Dell’s “Fluid Forward Think Tank – Let’s Talk Storage” – wrap-up
During the Dell Storage Forum in Paris, I’m have invited to be part of something called the ” Think Thank ” discussion,
where basically Partners , Customers and Dell brainstorm regarding several topics within the IT industry.
For the discussion moderation we had Simon Robinson, Research Vice President of 451 Research and representing partners & customers I was privileged to share ideas with
- Fabio Rapposelli, @fabiorapposelli
- Andrew Mauro, @andrea_mauro
- Barry Coombs, @virtualisedreal
- Didier Van Hoye, @WorkingHardInIT
- Rasmus Haslund, @haslund
- Charles Gillanders, @cgillanders
- Andreas Erson, @ersontech
- Tom Heskestad, @hypervfan
I was there “officially” with a Blogger hat on
, but I represented a end-customer / IT Architect perspective.
The conversation started off with an introduction of all the folks present at the table, and we had a nice mix of expertise around us , like storage administrators (obviously ! ), to systems architects, systems integrators.
Several topics were part of the discussions regarding Chargeback or cost-awareness also known as IT Show Back , systems/solutions convergence strategy , relationships between Dell, Partners (a reseller must deliver a very clear Value Added pitch or else is pointless) to trust towards/from the Vendor , manageability , roadmaps , build IT your own vs buy IT pre-configured , etc…
Quite interesting is the fact that despite the significantly different backgrounds we all have , the key concerns/ideas around all of us, were:
- the traditional storage model vs the so called software defined storage with their good and bad things
- flash …everyone understands flash and it would fix a lot of problems, however the problem is still the, high, cost
- scale-out vs scale-up approach
- who’s now in control ? the software vendors or the hardware vendors ?
- storage moved away from servers to shared environments, and now is going back to server again ?
- backup & restore .. how to deal with the fact that no one deletes data and we must be able to backup it up and restore it if needed
- bit expectations towards Windows 2013, HyperV 3, SMB3.0
- deduplication as an option we want vs a “necessary evil”
- Dell’s ability to execute their strategy based on buying a significant amount of companies, while keeping the support level as good as (if not better) and being able to integrate their IP rather than just sell it as a new product
- FcOE vs iSCSI (always a fun topic!)
- Management tools (or lack of )
- Cloud…we all agree that we use it , but we don’t adopt it ! 🙂
At the end of the discussion we all agree that there’s no technology that can meet everyone’s needs, and at the end of the day the most import thing is to make a solid design for your environment and see what’s the right tool for the job. The main key conclusion is that any business, independently from their size and area of business, must see IT as a business enabler and not as a cost center, and IT staff may need to learn a bit more of Business Politics 🙂
I honestly had a very pleasant time during the debate, and I look forward for the next opportunity to have a new discussion , to see if and how the discussed concerns have been mitigated/minimized.
As we all know that one image worths more than 1000 words here’s some , great, topics captured and illustrated during the session .
The session had a live stream, so you can check them out !
Finally thanks to Dell media team , Alison Krause and Michelle Richards for inviting me for the event, and for their support in making sure everything goes…Fluid 🙂
#storagebeers – Paris 2012
Dell Storage Forum 2012 Paris is right around the corner and with that an opportunity for #storagebeers came along.
The purpose of this gathering is to get in touch with fine folks and ladies , and start , to discuss IT Storage related issues. As the time goes and people get more acquainted with each other the number of subjects discussed are mind blowing.
Feel free to drop by and you will find a friendly , informal and , quite, informative event.
And without further chit·chat make sure you book your agenda for November, 14th 21H Havane Café ,Boulevard Auguste Blanqui, 75013 Paris.
Be there or be square ! 
#storagebeers#dellSF #dsf
VMworld Europe 2011 – Day zero
So finally i got my chance to attend a VMworld event , and i got the opportunity to go to the Copenhagen , Denmark.
I hope that during the event i will be able to chat with IT vendors and IT peers regarding virtualization and everything around IT, because virtualization is just part of the “big picture”.
For instance i look forward to discuss real life experiences in databases (Oracle/MS SQL) virtualization, with all their advantages or lack off..
Since i had never been into a VMworld before i really don’t know exactly what to expect, but i do know that i will try to get as much technical information as possible and to meet quite some really smart folks that “orbit” around the VMware/VMworld ecosystem.
As i start to attend the event itself i will try to update informations regarding the sessions and the event itself, so stay tuned aKa bookmark this page and came back later 🙂
For now, it’s time to get another dose of some medicines, because the flu decided to come along with me to this event…
@bsousapt
VMware 4.1 – Dell OpenManage Offline Bundle and VIB for ESXi installation script
Dear reader,
If you ever wondered how to install Dell Openmanage agents in a VMware host only by executing a simple script, fear no more..It’s possible, it’s quite simple and i will show you how 😉
I recently had to install 7 physical hosts [Dell R515] with VMware ESXi 4.1 Update 1 and for that i come up with a very small and easy script to install Dell Openmanage agents.
For this task i just had to download the Dell OpenManage Offline Bundle and VIB for ESXi , create a local directory [c:\vmware] and run my script.
Please be aware that you need to have installed the VMware Vsphere CLI [ i used version 4.1] and in my case i installed in a 64Bits machine.
The script does the following :
- set’s the physical host in maintenance mode
- installs the Dell OpenManage Offline Bundle VIB
- brings the physical host out from the maintenance mode
To make life easier i have zipped the Dell OpenManage Offline Bundle VIB together with the script and you download it here Dell OpenManage Offline Bundle and VIB for ESXi . Please make sure you rename the file from .doc to .zip [wordpress doesn’t allow to upload zip files] and extract it to c:\vmware and not c:\vmware\vmware .
At the end you should be able to see the hardware status within the vSphere client .
Script contents # START #
#Set the physical host in Maintenance Mode
cd “C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin\”
vicfg-hostops.pl –operation enter –server=your_vmware_host_ip –username=root –password=yourpassword
## Install OpenManage Agent – Dell OpenManage Offline Bundle and VIB for ESXi
cd c:\vmware
vihostupdate.pl –install –bundle C:\VMware\OM-SrvAdmin-Dell-Web-6.4.0-1266.VIB-ESX41i_A00.7.zip –server=your_vmware_host_ip –username=root –password=yourpassword
#exit maintenance mode
cd “C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin\”
vicfg-hostops.pl –operation exit –server=your_vmware_host_ip –username=root –password=yourpassword
Script contents # END #
VMware 5.0 Disk I/O performance – Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed vs Thick Provision Eager Zeroed vs Thin Provision
Hello dear reader,
As you know VMware has announced some time ago the vsphere 5 and finally it can be downloaded by anyone 🙂
Based on this i decided to test the performance of the 3 types of disks supported by VMware :
Basically the VM had 2 virtual disks assigned for the benchmark :
- Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed
- Thick Provision Eager Zeroed
- Thin Provision
Test setup :
One VM has been configured with 2 vcpu’s, 2 GB ram and 4 disks, all using the LSI SAS SCSI Controller :
- Disk 01 is the Windows “disk” (c:\ drive)
- Disk 02 it’s a Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed disk
- Disk 03 it’s a Thick Provision Eager Zeroed disk
- Disk 04 it’s a Thin Provision disk
The VM had 1 Gigabit link without any sort of redundancy, link aggregation, no MPIO , no jumbo frames to an ISCSI storage. The purpose of this exercise is to see the performance differences between the 3 types of disks and not to see the performance of the ISCSI storage .
Anyway….let’s go for the results
Results : ( results parsed at http://vmktree.org/iometer/ )
- I/O of a Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed disk
| Test name | Latency | Avg iops | Avg MBps | cpu load |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Max Throughput-100%Read | 0.00 | 3491 | 109 | 3% |
| RealLife-60%Rand-65%Read | 12.87 | 4490 | 25 | 11% |
| Max Throughput-50%Read | 101.44 | 6190 | 193 | 15% |
| Random-8k-70%Read | 13.96 | 5681 | 44 | 17% |
- I/O of a Thick Provision Eager Zeroed disk
| Test name | Latency | Avg iops | Avg MBps | cpu load |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Max Throughput-100%Read | 0.00 | 3511 | 109 | 1% |
| RealLife-60%Rand-65%Read | 12.78 | 4460 | 34 | 30% |
| Max Throughput-50%Read | 102.88 | 6261 | 195 | 2% |
| Random-8k-70%Read | 14.19 | 5770 | 45 | 34% |
- I/O of a Thin Provision disk
| Test name | Latency | Avg iops | Avg MBps | cpu load |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Max Throughput-100%Read | 0.00 | 3530 | 110 | 0% |
| RealLife-60%Rand-65%Read | 13.06 | 4566 | 35 | 30% |
| Max Throughput-50%Read | 102.36 | 6243 | 195 | 2% |
| Random-8k-70%Read | 14.17 | 5767 | 45 | 36% |
Conclusion :
It seems like VMware has quite similar performance across different types of disks (at least with the used benchmark profile for this test) and for me the Thin Provision disk would probably be the chosen one due to the fact of being…Thin .
During the next days/weeks i will try to get some more tests, against different storage devices and using ISCSI and NFS .
IT from Planet Zorg 