So if you work in IT, and even better, if you’re in the virtualization space of IT as I am, you have to know that VMworld is happening this week.
VMworld is just about the biggest vCelebration of vTechnologies there is. Part trade-show, part pilgrimage, part vLollapalooza, VMworld is where all the sexy new vProducts are announced by VMware, makers of ESXi, vSphere, vCenter, and so many other vThings.
It’s an awesome show…think MacWorld at the height of Steve Jobs but with fewer hipsters and way more virtualization engineers. Awesome.
And I’ve never been :sadface:
And 2014’s VMworld was a doozy. You see, the vGiant announced a new 2U, four node vSphere & vSAN cluster-in-a-box hardware device called EVO:RAIL. I’ve been reading all about EVO:RAIL for the last two days and here’s what I think as your loyal Hyper-V blogger:
What’s in a name? Right off the bat, I was struck by the name for this appliance. EVO:RAIL…say what? What’s VMware trying to get across here? Am I to associate EVO with the fast Mitsubishi Lancers of my youth, or is this EVO in the more Manga/Anime sense of the word? Taken together, EVO:RAIL also calls to mind sci-fi, does it not? You could picture Lt. Cmdr Data talking about an EVO:RAIL to Cmdr Riker, as in “The Romulan bird of prey is outfitted with four EVO:RAIL phase cannons, against which the Enterprise’s shields stand no chance.” Speaking of guns: I also thought of the US Navy’s Railguns; long range kinetic weapons designed to destroy the Nutanix/Simplivity the enemy.
If you’re selling an appliance, do you need vExperts? One thing that struck me about VMware’s introduction of EVO:RAIL was their emphasis on how simple it is to rack, stack, install, deploy and virtualize. They claim the “hyper-converged” 2U box can be up and running in about 15 minutes; a full rack of these babies could be computing for you in less than 2 hours. They’ve built a sexy HTML 5 GUI to manage the thing, no vSphere console or PowerCLI in sight. It’s all pre-baked, pre-configured, and pre-built for you, the small-to-medium enterprise. It’s so simple a help desk guy could set it up. So with all that said, do I still need to hire vExperts and VCDX pros to build out my virtualization infrastructure? It would appear not. Is that the message VMware is trying to convey here?
One SKU for the Win: I can’t be the only one that thinks buying the VMware stack is a complicated & time-consuming affair. Chris Wahl points out that EVO:RAIL is one SKU, one invoice, one price to pay, and VMware’s product page confirms that, saying you can buy a Dell EVO:RAIL or a Fujitsu EVO:RAIL, but whatever you buy, it’ll be one SKU. This is really nice. But why? VMware is famous for licensing its best-in-class features…why mess with something that’s worked so well for them?
Shades of Azure simplicity here
One could argue that EVO:RAIL is a reaction to simplified pricing structures on rival systems…let’s be honest with ourselves. What’s more complicated: buying a full vSphere and/or vHorizon suite for a new four node cluster, or purchasing the equivalent amount of computing units in Azure/AWS/Google Compute? What model is faster to deploy, from sales call to purchasing to receiving to service? What model probably requires consulting help?
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great. I like simple menus, and whereas buying VMware stuff before was like choosing from a complicated, multi-page, multi-entree menu, now it’s like buying burgers at In ‘n Out. That’s very cool, but it means something has changed in vLand.
I love the density: As someone who’s putting the finishing touches on my own new virtualization infrastructure, I love the density in EVO:RAIL. 2 Rack Units with E5-26xx class Xeons packing 6 cores each means you can pack about 48 cores into 2U! Not bad, not bad at all. The product page also says you can have up to 16TB of stroage in those same 2U (courtesy of VSAN) and while you still need a ToR switch to jack into, each node has 2x10GbE SFP+ or Copper. Which is excellent. RAM is the only thing that’s a bit constrained; each node in an EVO:RAIL can only hold 192GB of RAM, a total of 768GB per EVO:RAIL.In comparison, my beloved 2U pizza boxes offer more density in some places, but less overall, given than 1 Pizza Box = one node. In the Supermicros I’m racking up later this week, I can match the core count (4×12 Core E5-46xx), improve upon the RAM (up to 1TB per node) and easily surpass the 16TB of storage. That’s all in 2U and all for about $15-18k.Where the EVO:RAIL appears to really shine is in VM/VDI density. VMware claims a single EVO:RAIL is built to support 100 General Purpose VMs or to support up to 250 VDI sessions, which is f*(*U#$ outstanding.
I wonder if I can run Hyper-V on that: Of course I thought that. Because that would really kick ass if I could.
Overall, a mighty impressive showing from VMware this week. Like my VMware colleagues, I pine for an EVO:RAIL in my lab.
I think EVO:RAIL points to something bigger though…This product marks a shift in VMware’s thinking, a strategic reaction to the changes in the marketplace. This is not just a play against Nutranix and other hyper-converged vendors, but against the simplicity and non-specialist nature of cloud Infrastructure as a Service. This is a play against complexity in other words…this is VMware telling the marketplace that you can have best-in-class virtualization without worst-in-class licensing pain and without hiring vExperts to help you deploy it.
A few brief updates & random thoughts from the last few days on all the stuff I’ve been working on.
Refreshing the Core at work: Summer’s ending, but at work, a new season is advancing, one rack unit at a time. I am gradually racking up & configuring new compute, storage, and network as it arrives; It Is Not About the Hardware™, but since you were wondering: 64 Ivy Bridge cores and about 512GB RAM, 30TB of storage, and Nexus 3k switching.
Ahh, the Nexus line. Never had the privilege to work on such fine switching infrastructure. Long time admirer, first-time NX-OS user. I have a pair of them plus a Layer 3 license so the long-term thinking involves not just connecting my compute to my storage, but connecting this dense stack northbound & out via OSPF or static routes over a fault-tolerant HSRP or VRRP config.
To do that, I need to get familiar with some Nexus-flavored acronyms that aren’t familiar to me: virtual port channels (VPC), Control Plane policy (COPP), VRF, and oh-so-many-more. I’ll also be attempting to answer the question once and for all: what spanning tree mode does one use to connect a Nexus switch to a virtualization host running Hyper-V’s converged switching architecture? I’ve used portfast in the lab on my Catalyst, but the lab switch is five years old, whereas this Nexus is brand new. And portfast never struck me as the right answer, just the easy one.
To answer those questions and more, I have TAC and this excellent tome provided gratis by the awesome VAR who sold us much of the equipment.
Into the vCPU Blender goes Lync: Last Friday, I got a call from my former boss & friend who now heads up a fast-growing IT department on the coast. He’s been busy refreshing & rationalizing much of his infrastructure as well, but as is typical for him, he wants more. He wants total IT transformation, so as he’s built out his infrastructure, he laid the groundwork to go 100% Microsoft Lync 2013 for voice.
Yeah baby. Lync 2013 as your PBX, delivering dial tone to your endpoints, whether they are Bluetooth-connected PC headsets, desk phones, or apps on a mobile.
Forget software-defined networking. This is software-defined voice & video, with no special server hardware, cloud services, or any other the other typical expensive nonsense you’d see in a VoIP implementation.
If Lync 2013 as PBX is not on your IT Bucket List, it should be. It was something my former boss & I never managed to accomplish at our previous employer on Hyper-V.
Now he was doing it alone. On a fast VMware/Nexus/NetApp stack with distributed vSwitches. And he wanted to run something by me.
So you can imagine how pleased I was to have a chat with him about it.
He was facing one problem which threatened his Go Live date: Mean Opinion Score, or MOS, a simple 0-5 score Lync provides to its administrators that summarizes call quality. MOS is a subset of a hugely detailed Media Quality Summary Report, detailed here at TechNet.
My friend was scoring a .6 on his MOS. He wanted it to be at 4 or above prior to go-live.
So at first we suspected QoS tags were being stripped somewhere between his endpoint device and the Lync Mediation VM. Sure enough, Wireshark proved that out; a Distributed vSwitch (or was it a Nexus?) wasn’t respecting the tag, resulting in a sort of half-duplex QoS if you will.
He fixed that, ran the test again, and still: .6. Yikes! Two days to go live. He called again.
That’s when I remembered the last time we tried to tackle this together. You see, the Lync Mediation Server is sort of the real PBX component in Lync Enterprise Voice architecture. It handles signalling to your endpoints, interfaces with the PSTN or a SIP trunk, and is the one server workload that, even in 2014, I’d hesitate making virtual.
My boss had three of them. All VMs on three different VMware hosts across two sites.
I dug up a Microsoft whitepaper on virtualizing Lync, something we didn’t have the last time we tried this. While Redmond says Lync Enterprise Voice on top of VMs can work, it’s damned expensive from a virtualization host perspective. MS advises:
You should disable hyperthreading on all hosts.
Do not use processor oversubscription; maintain a 1:1 ratio of virtual CPU to physical CPU.
Make sure your host servers support nested page tables (NPT) and extended page tables (EPT).
Disable non-uniform memory access (NUMA) spanning on the hypervisor, as this can reduce guest performance.
Talk about Harshing your vBuzz. Essentially, building Lync out virtually with Enterprise Voice forces you to go sparse on your hosts, which is akin to buying physical servers for Lync. If you don’t, into the vCPU blender goes Lync, and out comes poor voice quality, angry users, bitterness, regret and self-punishment.
Anyway, he did as advised, put some additional vCPU & memory reservations in place on his hosts, and yesterday, whilst I was toiling in the Hot Lane, he called me from Lync via his mobile.
He’s a married man just like me, but I must say his voice sounded damn sexy as it was sliced up into packets, sent over the wire, and converted back to analog on my mobile’s speaker. A virtual chest bump over the phone was next, then we said goodbye.
Another Go Live Victory (by proxy). Sweet.
Azure Outage: Yesterday’s bruising hours-long global Azure outage affected Virtual Machines, storage blobs, web services, database services and HD Insight, Microsoft’s service for big data crunching. As it unfolded, I navel-gazed, when I felt like helping. There was literally nothing I could do. Had I some crucial IaaS or PaaS in the Azure stack, I’d be shit out of luck, just like the rest. I felt quite helpless; refreshing Mary Jo’s page and the Azure dashboard didn’t help. I wondered what the problem was; it’s been a difficult week for Microsofties whether on-prem or in Azure. Had to be related to the update cycle, I thought.
On the plus side, Azure Active Directory services never went down, nor did several other services. Office 365 stayed up as well, though it is built atop separate-but-related infrastructure in my understanding.
Lastly, I pondered two thoughts: if you’re thinking of reducing your OpEx by replacing your DR strategy with an Azure Site Recovery strategy, does this change your mind? And if you’re building out Azure as your primary IaaS or PaaS, do you just accept such outages or do you plan a failback strategy?
Labworks : Towards a 100% Windows-defined Daisetta Lab: What’s next for the Daisetta Lab? Well, I have me an AMD Duron CPU, a suitable motherboard, a 1U enclosure with PSU, and three Keepin’ it RealTek NICs. Oh, I also have a case of the envies, envies for the VMware crowd and their VXLAN and NSX and of course VMworld next week. So I’m thinking of building a Network Virtualization Gateway appliance. For those keeping score at home, that would mean from Storage to Compute to Network Edge, I’d have a 100% Windows lab environment, infused with NVGRE which has more use cases than just multi-tenancy as I had thought.
This is a really lame but (IMHO) effective drawing of what I think of as a modern small/medium business enterprise ‘stack’:
As you can see, just about every element of a modern IT is portrayed.
Down at the base of the pyramid, you got your storage. IOPS, RAID, rotational & ssd, snapshots, dedupes, inline compression, site to site storage replication, clones and oh me oh my…all the things we really really love are right here. It’s the Luntastic layer and always will be.
Above that, your compute & Memory. The denser the better, 2U Pizza Boxes don’t grow on trees and the business isn’t going to shell out more $$$ if you get it wrong.
Above that, we have what my networking friends would call the “Underlay network.” Right. Some cat 6, twinax, fiber, whatever. This is where we push some packets, whether to our storage from our compute, northbound out to the world, southbound & down the stack, or east/west across it. Leafs, spines, encapsulation, control & data planes, it’s all here.
And going higher -still in Infrastructure Land mind you- we have the virtualization layer. Yeah baby. This is what it’s all about, this is the layer that saved my career in IT and made things interesting again. This layer is designed to abstract all that is beneath it with two goals in mind: cost savings via efficiency gains & ease of provisioning/use.
And boy,has this layer changed the game, hasn’t it?
So if you’re a virtualization engineer like I am, maybe this is all you care about. I wouldn’t blame you. The infrastructure layer is, after all, the best part of the stack, the only part of the stack that can claim to be #Glorious.
But in my career, I always get roped in (willingly or not) into the upper layers of the stack. And so that is where I shall take you, if you let me.
Next up, the Platform layer. This is the layer where that special DBA in your life likes to live. He optimizes his query plans atop your Infrastructure layer, and though he is old-school in the ways of storage, he’s learned to trust you and your fancy QoS .vhdxs, or your incredibly awesome DRS fault-tolerant vCPUs.
Or maybe you don’t have a DBA in your Valentine’s card rotation. Maybe this is the layer at which the devs in your life, whether they are running Eclipse or Visual Studio, make your life hell. They’re always asking for more x (x= memory, storage, compute, IP), and though they’re highly-technical folks, their eyes kind of glaze over when you bring up NVGRE or VXLAN or Converged/Distributed Switching or whatever tech you heart at the layer below.
Then again, maybe you work in this layer. Maybe you’re responsible for building & maintaining session virtualization tech like RDS or XenApp, or maybe you maintain file shares, web farms, or something else.
Point is, the people at this layer are platform builders. To borrow from the automotive industry, platform guys build the car that travels on the road infrastructure guys build. It does no good for either of us if the road is bumpy or the car isn’t reliable, does it? The user doesn’t distinguish between ‘road’ and ‘car’, do they? They just blame IT.
Next up: software & service layer. Our users exist here, and so do we. Maybe for you this layer is about supporting & deploying Android & iPhone handsets and thinking about MDM. Or maybe you spend your day supporting old-school fat client applications, or pushing them out.
And finally, now we arrive to the top of the pyramid. User-space. The business.
This is where (and the metaphor really fits, doesn’t it?) the rubber meets the road ladies and gentlemen. It’s where the business user drives the car (platform) on the road (infrastructure). This is where we sink or swim, where wins are tallied and heros made, or careers are shattered and the cycle of failure>begets>blame>begets>fear>begets failure begins in earnest.
That’s the stack. And if you’re in IT, you’re in some part of that stack, whether you know it or not.
But the stack is changing. I made a silly graphic for that too. Maybe tomorrow.
Fellow #VFD3 Delegate and Chicago-area vExpert Eric Shanks has recently posted two great pieces on how to setup an Active Directory Certificate Authority in your home lab environment.
Say what? Why would you want the pain of standing up some certificate & security infrastructure in your home lab?
Eric explains:
Home Lab SSL Certificates aren’t exactly a high priority for most people, but they are something you might want to play with before you get into a production environment.
Exactly.
Security & Certificate infrastructure are a weak spot in my portfolio so I’ve been practicing/learning in the Daisetta Lab so that I don’t fail at work. Here’s how:
As I was building out my lab, I knew three things: I wanted a routable Fully Qualified Domain Name for my home lab, I was focused on virtualization but should also practice for the cloud and things like ADFS, and I wanted my lab to be as secure as possible (death to port 80 & NTLM!)
With those loose goals in mind, I decided I wanted Daisetta Labs.net to be legit. To have some Certificate Authority bonafides…to get some respect in the strangely federated yet authoritarian world of certificate authorities, browser and OS certificate revocations, and yellow Chrome browser warning screens.
Too legit, too legit to quit
So I purchased a real wildcard SSL certificate from a real Certificate Authority back in March. It cost about $96 for one year, and I don’t regret it at all because I’m using it now to secure all manner of things in Active Directory, and I’ll soon be using it as Daisetta Labs.net on-prem begins interfacing with DaisettaLabs.net in Azure (it already is, via Office 365 DirSync, but I need to get to the next level and the clock is ticking on the cert).
Building on Eric’s excellent posts, I suggest to any Microsoft-focused IT Pros that you consider doing what I did. I know it sucks to shell out money for an SSL certificate, but labwork is hard so that work-work isn’t so hard.
So, go follow Eric’s outline, buy a cert, wildcard or otherwise (got mine at Comodo, there’s also an Israeli CA that gives SSL certs for free, but it’s a drawn-out process) and stand up a subordinate CA (as opposed to a on-prem only Root CA) and get your 443 on!
Man it sucks to get something so fundamentally wrong. Reader Chris pointed out a few inaccuracies and mistakes about my post in the comments below.
At first I was indignant, then thoughtful & reflective, and finally resigned. He’s right. I built an AD Root -not a subortinate as that’s absurd- Certificate Authority in the lab.
Admittedly, I’m not strong in this area. Thanks to Chris for his coaching and I regret if I mislead anyone.
Behold, these three remain. File. Block. Object. And the greatest of these is block. – Sr. Systems Engineer St. Paul, in a letter to confused storage engineers in Thessalonika
Right. So a couple weeks back I teased the hardware specs of the new storage array I built for the Daisetta Lab at home.
Software-defined. x86. File and block. Multipath. Intel. And some Supermicro. Storage utopia up in the Daisetta Lab
My idea was to combine all types of disks -rotational 3.5″ & 2.5″ drives, SSDs, mSATAs, hell, I considered USB- into one tight, well-built storage box for my lab and home data needs. A sort of Storage Ark, if you will; all media types were welcome, but only if they came in twos (for mirroring & Parity sake, of course) and only if they rotated at exactly 7200 RPM and/or leveled their wears evenly across the silica.
And onto this unholy motley crue of hard disks I slapped a software architecture that promised to abstract all the typical storage driver, interface, and controller nonsense away, far, far away in fact, to a land where the storage can be mixed, the controllers diverse, and by virtue of the software-definition bits, network & hypervisor agnostic. In short, I wanted to build an agnostic #StorageGlory box in the Daisetta Lab.
Right. So what did I use to achieve this? ZFS and Zpools?
Hell no, that’s so January.
VSAN? Ha! I’m no Chris Wahl.
I used Windows, naturally.
That’s right. Windows. Server 2012 R2 to be specific, running Core + Infrastructure GUI with 8GB of RAM, and some 17TB of raw disk space available to it. And a little technique developed by the ace Microsoft server team called Tiered Storage Spaces.
Was a #StorageGlory Achievement Unlocked, or was it a dud?
Here’s my review after 30 days on my Windows SAN: san.daisettalabs.net.
The Good
It doesn’t make you pick a side in either storage or storage-networking: Do you like abstracted pools of storage, managed entirely by software? Put another way, do you hate your RAID controller and crush on your old-school NetApp filer, which seemingly could do everything but object storage?
When I say block, do you instinctively say file? Or vice-versa?
Well then my friend, have I got a storage system for your lab (and maybe production!) environment: Windows Storage Spaces (now with Tiering!) offers just about everything guys like you or me need in a storage system for lab & home media environments. I love it not just because it’s Microsoft, but also because it doesn’t make me choose between storage & storage-networking paradigms. It’s perhaps the ultimate agnostic storage technology, and I say that as someone who thinks about agnosticism and storage.
A lot.
You know what I’m talking about. Maybe today, you’ll need some block storage for this VM or that particular job. Maybe you’re in a *nix state of mind and want to fiddle with NFS. Or perhaps you’re feeling bold & courageous and decide to try out VMware again, building some datastores on both iSCSI LUNs and NFS shares. Then again, maybe you want to see what SMB 3.0 3.0 is all about, the MS fanboys sure seem to be talking it up.
The point is this: I don’t care what your storage fancy is, but for lab-work (which makes for excellence in work-work) you need a storage platform that’s flexible and supportive of as many technologies as possible and is, hopefully, software-defined.
And that storage system is -hard to believe I’ll grant you- Windows Server 2012 R2.
I love storage and I can’t think of one other storage system -save for maybe NetApp- that let’s me do crazy things like store .vmdks inside of .vhdxs (oh the vIrony!), use SMB 3 multichannel over the same NICs I’m using for iSCSI traffic, create snapshots & clones just like big filers all while giving me the performance-multiplier benefits of SSDs and caching and a reasonable level of resiliency.
File this one under WackWackStorageGloryAchievedWindows boys and girls.
I can do it all with Storage Spaces in 2012 R2.
As I was thinking about how to write about Storage Spaces, I decided to make a chart, if only to help me keep it straight. It’s rough but maybe you’ll find it useful as you think about storage abstraction/virtualization tech:
And yes. Ex post facto dedupe is a made up term. By me. It’s latin for “After the fact, dedupe,” because I always scheduled my dedupes for Saturday night, when the IO load on the filer was low. Ex post facto dedupe is in contrast to some newer storage companies that offer inline compression & dedupe, but none of the ones above offer this, sadly.
It’s easy to build and supports your disks & controllers: This is a Microsoft product. Which means it’s easy to deploy & build for your average server guy. Mine’s running on a very skinny, re-re-purposed SanDisk Ready Cache SSD. With Windows 2012 R2 server running the Infrastructure Management GUI (no explorer.exe, just Server Manager + your favorite snap-ins), it’s using about 6GB of space on the boot drive.
And drivers for the Intel C226 SATA controller, the LSI 9218si SAS card, and the extra ASMedia 1061 controller were all installed automagically by Windows during the build.
The only other system that came close to being this easy to install -as a server product- was Oracle Solaris 11.2 Beta. It found, installed drivers for, and exposed all controllers & disks, so I was well on my way to going the ZFS route again, but figured I’d give Windows a chance this time around.
Nexenta 4, in contrast, never loaded past the Install Community Edition screen.
It’s improved a lot over 2012: Storage Spaces almost two years ago now, and I remember playing with it at work a bit. I found it to be a mind-f*** as it was a radically different approach to storage within the Windows server context.
I also found it to be slow, dreadfully slow even, and not very survivable. Though it did accept any disk disk I gave it, it didn’t exactly like it when I removed a USB drive during an extended write test. And it didn’t take the disk back at the conclusion of the test either.
Like everything else in Microsoft’s current generation, Storage Spaces in 2012 R2 is much better, more configurable, easier to monitor, and more tolerant of disk failures.
It also has something for the IOPS speedfreak inside all of us.
Storage Spaces, abstract this away
Tiered Storage Spaces & Adjustable write cache: Coming from ZFS & the Adaptive Replacement Cache, the ZFS Intent Log, the SLOG, and L2ARC, I was kind of hooked on the idea of using massive amounts of my ECC RAM to function as a sort of poor-mans NVRAM.
Windows can’t do that, but with Tiered Storage Spaces, you can at least drop a few SSDs in your array (in my case three x 256GB 840 EVO & one 128GB Samsung 830), mix them into your disk pool, and voila! Fast read-cache, with a Microsoft-flavored MRU/LFU algorithm of some type keeping your hottest data on the fastest disks and your old data on the cheep ‘n deep rotationals.
What’s more, going with Tiered Storage Spaces gives you a modest 1GB write cache, but as I found out, you can increase that up to 10GB.
Which i naturally did while building this guy out. I mean, who wouldn’t want more write-cache?
But there’s a huge gotcha buried in the Technet and blogposts I found about this. I wanted to pool all my disks together into as large of a single virtual disk as possible, then pack iSCSI-connected .vhdxs, SMB 3 shares, and more inside that single, durable & tiered virtual disk.What I didn’t want was several virtual disks (it helped me to think of virtual disks as a sort of Aggregate) with SMB 3 shares and vhdx files stored haphazardly between them.
Which is what you get when you adjust the write-cache size. Recall that I have a capacity of about 17TB raw among all my disks. Building a storage pool, then a virtual disk with a 10GB write cache gave me a tiered virtual disk with a maximum size of about 965GB. More on that below.
It can be wicked fast, but so is RAID 0: Check out my standard SQLIO benchmark routine, which I run against all storage technologies that come my way. The 1.5 hour test is by no means comprehensive -and I’m not saying the IOPS counter is accurate at all (showing max values across all tests by the way)- but I like this test because it lets me kick the tires on my array, take her out for a spin, and see how she handles.
And with a “Simple” layout (no redundancy, probably equivalent to RAID 0), she handles pretty damn well, but even I’m not crazy enough to run tiered storage spaces in a simple layout config:
These three tests (1.5 hours each, identical setup against multiple configs) were done locally on the array, not over my home network
What’s odd is how poorly the array performed with 10GB of “Write Cache.” Not sure what happened here, but as you can see, latency spiked higher during the 10GB write cache write phase of the test than just about every other test segment.
Something to do with parity no doubt.
For my lab & home storage needs, I settled on a Mirror 2-way parity setup that gives me moderate performance with durability in mind, though not much as you’ll see below.
Making the most of my lab/home network and my NICs: Recall that I have six GbE NICs on this box. Two are built into the Supermicro board itself (Intel), and the other four come by way of a quad-port Intel I350-T4 server NIC.
Anytime you’re planning to do a Microsoft cluster in the 1GbE world, you need lots of NICs. It’s a bit of a crutch in some respects, especially in iSCSI. Typically you VLAN off each iSCSI NIC for your Hyper-V hosts and those NICs do one thing and one thing only: iSCSI, or Live Migration, or CSV etc. Feels wasteful.
But on my new storage box at home, I can use them for double-duty: iSCSI (or LM/CSV) as well as SMB 3. Yes!
Usually I turn off Client for Microsoft Networks (the SMB file sharing toggle in NIC properties) on each dedicated NIC (or vEthernet), but since I want my file cake & my block cake at the same time, I decided to turn SMB on on all iSCSI vEthernet adapters (from the physical & virtual hosts) and leave SMB on the iSCSI NICs on san.daisettalabs.net as well.
The end result? This:
[table caption=”Storage Networking-All of the Above Approach” width=”500″ colwidth=”20|100|50″ colalign=”left|left|center|left|right”]
nic,Name,VLAN,IP,Function
1,MGMT,100,192.168.100.15,MGMT & SMB3
2,CLNT,102,192.168.102.15,Home net & SMB3
3,iSCSI-10,10,172.16.10.x,iSCSI & SMB3
4,iSCSI-11,10,172.16.11.x,iSCSI & SMB3
5,iSCSI-12,10,172.16.12.x,iSCSI & SMB3
[/table]
That’s five, count ’em five NICs (or discrete channels, more specifically) I can use to fully soak in the goodness that is SMB 3 multichannel, with the cost of only a slightly unsettling epistemological question about whether iSCSI NICs are truly iSCSI if they’re doing file storage protocols.
Now SMB 3 is so transparent (on by default) you almost forget that you can configure it, but there’s quite a few ways to adjust file share performance. Aidan Finn argues for constraining SMB 3 to certain NICs, while Jose Barreto details how multichannel works on standalone physical NICs, a pair in a team, and multiple teams of NICs.
I haven’t decided which model to follow (though on san.daisettalabs.net, I’m not going to change anything or use Converged switching…it’s just storage), but SMB 3 is really exciting and it’s great that with Storage Spaces, you can have high performance file & block storage. I’ve hit 420MB/sec on synchronous file copies from san to host and back again. Outstanding!
I Finally got iSNS to work and it’s…meh: One nice thing about san.daisettalabs.net is that that’s all you need to know…the FQDN is now the resident iSCSI Name Server, meaning it’s all I need to set on an MS iSCSI Initiator. It’s a nice feature to have, but probably wasn’t worth the 30 minutes I spent getting it to work (hint: run set-wmiinstance before you run iSNS cmdlets in powershell!) as iSNS isn’t so great when you have…
SMI-S, which is awesome for Virtual Machine Manager fans: SMI-S, you’re thinking, what the the hell is that? Well, it’s a standardized framework for communicating block storage information between your storage array and whatever interface you use to manage & deploy resources on your array. Developed by no less an august body than the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), it’s one of those “standards” that seem like a good idea, but you can’t find it much in the wild as it were. I’ve used SMI-S against a NetApp Filer (in the Classic DoT days, not sure if it works against cDoT) but your Nimbles, your Pures, and other new players in the market get the same funny look on their face when you ask them if they support SMI-S.
“Is that a vCenter thing?” they ask.
Sigh.
Microsoft, to its credit, does. Right on Windows Server. It’s a simple feature you install and two or three powershell commands later, you can point Virtual Machine Manager at it and voila! Provision, delete, resize, and classify iSCSI LUNS on your Windows SAN, just like the big boys do (probably) in Azure, only here, we’re totally enjoying the use of our corpulent.vhdx drives, whereas in Azure, for some reason, they’re still stuck on .vhds like rookies. Haha!
Single Pane o’ glass in VMM with SMI-S, GUIDs galore and more for the Hyper-V set
It’s a very stable storage platform for Microsoft Clustering: I’ve built a lot of Microsoft Hyper-V clusters. A lot. More than half a dozen in production, and probably three times that in dev or lab environments, so it’s like second nature to me. Stable storage & networking are not just important factors in Microsoft clusters, they are the only factors.
So how is it building out a Hyper-V cluster atop a Windows SAN? It’s the same, and different at the same time, but, unlike so many other cluster builds, I passed the validation test on the first attempt with green check marks everywhere. And weeks have gone by without a single error in the Failover Clustering snap-in; it’s great.
The Bad
It’s expensive and seemingly not as redundant as other storage tech: When you build your storage pool out of offlined disks, your first choice is going to involve (just like other storage abstraction platforms) disk redundancy. Microsoft makes it simple, but doesn’t really tell you the cost of that redundancy until later in the process.
Recall that I have 17TB of raw storage on san.daisettalabs.net, organized as follows:
[table]
Disk Type, Quantity, Size, Format, Speed, Function
WD Red 2.5″ with NASWARE, 6, 1TB, 4KB AF, SATA 3 5400RPM, Cheep ‘n deep
Samsung 840 EVO SSD, 3, 256GB, 512byte, 250MB/read, Tiers not fears
Samsung 830 SSD, 1, 128GB, 512byte, 250MB/read, Tiers not fears
HGST 3.5″ Momentus, 6, 2TB, 512byte, 105MB/r/w, Cheep ‘n deep
[/table]
Now, according to my trusty IOPS Excel calculator, if I were to use traditional RAID 5 or RAID 6 on that set of spinners, I’d get about 16.5TB usable in the former, 15TB usable in the latter (assuming RAID penalty of 5 & 6, respectively)
For much of the last year, I’ve been using ZFS & RAIDZ2 on the set of six WD Red 2.5″ drives. Those have a raw capacity of 6TB. In RAIDZ2 (roughly analogous to RAID 6), I recall getting about 4.2TB usable.
All in all, traditional RAID & ZFS’ RAIDZ cost me between 12% and 35% of my capacity respectively.
So how much does Windows Storage Spaces resiliency model (Mirrored, 2-way parity) cost me? A lot. We’re in RAID-DP territory here people:
Ack! With 17TB of raw storage, I get about 5.7TB usable, a cost of about 66%!
And for that, what kind of resieliency do I get?
I sure as hell can’t pull two disks simultaneously, as I did live during prod in my ZFS box. I can suffer the loss of only a single disk. And even then, other Windows bloggers point to some pain as the array tries to adjust.
Now, I’m not the brightest on RAID & parity and such, so perhaps there’s a more resilient, less costly way to use Storage Spaces with Tiering, but wow…this strikes me as a lot of wasted disk.
Not as easy to de-abstract the storage: When a disk array is under load, one of my favorite things to do is watch how the IO hits the physical elements in the array. Modern disk arrays make what your disks are doing abstract, almost invisible, but to truly understand how these things work, sometimes you just want the modern equivalent of lun stats.
In ZFS, I loved just letting gstat run, which showed me the load my IO was placing on the ARC, the L2ARC and finally, the disks. Awesome stuff:
In this Gifcam, watch ada0-6 as they struggle under load with the “Always Sync” option enabled.
As best as I can tell, there’s no live powershell equivalent to gstat for Storage Spaces. There are teases though; you can query your disks, get their SMART vitals, and more, but peeling away the onion layers and actually watching how Windows handles your IO would make Storage Spaces the total package.
Bottom line
So that’s about it: this is the best storage box I’ve built in the Daisetta Lab. No regrets going with Windows. The platform is mature, stable, offers very good performance, and decent resiliency, if at a high disk cost.
I’m so impressed I’ve checked my Windows SAN skepticism at the door and would run this in a production environment at a small/medium business (clustered, in the Scaled Out File Server role). Cost-wise, it’s a bargain. Check out this array: it’s the same exact Hardware a certain upstart Storage vendor I like (that rhymes with Gymbal Porridge) sells, but for a lot less!
They’ve built a sexy HTML 5 GUI to manage the thing, no vSphere console or PowerCLI in sight. It’s all pre-baked, pre-configured, and pre-built for you, the small-to-medium enterprise. It’s so simple a help desk guy could set it up. So with all that said, do I still need to hire vExperts and VCDX pros to build out my virtualization infrastructure? It would appear not. Is that the message VMware is trying to convey here?
Wilson.tech 