Now you can share empty storage from one vSAN cluster with another cluster and make efficient use of the space.  Other enhancements have come in the form of customization settings for DD&C.  Now you can turn of the deduplication service in clusters that run workloads that wouldn’t benefit from it.  This frees up compute cycles that would otherwise just be wasted.  This setting also has the benefit of not taking out the entire disk group if a single disk fails.

Capacity management has also improved with more details being displayed about the cluster consumption.  Now users can get a more accurate depiction of just what is using up the space and can plan accordingly.  Increased efficiency also came to large clusters where the amount of reserved overhead space actually reduces as more nodes are added.  On the flip side, for smaller 2 node clusters, a single vSAN Witness can handle up to 64 2-node clusters (instead of requiring one per cluster).  This is great news for companies adopting vSAN for both their core datacenters as well as smaller remote sites.  And finally, VMware brings an overall performance increase to vSAN services, especially those utilizing erasure coding for increased capacity efficacy over a mirrored storage policy.

Simplify Day to Day Operations

One of the other big issues with vSAN has been maintenance.  Effectively faulting the system if you want to put a host into maintenance mode right away (or wait a while for data to be evacuated).  Now enhancements have been put in place to help get the last writes done quicker and the hosts in and out of maintenance mode even faster. The in-memory metadata tables are now being written down to cache in a “Save and Restore” method to allow hosts to reboot and come back into service faster, which allows for a quicker rolling reboot upgrade scenario.

Extend File Services

The biggest, and probably best, enhancement that comes to file services is the support of SMB.  Especially in smaller sites that need file services, a single VSAN cluster can now replace all the specialized storage services that normally needed a stand-alone array.  With support for both NFS and SMB, multiprotocol is now being offered and these can be shared back into applications.

Final Thoughts

These are all welcome changes and enhancements to VSAN and address a lot of things users have been bringing up for a while now.  Hopefully with the release of U1, users will now start upgrading from 6.7 sooner rather than later.

vSphere 7.0 is coming, are you ready?

It seems like just yesterday vSphere 6.7 was dropping (the 3rd installment in the vSphere 6 series).  Like a good book turned into a movie, it seems like even the final release was split into multiple parts.  Today starts a new adventure, and with that a major change to the to vCenter and ESXi.  Today I’m going to highlight just a few of the big changes coming.

vCenter Server Profiles

I know what you’re thinking … “OMG, Host profiles is coming to vCenter, why would I want this nightmare?”  I assure you, its not like that.  The idea behind this is for those of you who have multiple environments and require multiple vCenters.  We’ve all been there in just how complicated it can be to fine tune all the settings to meet security and integration needs.  Now you can do all that busy work on your first server, and just export that configuration to other vCenters, standardizing your implementation across the board.  There is even version control, so you can revert back to a previous known good if you mess something up (but of course you wouldn’t do that because you’re an expert!).  For those using automation platforms (puppet, chef, ansible, etc…) there is a wide range of APIs (4, just 4) that allow you to control this functionality as well as an exportable JSON configuration.  This API even has the built in ability to check if your changes are valid and will let you know which settings won’t work before you deploy.  While those in the SMB market may not need to use this functionality, those in the enterprise space will welcome it I’m sure.

vCenter Server Scalability

There have been a few improvements to vCenter server around it’s ability to scale up and out.  First and foremost, as expected with every major release, the number of hosts and VMs increase to 2500 and 30,000 respectively.  While were still limited to 15 vCenters in linked mode, the number of hosts that can be managed in that topology increased dramatically.  These will make great VCP test questions (They still ask for maximums on the exam, right?).  

Speaking of SSO, the CLI tools (cmsso-util) has been included for all your easy domain repointing and unregistering needs.

Content libraries are being improved and these are now considered the go to for template deployments.  One of the new features being included is a new version control system for templates, so you can roll back and deploy an early version if you need to.  It’s a simple check out / check in system to handle this.

Improved Performance

Several enhancements were made to the performance systems in a cluster.  First, DRS runs every 1 minute instead of every 5 to get better understanding of the workloads in an environment.  Also gone is the bubble level and instead a percentage score to show how optimized you are.  A lower score doesn’t necessarily mean a VM isn’t running properly, just that there are improvements to be gained. The other enhancement is around the concept of saleable shares.  This better aligns the amount of resource entitlements a VMs can get as determined by the resource pool they are in.  Now things dynamically adjust based on the number of VMs instead of a fixed share amount being granted.  No longer could a VM marked as normal be granted more shares than a Higher level VM.

Even vMotion is getting an enhancement.  By claiming a single vCpu during the vMotion process, great efficiencies can be had in the memory page tracing process, allowing for a decrease in the stun time.  While you may not notice this with a small VM, large workloads (such as SAP or Oracle) will greatly benefit from this and allow you to vMotion them without a huge impact.

Upgrades

Finally, probably one of the best announcements, the external platform controller is dead (and there was much rejoicing).  Any upgrades done with an external platform controller will be converged into an integrated, and its done as part of the upgrade so there is no longer a need to run the separate converged tool.  Even the upgrade planner gets some enhancements where it now gets notifications of the latest versions of vCenter server and has a what-if capability to validate as much as it can before an upgrade happens as well as checking interoperability between multiple VMware products.  To be honest, this is the simplest solution for everyone and I’m glad this is being built in to the installer and not just a KB article that has to be referenced.

The final piece of the upgrade enhancements revolves around the vSphere lifecycle manager.  Previously, upgrades were limited to the ESXi image (and any drivers that may be baked into an OEM image).  Now we can combine ESXi, Drivers, and even hardware firmware as part of the upgrade lifecycle (where have I seen this before … *cough* VRail *cough*).  Users will now be able to combine a base image, vendor add ons, firmware updates, and any additional components they deem necessary for the upgrade cycle.

So what do you think? Is this enough to take the plunge and upgrade right away?

Thoughts on the VMworld 2018 Day 1 Keynote

Today, with some assistance from the VMware Blogger program, I was able to get front and center for the VMworld 2018 keynote.  They shared some interesting updates with us.  First and foremost, Pat has a new tattoo

But seriously, VMware has seen their transition over the years in 5 acts.  First, it was all about ESXi.  Then came the ByoD (Bring your own Device revolution.  Followed closely by SDN (Software Defined Networking).  Then the entrance into public/hybrid clouds.  Most recently, they are getting into the Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning space.

As Pat put it, cloud is all about consistent infrastructure and consistent operations.  And the best way to do that on prem is with Cloud Foundation

When it comes to Public Cloud, there were some new announcements around integration with AWS.  Andy Jassy from Amazon came up on stage and talked a bit about road maps.  They’ve been getting high demand for their new fed cloud and will be opening and eastern US location soon.  However, the biggest announcement was around support for RDS (Relational Database Service) on VMware.  This is really going hard after the database market and is a great way to make a splash.

Next up was Project Dimension.  This is like a reverse hybrid cloud option.  The idea is going with a cloud first initiative that then stretches into on prem.  So what you can do now, leveraging VMware on AWS, is give your developers and AWS availability zone that is running on your own local hardware.

One of the cooler demos i saw was around “Cloud Motion”.  The idea of being able to bulk move VMs right into the could.  It starts by using vSphere Replication, and then when that’s done it does a vMotion right up into the cloud.  This makes it real easy to fling workloads into the cloud when the time is right.

There were also some great announcements around integration with Dell.  All new business laptops will ship ready to work with VMware workspace one.

We also got to see some cool new tech.  Coming soon you will see a version of ESXi that runs on ARM64 chips.  We are finding these embedded in more and more IoT devices, and this is a great way to do development and high availability.

And finally something new called vSphere Pro, which is a version of vSphere that has AppDefense built right in.  Now you can start building your firewall rules, segregation, and app security right in vSphere and be protected much more easily.

All in all, i think this is a strong showing from VMware that is in an area of growth.  I’m looking forward to the rest of the conference.

What’s new with vRealize?

keep-calm-and-vrealize-4Today VMware announced updates to 4 major products with vRealize branding (3 within the suite and 1 not).  Even though the version increments are small, the features they bring are not! vRealize Operations, Log Insight, Network Insight, and Business for Cloud have all received updates.  So lets get started, shall we?

vRealize Operations 6.6

Right out of the gate, you will notice something very different in this build of vRealize Operations (lovingly known as vROps).  That’s right, they’ve embraced HTML5!  If you’ve been using the HTML5 client for vSphere, you’ll see this looks very familiar (its the same underlying engine in both).  It is great to see VMware continuing to phase out flash and embrace something everyone can use.  Also in this build is a revised “Getting Started” page.  More and more people are just starting out with adding vROps into their environment, and making the product easier to new comers is always welcome, just make sure there is an easy way to dismiss all the getting started notifications for the power users Winking smile.  These new dashboards are based on types of rolls (Operations, Troubleshooting, Compliance, etc…).  Combine these with greater out of the box integrations with things like vSAN, Log Insight, Automation, and you’ve got a pretty powerful tool to get started with.

vROps H5 Client

One of the other big new features arriving in this update revolves around DRS.  Imagine, if you would, that you could enhance DRS with the power of vROps.  While by itself DRS is fantastic for load balancing in a cluster, now you can load balance across the entire datacenter.  This new combination will allow you to automatically move workloads to different clusters and different datastores.  Now, take it one step further. While DRS by itself is a reaction based process (it only kicks in once there is resource contention), when you can utilize the analytic engine of vROps you can get ahead of the curve.  Spotting patterns in workloads will allow DRS to move things ahead of time to ensure that your VMs have the resources available before the increase in load.  They call this Predictive DRS (pDRS).  I’ll be looking into this further in a later post, but this has the potential to be a real game changer for VMware.

Predictive DRS

And finally, one last thing, and I thought this was a bit interesting.  There has also been development around hardening / compliance.  There is a new dashboard that will tell you how hardened your components are (based on VMware’s hardening guide) and how compliant things are.  This even goes so far as to checking your environment against HCL.

Hardening

vRealize Log Insight 4.5

This update is a bit smaller than the vROps one and it revolves around vROps as well.  In this update, they’ve added closer integration with vROps.  In fact, now you can launch Log Insight directly from the vROps dashboard.  You can auto initiate log management to get to the bottom of the alerts you are seeing in vROps.  Now to achieve this, they had to make more enhancements to the single sign-on support, so it would seem this is working better.

Log Insight vROps Integration

vRealize Network Insight 3.4

The updates coming to vRNI revolve around a few key areas.  First, if you are an enterprise customer, you will now be able to manager security with your cloud integration with AWS.  You’ll be able to EC2 instances to application groups for micro segmentation, have visibility into AWS flows and security groups, and triage AWS traffic issues. For those of you without enterprise license, you can expect to see greater ability to troubleshoot between physical and virtual infrastructure.  You’ll be able to gain insight into issues involving the underlying layer 2 network as well as gain enhanced traffic and security analytics from physical servers.  One last enhancement is ability to take vRNI generated events and export them to a syslog, which would be of great use in Log Insight.

 

vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3

Now I’ll admit, this is the product that I’m the least familiar with.  For those of you not familiar with this tool, its great for larger environments that want to get a handle on hybrid cloud.  You can break down your costs of your VMs and map them against various providers to get a cost analysis.  In this update Azure has been recognized as a major player in the cloud market, and has been promoted to that status within the analytics engine.  The AWS integration has also been improved with enhanced VM level statistics.  There are also some new out of the box reporting capabilities.  One of the best ones is a new Daily Pricing Report.  Administrators can configure a daily email (or spreadsheet) that will itemize your datacenter costs so that you can keep better track of costs.

Daily Pricing Report

Sean’s Take

Its great to see more enhancements to these products.  Its clear that vROps is getting a long needed overhaul and being placed in the center of things, with it’s ability to reach into every product and maximize it’s benefit.  If you haven’t had the chance, i urge you to give it a try and see what it can do for you.  As VMware embraces Amazon and Azure, they want to make sure you also get the most out of it, which is why we see these additional enhancements in that space as well.

VxRail – One Year Later

vxrail.frontOne year ago, EMC (yes it was still EMC at the time) launched their update to the VSPEX BLUE, EMC’s take on the EVO: Rail product.  For those who don’t remember, EVO: Rail was a joint effort between VMware and several hardware vendors to release hyper converged infrastructure to the masses.  I covered the original launch here and EMC’s spin on it.  The EVO: Rail program was a success / failure depending on who you spoke to in the industry, but it did validate that HCI is here to stay and not just a passing fad.  Later on, the EVO program was retooled under a joint venture between EMC & VMware under the VCE umbrella , and last year launched the evolution of that product … VxRail!

What went well?

What's Going Well

VxRail went GA in March of 2016 and so far sales have good, especially in the mid market, especially on purpose built deployments (VDI, Databases, etc…).  Working for a partner, I can attest that HCI adoption is going strong in the market place as more and more people look to it as a possible future.  The product has undergone several major releases, which is huge for a product that was just starting to sell.  It means that they are really listening to feedback and delivering to enhance the product regularly.  It helps that VMware has been continuously driving innovation on the VSAN side (which VxRail is built on).

What needs improvement?

What's not going well

Dell EMC will be the first to admit that they didn’t expect the sales of this product (especially given the sales of the previous generation), and thus they didn’t quite bulk up the PS side to match.  Unfortunately that mean delays while the back log was churned through.  The other side was features was prioritized over serviceability, so things like the support gateway were not built in when you would have expected it was already included.  The good news is things like this have been addressed (or are being addressed soon).

So what’s next for VxRail?

VxRail 4.0

Flash Flash Flash!  Recent sales have been leaning very heavily to all flash solutions, and that will be the trend going forward with VxRail sales which will also drive development on those lines especially in NVMe and NVDIMMs.  The shift in the recent version to use Dell PowerEdge Servers has also opened up a lot of configuration options for memory and CPU.

Multiple Node Options

With offering several different types of nodes, you can right size the product for the solution and make the price a lot more attractive (this is one of the things learned from the EVO sales).

Sean’s Take

Its great to see things are finally shaping up for the EVO program and just further validates something I’ve believed for years.  Speaking as a partner, I welcome the extra options in HCI market space because it gives the customer a better chance to get what they want, and that will greatly help more people consider HCI an option for their next step in the data center journey.  It was great to speak with Chad Dunn at Tech Field Day 13 (#TFD13) earlier this month in Austin.  If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the videos from Dell EMC.

Cheap and Simple MDM for the Masses!

Airwatch-by-vmware-logoAs businesses expand, IT staffs often do not.  When more and more people are added to the company, you will need a way to manage everyone’s devices.  Whether you have corporate secrets to protect, a BYOD policy to enforce, or you just want people to stop asking you for the Wi-Fi password, mobile device management is becoming a bigger part of day to day operations.  Today, VMware is proud to announce the addition of a new product, Airwatch Express!

Airwatch Express is the MDM-as-a-service offering that allows companies to manage mobile devices without going through a major investment in time or resources.  At only $2.50/month/device, this offering allows a 100% cloud based management of devices that comes in at almost half the current pricing.

AirWatch Express Blueprint_Page_05

So what do you get in this offering.  Well first, it’s 100% cloud based.  No need to install and setup a solution on premises.  Administrators manage devices by creating blueprints (similar to vRealize Automation).  The cloud based portal walks them through 7 steps including the type of devices they want to configure, what applications are required to be installed or need to be blocked (yes you can block things like youtube), as well as mail, Wi-Fi, and encryption settings.  You then assign these blueprints to your users (by either creating them in the website or using the active directory connector plugin).  It couldn’t be any simpler.

AirWatch Express Blueprint_Page_08

As someone who has worked for a startup that had a single digit sized IT team, yet was hiring 10 new employees a week, this is a great offering to get the job done and not stress out the IT staff.  While Airwatch Express might not be the most feature rich offering (it is designed as an entry level product), buyers can upgrade to other versions of Airwatch that might suit their needs better.

Turning VDI up to 11!

11It’s an exciting time in the world of HCI.  More and more people are starting to realize the benefits of consolidating their environments down to a smaller footprint.  Today, SimpliVity is taking that a step further and cranking up VDI density to 11!  Building on the momentum of the OmniStack 3.0 release, a new software update greatly improves the time to deployment and performance of VDI workloads while maintaining predictable results as you scale.  While you can read the full announcement here, I want to highlight a few of the results:

  • 1000 linked clones in 4 nodes
  • 1000 desktops in 70 minutes
  • 1000 logins in 1000 seconds

These are some pretty bold claims, and to back that up, they are all validated by LoginVSI benchmarks!

1000 linked clones in 4 nodes

So before I dive into these claims, a little background information about the environment.  These tests were performed on the all new OmniCube CN-2400 platform.  This platform give a 15%-20% boost over the CN-2200 and brings the Intel Haswell chipset to a lower cost solution.  As with all the OmniCube offerings, RAM and CPU are adjustable to fit your needs.  CN-24004 of the CN-2400s were placed in a cluster and each were given 384 gigs of ram.  As for the different type of VMs used, they were based on the industry standards for Task Worker, Office Worker, and Knowledge Worker.  Using Windows 7 64 bit, they were given 1 gig of ram, 1.5, and 2 gigs respectively.  So lets take a look at the first claim.  Loading 1000 desktops into this size of an environment delivers unheard of density in the HCI space.

1000 desktops in 70 minutes

One of the major stresses on a VDI environment is the amount of time it takes to provision desktops.  Whether you are deploying a new OS, refreshing the existing image after an update, or bringing up your environment after a disaster, users don’t want to have to wait around to get access to their work, and likewise administrators don’t want to spend all night doing maintenance (IT admins need sleep too!).

1000 linked clones in 70 minutes

As you can see from the graph above, the number of linked clone desktops scaled up linearly as they registered a desktop check-in in the Horizon View logs.  Performance of the virtual desktops did not take a hit either as the number of instances increase as seen in the graph below.

1000 linked clones performance

1000 logins in 1000 seconds

Login storms, love them or hate them, it’s a part of doing business.  Every morning, users all login around the same time, and infrastructure needs to be able to handle that.  For this test, SimpliVity wanted to see just how much load could be put on the system during a scenario such as this, so the login time was adjusted to occur every second (a 2.8x increase over the industry standard for testing) which means that by 1000 seconds, all 1000 desktops will have performed a login.

1000 logins 1000 secondsI think the results here speak for themselves.  As the number of active sessions increases, performance remains steady and well below the threshold where users would see problems.

The full results of all the testing is posted here.  I’m really excited by this development and can’t wait to see what can be achieved in the future.

VMware Announces vExperts for 2015 Second Half

vExpert-2015-BadgeYesterday, VMware announced the list of vExperts for 2015 Second Half and I am honored to be a part of that list.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, the “vExpert” designation is not based on technical expertise, but rather a recognition for excellent engagement and influence within the virtualization communities.  To quote directly from the program:

“Each of these vExperts have demonstrated significant contributions to the community and a willingness to share their expertise with others. Contributing is not always blogging or Twitter as there are many public speakers, book authors, script writers, VMUG leaders, VMTN community moderators and internal champions among this group.”

I am gracious and humbled to be considered an influencer in this community and this has reaffirmed my commitment to knowledge sharing.  I want to thank Corey Romero and the rest of the vExpert team.  Keep up the great work with this program.

Breathing new life into the home lab – Part 1: Flash Storage

M600It’s been a few years since I’ve put an investment into the home lab.  I had originally built this to teach myself enough to pass the VCP4 & my VCP5 (and i’ll use if for my VCP6 too).  But now I want to expand, learn more about VDI, the vRealize suite, as well as experiment with other technologies.  To do that, some upgrades will be needed, and the first area to start with is storage.  Spinning disk is still the cheapest way to get bulk storage, but for a home lab, I don’t need multiple TB of space when all of my VMs are thin provisioned.  Instead, to get the speed I want, i’d have to stitch together way more hard drives than I have space for.  This is where flash can really shine.  You only need a few disks to get a huge speed boost, so your costs are not astronomical.  By chance, I recently received a few 1Tb Micron M600 SSDs and these things are amazing.  After taking 1 for my laptop, the rest were loaded into a Synology 1813+.  So what do these SSDs bring to the table?

Type of test Performance IOPS
Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) 560.129 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) 511.183 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) 357.966 MB/s 87394.0
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) 365.970 MB/s 89348.1
Sequential Read (Q= 1,T= 1) 489.114 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 1,T= 1) 473.808 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) 22.846 MB/s 5577.6
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) 60.840 MB/s 14853.5

Wow that’s fast!  Good job Micron!  The results above were taken using CrystalDiskMark on my windows laptop and show the most I could get out of a single drive that was direct attached.

To make the most of this storage for a lab, i think it would be best to put this into the NAS and leverage it as shared storage, and the synology is configured for a 4 x 1gig LACP connection, which should be more than enough for a home lab.  The question is, what do i do with the storage, do i do NFS or iSCSI?  RAID 5 or RAID 10?  Well, lets try them all!  I’ll create a datastore in each configuration and test it with 1 windows VM running CrystalDiskMark just like I did on my laptop and see what we get.

iSCSI_Raid_5 iSCSI_Raid_10 iSCSI_on_FS Raid_10
Type_of_test Performance IOPS Performance IOPS Performance IOPS
SR (Q=32) 113.758 MB/s 117.027 MB/s 117.316 MB/s
SW (Q= 32) 82.531 MB/s 117.046 MB/s 115.717 MB/s
RR 4KiB (Q= 32) 52.542 MB/s 12827.6 52.154 MB/s 12732.9 38.101 MB/s 9302.0
RW 4KiB (Q= 32) 35.035 MB/s 8553.5 49.571 MB/s 12102.3 66.477 MB/s 16229.7
SR (Q= 1) 86.619 MB/s 94.588 MB/s 101.082 MB/s
SW (Q= 1) 75.291 MB/s 105.702 MB/s 102.972 MB/s
RR 4KiB (Q= 1) 8.691 MB/s 2121.8 8.276 MB/s 2020.5 10.676 MB/s 2606.4
RW 4KiB (Q= 1) 10.006 MB/s 2442.9 9.594 MB/s 2342.3 11.077 MB/s 2704.3
NFS Raid 5 NFS Raid 10
Type of test Performance IOPS Performance IOPS
SR (Q= 32) 114.898 MB/s 117.439 MB/s
SW (Q= 32) 96.743 MB/s 117.007 MB/s
RR 4KiB (Q= 32) 56.588 MB/s 13815.4 66.533 MB/s 16243.4
RW 4KiB (Q= 32) 44.319 MB/s 10820.1 57.590 MB/s 14060.1
SR (Q= 1) 106.323 MB/s 109.257 MB/s
SW (Q= 1) 81.581 MB/s 106.127 MB/s
RR 4KiB (Q= 1) 12.513 MB/s 3054.9 14.132 MB/s 3450.2
RW 4KiB (Q= 1) 9.270 MB/s 2263.2 10.571 MB/s 2580.8

*I apologize for the table formatting, no matter what i set it to, wordpress is deciding to do it’s own thing.

It’s clear from these test results that i am maxing out the 1 gig connection on the sequential transfers (especialy when the queue depth is increased).  I was a bit surprised by the performance gains in the RAID 10 vs. RAID 5 and that NFS ended up being faster than iSCSI (probably cause it’s all software based iSCSI).  Clearly this will work well for a single host, but the real performance testing will happen when multiple hosts hit the NAS.  So that is where i go next, now that i’ve settled on a storage configuration, i can start planning hosts for this home lab.  Let me know your thoughts in the comments

VSPEX Blue – Evo:Rail and more!

VSPEX Blue Today EMC announced it’s latest product, the VSPEX Blue!  This 2U hyper converged offering is based of of VMware’s EVO:Rail platform that was announced last year.  While most everyone reading this is familiar with the EVO:Rail platform, the VSPEX Blue offering expands on this to give even more to the administrator.

For those of you unfamiliar, EVO:Rail offers a simplified VMware cluster setup that lets you go from power on to provisioning virtual machines in about 15 minutes with limited interaction from the administrator.  For more information about the software and basic interface, read this blog post from Duncan Epping.

So what do you get?

On the outside, each VSPEX Blue appliance is a standard Phoenix 2U chassis that contains 4 nodes.  Each node contains 2 gigabit ethernet ports, and 4 storage drives to make it vSan compliant.  The diagram below explains in detail what to expect from a hardware perspective.

VSPEX Blue Hardware

One differentiating factor in the hardware is that this is the first EVO:Rail solution to offer both a standard and performance model.  The only difference is that the standard has 128GB of ram and the performance has 192GB.  The below slide explains what you get in each node.

VSPEX Blue Node

 

So what sets this apart from the other vendors?

That is an interesting question.  While there is a slight hardware differentiation in RAM options, the biggest differences come in the form of software.  On top of the standard VMware offering comes the VSPEX Blue Manager.  This is built into the standard EVO interface, so what you get is extra options in a familiar presentation.  A key section is the hardware manager which allows you to view the hardware status of each component in the appliance in an interface that reminds me of Unisphere.

VSPEX Blue Manager Appliance View

 

You can visualize exactly which part has failed and this makes it easy for the administrator to replace the parts themselves.  Tied with this also comes the EMC Remote support options including ESRS found on EMC’s traditional storage platforms.  You can click right from the VSPEX Blue Manager interface and get knowledge base access and live chat available to you.  EMC will be handling the support for all issues relating to the VSPEX Blue appliance and will interface with VMware as needed.  The administrator will not need to call 1 company for hardware and another for software.

The other major addition from EMC is the VSPEX Blue Marketplace.  This is a great place to click and automatically deploy additional VMware related software solutions.  When VSPEX Blue goes GA in 2 weeks, it will launch with the following options from the marketplace:

  • EMC Recoverpoint for VMs (Licensed for 15 VMs per appliance)
  • CloudArray Virtual Edition (1 TB of cache and 10TB of cloud storage)
  • vSphere Data Protection Advanced (Alowing you to backup to Avamar and Datadomain)

VSPEX Blue MarketThis is just to start, as the product evolves more offerings will be available from EMC and from partners.

My take on this offering

So after looking at all the launch partners, it’s clear that while EMC is last to market, they haven’t just been wasting their time.  This is the first appliance i’ve seen that offered something more than just the standard EVO:Rail offering and laid the groundwork for a bigger ecosystem.  Given that this is the first instance that there are 2 different hardware offerings, i can see some people saying that EMCs relationship with VMware allowed them something special.  My understanding (and i could be wrong about the specifics on this) is that this option is available to all partners, so we may see some new offerings from the existing launch partners as well.

This appliance is also a partner only sale, so EMC Sales reps won’t be selling them directly (unless you want to buy a lot of them) and they will be sourced directly from the OEM manufacturers, which means the partner will be in charge of delivery instead of EMC.

VSPEX Offerings

Finally, this offering now really shows the VSPEX offerings at all sizes.  With the internalization of VCE, EMC can now offer converged options for small, medium, and large business.  And no i’m not going to talk about that 4th option in the photo above.