Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Interestingly, in the enterprise data center trade shows I have attended recently, the focus was on systemic risk and systemic performance rather than on discrete products or technologies; exactly the opposite of what I’ve read about hypervisor and cloud shows, where the focus has been on faster processors, faster storage (NVMe, 3D NAND) and faster networks (100 GbE).  This may be a reflection of the two communities of practitioners that exist in contemporary IT:  the AppDev folks and the Ops folks.

vRops 6.3 has been announced. I have already upgraded a test environment of mine and a few production environment and are talking to customers who what’s to upgrade ASAP. There are different great features that make an upgrade worthwhile. Before I jump in and show case all the cool improvements and added features. A word of caution BEFORE upgrading make sure all endpoint operations agents have been upgraded. vRops 6.3 is not backward compatible with 6.x agents.

The placement of the virtual machines in a Hyper-V cluster is an important step to ensure performance and high availability. To make a highly available application, usually, a cluster is deployed spread across two or more virtual machines. In case of a Hyper-V node is crashing, the application must keep working. But the VM placement concerns also its storage and its network. Let’s think about a storage solution where you have several LUNs (or Storage Spaces) according to a service level. Maybe you have an LUN with HDD in RAID 6 and another in RAID 1 with SSD. You don’t want that the VM which requires intensive IO was placed on HDD LUN.

Samsung announced its 960 PRO and 960 Evo, the next generation M.2 PCIe SSDs. Like the 950 Pro, the 960 Pro and 960 Evo are PCIe 3.0 x4 drives using the latest NVMe protocol for data transfer. The 960 Pro offers a peak read speed of 3.5GB/s and a peak write speed of 2.1GB/s, while the Evo offers 3.2GB/s and 1.9GB/s respectively. The 950 topped out at a mere 2.5GB/s and 1.5GB/s. The 960 Pro and the 960 Evo are planned for release in October. The Pro starts at $329 for 512GB of storage, rising up to a cool $1,299 for a 2TB version. The Evo price goes from $129 for a 250GB version to $479 for a 1TB version.

In Windows Sever 2016 Microsoft improved Hyper-V backup to address many of the concerns mentioned in our previous Hyper-V backup challenges Windows Server 2016 needs to address: They avoid the need for agents by making the API’s remotely accessible. It’s all WMI calls directly to Hyper-V. They implemented their own CBT mechanism for Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V to reduce the amount of data that needs to be copied during every backup. This can be leveraged by any backup vendor and takes away the responsibility of creating CBT from the backup vendors. This makes it easier for them to support Hyper-V releases faster. This also avoids the need for inserting drivers into the IO path of the Hyper-V hosts. Sure the testing & certification still has to happen as all vendors now can be impacted by a bug MSFT introduced. They are no longer dependent on the host VSS infrastructure. This eliminates storage overhead as wells as the storage fabric IO overhead associated with performance issues when needing to use host level VSS snapshots on the entire LUN/CSV for even a single VM. This helps avoid the need for hardware VSS providers delivered by storage vendors and delivers better results with storage solution that don’t offer hardware providers. Storage vendors and backup vendors can still integrate this with their snapshots for speedy and easy backup and restores. But as the backup work at the VM level is separated from an (optional) host VSS snapshot the performance hit is less and the total duration significantly reduced. It’s efficient in regard to the number of data that needs to be copied to the backup target and stored there. This reduces capacity needed and for some vendors the almost hard dependency on deduplication to make it even feasible in regards to cost. These capabilities are available to anyone (backup vendors, storage vendors, home grown PowerShell scripts …) who wishes to leverage them and doesn’t prevent them from implementing synthetic full backups, merge backups as they age etc. It’s capable enough to allow great backup solutions to be built on top of it.

With the next release of Windows Server, 2016, who will be available during Ignite conference (end of September), a new feature will be released. It’s Windows Containers.

Personally I have been very successful at providing good backup designs for Hyper-V in both small to larger environments using budgets that range in between “make due” to “well-funded”.  How does one achieve this? Two factors. The first factor is knowing the strengths and limitations of the various Hyper-V versions when you design the backup solution. Bar the ever better scalability, performance and capabilities with each new version of Hyper-V, the improvements in back up from 2012 to 2012 R2 for example were a prime motivator to upgrade. The second factor of success is due to the fact that I demand a mandate and control over the infrastructure stack to do so. In many case you are not that lucky and can’t change much in already existing environments. Sometimes not even in new environments when the gear, solutions have already been chosen, purchased and the design is deployed before you get involved.

As you know, the main virtualization conference VMworld 2016 arranged by VMware is now being held in Las Vegas. On the first day of the conference several interesting announcements were made. For example, VMware Cloud Foundation, which soon will be available on the IBM platform and later with other vendors, as well, was presented. It allows to get a ready-made infrastructure at customer’s site with both necessary software and hardware components and ready, configured and integrated control and automation tools like NSX, Virtual SAN and vRealize:

When we got Shared VHDX in Windows Server 2012 R2 we were quite pleased as it opened up the road to guest clustering (Failover clustering in virtual machines) without needing to break through the virtualization layer with iSCSI or virtual Fibre Channel (vFC).