Netapp ASIS Dedupe and VMWare

So back here I told you about ASIS dedupe volume limits:  Netapp asis dedupe. 

Why would I want tier 1 block based dedupe?  Well it doesn't work on unstructured data that well, I mean you might get some dedupe, but who knows how much.  

Where it makes crazy money is: VMWare.  This isn't specific to VDI.  Snapshots and dedupe allow  you to quickly backup your VMWare datastores while using almost no storage.  It also allows you to put 50 VMs in 100GB of space (well depends on your VMs but that is what I have right now).  Normally 50 VMs x 30GB for host OS = 1.5TB of space.  Yeah.  That makes some sense and cents.  You can usually dedupe down to about half the space (but sometimes like similar machines like clones it really works well).

So what is the downside?  Well dedupe uses CPU on your netapp, so if your netapp is pegged don't use it.  And there is the vol size thing linked above (but that isn't usually a problem).   Another interesting thing is you no longer have the data spread across many spindles, which means less IOPS.  But there is an interesting fix for that- PAM card.  Yup a cache card for the Netapp that keeps those commonly used deduped blocks (that are basically the OS data) in cache and gets you tons  of IOPS- only available on 3040 or faster (31xx or 6xxx shipping product).  So I've run a pretty good sized storage backend for VMWare off of 1 shelf and a PAM card.  If it were a lab, you could even do SATA and PAM card. 

This thing is like peanut butter and jelly- ASIS dedupe and VMWare.

PC to Thin client Conversion

Want a terminal box no moving parts, centrally controllable, that speaks all the major terminal dialects (like citrix, VDI, rdp) made from your current old PCs?

PC to Thin Client Conversion to the rescue:

http://www.igel.com/igel/live.php,navigation_id,1297,_psmand,9.html

Apparently they are third in market share for terminals (HP and Wyse being in the lead)- and the conversion product is pretty cool.  Trying it in a pilot right now.   It isn't for everyone, but it is a compelling product.

Storage VMotion (with a gui)

Ever put some VMs on local disk and wanted to move them to your shared storage?  Have you wanted to do that without outage?

Maybe you wanted to patch an ESX box that has local VMs without bringing them down?

Maybe you didn't listen to me and used a block protocol instead of NFS for your VMs and now you are having to resize your LUNS and you didn't use something that resizes gracefully.

Then use storage vmotion:

Storage VMotion with a GUI

For free with a little gui in case you are not a CLI junky.

Does my Mac support VT instructions?

1) open a terminal

2) sysctl -a | egrep -i "vmx|svm"

Output will include a line like this with vmx in it:

machdep.cpu.features: FPU VME DE PSE TSC MSR PAE MCE CX8 APIC SEP MTRR PGE MCA CMOV PAT PSE36 CLFSH DS ACPI MMX FXSR SSE SSE2 SS HTT TM SSE3 MON DSCPL VMX EST TM2 SSSE3 CX16 TPR PDCM

Unless you are on an AMD somehow- svm is AMD's VT instruction, VMX is Intel's.  You really only have to look for vmx but I include both for completeness.

On linux you do:

egrep -i "vmx|svm" /cat/proc/cpuinfo

Virtual Server management- open source style

I really want to try the VMWare player for openqrm. It has all kinds of crazy features:

Support for different virtualization technologies

VMware, Xen, KVM and Linux-VServer vms can be managed transparently via openQRM. openQRM seamlessly support P2V (physical to virtual), V2P (virtual to physical) AND V2V (virtual to virtual) migration. This mean server appliances can not only move from physical to virtual (and back) easily but also that they can be migrated from virtualization technology A to virtualization technology B without any hassle.

Fully automatic Nagios configuration (single click) to monitor all systems and services

High-availability : "N to 1" fail-over

VMWare appliances to Parallels

Ever found a VMWare appliance or VM that you wanted to run under parallels?

well Virtualization Daily has an answer:

Convert the image from VMWare format to a raw hard disk image using Qemu.

qemu-img convert appliance-harddrive-name.vmdk -O raw appliance-harddrive-name-raw.hdd

There are some caveats: not all VMDKs can be converted, IDE disk only, single disk images (can't have multiple VMDK files). I've had pretty good fortune with Linux appliances so far (because it had the kernel drivers to load up even though the hardware had changed slightly).

They did some sample parallels appliances:

Virtualization for linux takes a step forward

www.enomalism.com

Hopefully it works as advertised. Looks like it has some features sorely missing from the opensource, management of multiple Xen Servers.

The interesting points:

# Create a cloud of abstracted, highly scalable, and managed compute infrastructure capable of hosting end-customer applications and billed by consumption.
# Simple easy to use web based user interface
# Automagically load balance and and monitor operations using a RESTFul API.
# VM Agnostic, migrate to and from various virtual environments including KVM/Qemu, Amazon EC2 and Xen. (OpenVZ, VirtualBox and VMware coming soon)
# Fully Automated platform with easy setup rules for a completely autonomous and self healing virtual environment

Those alone make it worth while. It depends on mysql for its data storage. I might be trying this out in the lab. When I do, I'll post back.

Since Xen is at least where VMWare Server/ESX is, it is interesting that enomalism might give at least a set of the features available in the ESX/virtual infrastructure product. The main weakness of Xen is managing a pool of Xen servers, and if enomalism does what it advertises, it is a huge step forward.

Xen Virtualization on CentOS

You can use many tools on Centos 5 to manage virtual servers:

CLI tools: xm, install-sh, virsh
GUI tools: virt-manager

Here are some useful links-

How to install a virtual server (after installing CentOS with the Virtualization packages):
http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Xen/InstallingCentOSDomU

That is a command line tutorial. But you could use virt-manager if you have X and Xen. It walks you though all the steps in a much easier way, but it is a good idea to know what is going on behind the scenes. Everything in this tutorial can be done by virt-manager without much hassle.

This is how you install a native virtualization DomU like Windows:

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Xen/InstallingHVMDomU

It also has the way to check your processor extensions.

This one has some basics about keyboard mapping and also has how to deal with SELinux (without turning it off people!):

http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/Xen

This article has P2V basics. It gives some insight into what the virt-p2v boot iso (linked in the intro post) does behind the scenes:

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Xen/MoveNative2DomU

And if you had to move something yourself if you had to do it manually.

Free Virtualization Introduction

Xen on Linux is usable out of the box now. If you download CentOS 5.1 (or later I would guess), you can setup virtualization during install.

Virtualization lets you run multiple instances of an operating system and applications on one piece of hardware. You can imagine or read on the net why that would be useful.

Some terms to translate for those familiar with VMWare or Parallels style terminology:

Host OS: VMWare Server (not ESX) uses an operating system (windows or linux) as a host, ESX is the host, and Parallels uses OS X. With Xen virtualization this roughly corresponds to Domain0. Domain0 has unlimited privileges.

Guest OS: You can run windows, linux or other operating systems under VMWare or Parallels. On Xen the guest OS is known as a DomU (domain U), which has direct access to hardware. This domain has limited resources (ram and processors as configured), by default it has no access to hardware.

Paravirtualization vs. fully virtualized-

paravirtualization uses software to allow virtualization. Under CentOS 5, the paravirtualizable guest operating systems are basically linux, linux and linux. Native virtualization uses processor extensions so you need a recent Intel processor that supports or a AMD that supports AMD-V extensions. The extensions aren't very common outside of server class chips (Xeon and Opteron). Here is how to tell if you have the extensions:

egrep '^flags.*(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo

If you don't have a lines of output with vmx or svm in them, you don't have the extensions.

P2V: Physical to Virtual. How to import physical servers (usually old), to a virtual machine, which can save you time and money and get you out of supporting old and busted servers. There are some pay tools for P2V for Xen and Linux. But here is a pretty good free one:

http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v/

That is it for the intro. More tomorrow with specific examples.