It seems like only yesterday when the last survey was conducted, and I was actually not going to write this post – because I hate “me too” posts.
So let us try and do this slightly differently.
On my No. 32 - Thank you all so much! post I stated some observations – which I hope you will consider this year, when you choose which blogs you wish to rank in the top 10.
Try not to make this into a popularity contest. Judge the bloggers on their content. Judge the bloggers on their writing skills. Judge the bloggers on their passion. Judge the bloggers on who they are – not just because they work in company A, B or C.
It is great that there are some changes in this year’s survey:
Bloggers for certain categories: Storage blog Cloud Computing blog End User Computing (VDI) blog News & Information website Favorite Scripting blog Favorite Podcast Official VMware blog Best Videos used in a blog Favorite New Blog (less than a year old) Favorite Independent blogger
If you find that my blog or my writing deserves your vote or it fits any of the above mentioned categories, I would be most thankful.
Good luck to all the bloggers!!
As always – once the results are published you can follow the Top 25 Bloggers on Twitter.
This will be the 3rd and final post for the Bloggers Reality Contest that I am participating in before VMworld 2011.
The topic we will be dealing with today is converged networking.
Why is it necessary?
A few years ago, when I was starting out with virtualization, I started out with rack mount servers. From the start I knew that I would be using Network attached storage - and that the minimum amount of network cards I would need for my for these ESX servers was 6 1Gb NICs, two for management and vMotion, two for network traffic for the virtual machines and two more for iSCSI / NFS. It became apparent very quickly that this does not scale, for a number of reasons.
The connection of each ESX host to two redundant switches, become a cumbersome process, which takes up a considerable amount of time both of the Networking team and the Server Team as well. Connecting the ports to the correct switches, making sure that the VLANs are set for each network port and so on.
It became evident that using 6 ports for each ESX server would leave no free ports for the rest of the servers in that rack. Each patch panel has 16 ports by default. 2 ESX servers per rack - eat up almost all of the ports immediately, which means either running more that 16/24 ports to each rack, or limiting myself to how many ESX servers I can install in each rack.
In short, this is not an easy process
So how would you solve this? That is where 10Gb Ethernet comes in. Instead of running those six 1Gb NICs I mentioned above - run two 10Gb NICs - that will give you all the throughput you had before, and then some, of course redundancy included.
Unfortunately though, this does solve all of your problems. What happens if you also need connectivity to a Fiber channel array? That means more cables coming out of your servers - more port being used (be they ethernet or SAN fabric).
And all of the above of course is relevant also for the Storage stack as well.
What are the solutions out there?
If someone were to ask me who are the two major players in the converged networking game today, I would instinctively say HP and Cisco. The solutions they provide are similar in some ways, but are very different in others.
I would like to stress this is my own understanding of both of these solutions - I could be mistaken in some of the details, and as always would be happy to hear your feedback if there are any errors in my description.
Cisco control the network stack. I think that this is pretty much agreed upon by almost all. They have also gained a large market share in the past two years for the converged systems market. The continued UCS growth is something that HP cannot afford give up because it is taking good percentage of their market share.
HP have Virtual Connect and their Flex-10 technology for HP Bladesystem that will allow you to converge the both your Ethernet and Storage traffic over the same network card,
Cisco have their CNA cards that will allow you to pass Ethernet and FCoE over the same network card.
HP keep all traffic internal to the Chassis internal - thus internal VM / vMotion traffic stay within the chassis, as opposed to UCS which sends all the traffic up the top of the rack, regardless.
It is extremely difficult to explain in such a short post which one has more benefit, which one is better and who has the better solution. The answer to that question is actually very simple. The vendor that has a solution better suited to your needs - is the best solution.
Summing UP
This is the last post of a series of three that I (and several other bloggers) have written as part of the Bloggers Reality contest.
We touched on topics that were related to HP's solutions and products that we were exposed to. Some of us are very familiar with their products, some of us did know anything about them at all. Despite that, we all had some great articles published on the each of these subjects. We all learned new things, and most of all (I think I can speak for all of the contestants) we all had a good time!
I would appreciate your comments on this post, what you thought about this blogger's contest, and what you would have liked to see more of, and of course also less of.
Please remember this is a contest and your vote for this post is needed (and your comments as well).
One last note - KISS - Keep it simple stupid (for all of you who did not know what that was)
On Wednesday night I participated on session 2 of the Blogger Reality Contest. From the rankings that were published on Wednesday - I am actually not doing so well (so your continued and strengthened support would be appreciated) - but hey this is not about the competition - it is all about the participation. It is great to interact with a whole new set of people, and I am sure that the relationships built during these three weeks will last. But let's get back to the technology part of it.
Wednesday's topic was Converged Systems. I will not bother you all again with the converged part, we covered that all last week, and the three topics covered were:
HP VirtualSystem
HP CloudSystem
HP AppSystems
The one I would like to cover here in more detail is HP CloudSystem. A while back I wrote a post about
The Datacenter - in a Few Years From Now where I presented this graphic below.
The relevant part I think is the one here below
And what does this have to with cloud though? The way I see cloud vision is having your pool of resources from which you can provision your applications and vApps to your end users. At the moment this is limited to a cloud for each Hypervisor. I cannot have a VMware vCloud that has Hypervisors that are not ESX. I cannot have a Microsoft Cloud with Hypervisors that are not Hyper-V and so on.. Yes, there are some products that will allow you to manage the multiple clouds under one "umbrella" and place the VM in your Hyper-V cluster or ESX Cluster or RHV Cluster according to different criteria. But today they still need to be separate clusters. Utilizing such an idea will make my infrastructure completely vendor agnostic - and I (the customer) could pick and choose whichever hypervisor suits me.
VMware has their cloud product - vCloud Director. Microsoft has their Private Cloud, Redhat has their CloudForms, Citrix has their Project Olympus. The purpose of this post is, not to get into who has the best cloud offering, nor who has the more mature product. The reality of today is that most infrastructures are running mainly on one platform, and one platform only. Will that change in the future? I think so - in my post Why Should you Care about Veeam Support for Hyper-V, I started to talk about the market share that other hypervisors are gaining and will continue to do so in the future.
I spent a hour on a conference call last week with a colleague who had built their own private cloud solution. I was interested in hearing the details behind the platform and how it was built, and I was quite surprised to actually hear that the whole infrastructure was built on VMware - but they had decided on a 3rd party solution for the orchestration of the the cloud and not to use vCloud Director. The reason being mainly because of the lack of integration the system actually has into current business process. The amount of time it actually takes to integrate into their current CMDB, and a number of other reasons as well. Looking back on the conversation I actually am starting to see that the above graphic that I made should actually be changed. A layer that translates the operations from kind of hypervisor to the other will not actually be the correct solution or the right way to go.
The way to actually go would be to create a system that would allow you to manage Hypervisors/Clouds from multiple vendors, all under one management portal. This way you as the Admin would still not care if the machine is running on a VMware / Hyper-V / Xen / Redhat cluster - for you the machine will be managed the same way regardless. The Orchestration software will be that to deploy the virtual machine according to your pre-defined criteria of cost / SLA etc. and present a unified interface to the end-user so they will be able to access their machine - again completely ambivalent to the what the underlying hypervisor is.
HP CloudSystem could be such a platform. Providing a layer of automation that is external to the the actual hypervisor - could actually be the answer. Treating Server / Storage / Network / Application Pools as exactly that - just pools - and to the end-business user who does not care what platform they run on - but rather that they work, this abstraction should work just fine.
You could even take this one level further by adding an external public cloud to your pool of services. Something like Cloudbursting.
Cloudbursting is an application hosting model which combines existing corporate infrastructure with new, cloud-based infrastructure to create a powerful, highly scalable application hosting environment.
To explain this in my terms, you use the public cloud as an extension of your compute resources to extend and scale as needed for your application.
The HP CloudSystem core is built on the HP BladeSystem architecture and includes the Matrix Operating Environment that enables rapid provisioning of complex infrastructure services and adjustment of those services to meet changing business demands. It also includes HP Cloud Service Automation software to manage the entire cloud lifecycle. Cloud Service Automation provisions applications, manages and monitors the cloud, and provides a single service view across the cloud and traditional IT.
HP CloudSystem’s core capabilities can be extended with
• Cloud Maps: tools and best practices that enable CloudSystem to quickly and easily provision various kinds of common application environments from major vendors such as VMware, Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft. Cloud Maps can substantially reduce the time and effort needed to deploy CloudSystem services.
HP storage
HP networking
HP Software
To sum up this post - The future of the cloud (and your datacenter) will be in the automation layer and will look something like this. It will all lie in the orchestration layer.
As this is a contest your vote does count. Please add you vote in box below. Thanks.
Your comments of course are always welcome.
(Small Print) HP is not the only one to offer such software or orchestration platforms. There are several other vendors and other 3rd party companies that provide the same or similar technologies. HP is one of the sponsors of this event, which mean they are partially footing the bill for my trip to VMworld this month. I am highly grateful for the opportunity and honor but I am under no obligation to write anything positive (or negative for that matter) about any of the presented solutions. The opinions and thoughts above are my own so take them as they are.
But before even starting about what we learned, I asked myself what is converged storage? Well it seems that it is actually an HP term - because on Google there is not very much else besides answers that pertain to HP (small mention there of a another company - Nimble).
OK - so that did not help much. So so what is Converged Storage then? Storage we all know - is that small little thing that all of our data is kept - you know what I mean? Those 3.5" Floppies? And converged well I actually went and looked that one up on the www.
Out of all of the definitions, I think that either the 1st or the 3rd is most appropriate for what we are discussing here. Actually a bit of both.
I do not consider myself a storage expert - not by a long shot. But what I can say, is that during my day-to-day work I deal with storage - A LOT - and have had experience with a several vendors, be it IBM, HP, NetApp, EMC, Nexenta and some others as well.
So how do I perceive how HP envisions Converged Storage?
Not everyone starts up buying a HP X9000 or a FAS6200 or a Symmetrix when they start out their business. Usually - it will be a USB disk for shared storage - then perhaps a small NAS device and then when the business grows and expands you need to start looking out at proper storage. So in here come the bigger vendors. But ideally - what I would like from an IT point of view would be getting a Storage array that can grow as my company grows. And if that could actually be done with the least amount of downtime when I need to expand then that is great. And here is what HP are proposing to offer.
Start off small. Get what you need out of your array, make use of its maximum potential. But when you grow you will want an easy upgrade or an easy path for expansion. Allow me to expand as much as I want. In the beginning I started by fixing computers in my garage and I will grow to be the next VMware / Google / Amazon / Microsoft. I will need a storage platform that will grow with me and my business. And if you want to put a cherry on the top - then make in completely non-disruptive and transparent.
I might be jumping ahead a little bit to what we will be seeing next week, but half of the presentation was about the Converged Systems. In your datacenter you probably have a separate department or at least a vendor for each of your infrastructure components. Your storage is provided by one vendor, your network is provided by another, and last but not least your servers could be a third. And the IT world has seen that this is not the ideal setup, because you have to put all the pieces of the puzzles to together and to get to play a nice and happy tune. Not always is that the easiest of tasks. And if they are all different vendors, then I can bet you all that there will not be "One Admin to Rule them all". And we can see that the market is going in the direction of combining as may of these components as possible in one converged solution.
Cisco and their UCS have become one of the major players in a the converged infrastructure market. They have managed to integrated 2.75 / 3 of the major components in the infrastructure. I say 2.75 because the Network and compute are there, prominently there, and the technology is in place to hook you up to storage in any way you would like or think, but they do not own or have a stake in Storage (yet).
The major storage players are just that storage players, they have little or no say in the compute or networking stack.
And here HP comes in. They are one of the only companies that can supply a solution in each of the 3 above mentioned categories. More of this on the next post.
To sum this one up - Converged Storage is:
an HP term - but is something every CIO would drool over
it is storage that will grow as you grow
be a part of a complete solution
integrate seamlessly with all the other components in your infrastructure (regardless of the fact if they are from the same vendor or not)
2 more short points. Why a picture of Minority Report? because of the graphic on the landing page - just reminded me..
And one last thing. There are two short videos on the site that explain the concept of Converged Storage The first one was way to high-level for me - with a lot of nice words and high level explanations. Not my cup of tea.The second one though - I think was right on - explained perfectly what the idea is behind converged storage. Simple and simplistic, just the way I like it.
HP Converged Storage
Please take a second to voice your opinion on the post in the poll below. No Negative Feedback Welcome (Sorry Had to put that in there… :)). Comments of course are always welcome.
(Small Print) HP is one of the sponsors of this event, which mean they are partially footing the bill for my trip to VMworld this month. I am highly grateful for the opportunity and honor but I am under no obligation to write anything positive (or negative for that matter) about any of the presented solutions. The opinions and thoughts above are my own so take them as they are.
After a back and forth - and some uncertainty - I can finally say that I am going to be at VMworld next month. Copenhagen was out of the question for me this year because it falls smack bang in the middle of the Jewish Holiday of Sukkot.
So how did this all come about? It all started with small item I saw on Twitter
Thomas Jones put together a small bloggers contest - a reality show of some sorts. Now I sure hope that I will not need to jump off any buildings - nor have a camera strapped to my head the whole time in Vegas - it is actually a lot more conservative and simple than that. Out of the number of bloggers that applied there were 8 chosen (in no particular order)
Over the course of the next few weeks we will all undergo some training sessions - on different topics related to Networking, Storage and Cloud. After each of these sessions we will all post a blog about what we have learned. This can be a written blog or a video blog - I think I will be sticking to text - due to the fact that I suck at video - and I don't think you want to see my ugly mug on your screen anyway.
About how this will work - I will describe in another post next week.
Besides the amazing fact that I will now be able to come to VMworld in Las Vegas, I see this as a great opportunity to get to know a whole new crowd of people. Not all of the above listed are virtualization bloggers - and most of them I had not even heard of before this contest. I have met and spent some time with Matthew at TechFieldDay #5 this last February. It will be great to meet up again!
It will be highly interesting to see the different points of view each of have on the topics above, and how each one addresses the information from these sessions.
This is a contest - and the winner will win a (not-yet-disclosed) prize. But for me the biggest prize is already in the bag, and that is the opportunity to go to VMworld, to network with my peers, sleep far too little - and to spend time with 15,000 other geeks like myself.
The relevant part I think is the one here below
