Hard Drives Are Dead! Long Live Hard Drives! Wait... What??

Hi All,

Happy Friday!  Today's title probably makes no sense, but keep reading and it will soon all come together.  If you've read my blog or heard me present you'll know I usually begin to rant about how SSD's are so popular right now that you'd think they were the cure to all disease!

This is my friend Mr. SSD.  I have nothing against him, I actually think he's REALLY cool.  He's one of those guys you knew in high school that was just really cool and no matter what he said or did people just thought it was the coolest thing.  Even though my friend here is fast and has no moving parts, I don't think he's going to replace our friend here Mr. Hard Disk so quickly.

Mr. Hard Disk was your buddy in high school that would loan you some cash if you were low, drive you around cause he already had a car and was just an all around reliable and good guy.  Hard drives are just like that friend.  They've been around for quite some time now, they're reliable, they're affordable and I don't think will be going anywhere for awhile.

Remember Mr. SSD might seem like the coolest thing since sliced bread, but he does have a dark side.  He's more expensive, he has a finite life span and the current generation of SSD's aren't the fastest when it comes to sequential writes, which Mr. Hard Disk does quite well!

Am I saying just use hard disks?  No, no, no!  They're both good friends to have because they have synergistic qualities when they're used together.  Combine the random write and cached read capability of SSD and the sequential write, plus cost of hard disks and you my friend are hanging with the cool crowd!  What I'm referring to is hybrid storage and Nimble Storage does it great!  You get the speed of SSD with the price of HDD.

And to those people that say, "Brain, you're crazy, hard disks are dead!"  I give you my good friend, Mr. Tape!

For YEARS people have been telling me that tape is dead, tape is dead!  Tape is still here my friends and tape will be here for years to come.  It fills a space in the backup market that it does well for a good price.  Personally I think tapes and hard disks will be around for many years.  Will they be used in conjunction with newer technologies?  Absolutely!

Remember, just cause it's old doesn't mean it should be discarded.

Until Next Time!

-Brain

How to Upgrade Your Nimble - It Can't Be That Easy! Can It? Part II

Hi Friends,

A little while back I posted this blog:

How to Upgrade Your Nimble - It Can't Be That Easy! Can It?

I showed you one way to easily upgrade your Nimble storage array if you didn't have access to the Internet.  If you thought that way was easy, this other way will knock your socks off!

Regardless of what my doubtful friend here thinks, let's take a look at the process.

1.  Follow the steps like in the previous article, except you don't need to get the software first.  Click on Administration and Software.  So instead of Uploading the software, just click on the Download button.  Notice there's nothing listed in the Downloaded area in this step.

2.  The array will contact Nimble and you'll get a list of software versions you can download.  Here my choice is 1.4.7.  Select the version you want and click the Download button.

 

3.  Watch as the software is downloaded, or get a cup of coffee.  Don't take too long because it'll be done before you know it!

4.  The update has been downloaded and is ready for update!  You can wait or click on the Update button to immediately update your array.  The choice is yours.

That's it!

Yep, that's it!

I told him it would knock his socks off!

Until Next Time!

-Brain

Size Matters!

Hi Friends,

I'm here today to answer the age old question, does size matter?  Without a doubt, size matters!  When it comes to sizing your VDI storage.  :-)

Okay, now get your mind out of the gutter and let's talk about block size!  Yeah I know, the gutter is probably more fun, but unless I want to start a trashy romance blog, let's stick to technical stuff.

So IOPS, what the heck are IOPS?  IOPS are input and output operations per second.  Okay....  So what's are IOPS?  Basically it's a performance measurement commonly used, particularly for hard drives.  And since storage is made up of hard drives, I hear the term a lot!  So much so that it's become one of the leading metrics people use to size their environments when they're getting ready implement a new storage system for VDI.

Unfortunately IOPS are only part of the story.  Take my friend here. He's strong, and confident he can lift 10 IOPS of work.  And if IOPS were the only performance metric we needed to worry about, my friend here could lift 10 IOPS all day!

Ah, but IOPS are not the only thing we need to worry about friends.  What about Reads vs. Writes?

How about Sequential vs. Random work load?  And the Hypervisor?

And what about Block Size??

As my friend here has demonstrated, all of these performance metrics can squash your storage performance if you haven't sized for them.  Due to the random nature of desktops, block size can be 4KB one moment and 64KB another!  Although it might not sound like much, 10 IOPS of 4KB work is a lot less the 10 IOPS of 64KB work.

The beauty of Nimble Storage is the CASL OS and it's extreme flexibility.  Unlike my friend here who as a lot on his mind now, CASL is optimized to handle the randomness and extremes of a VDI workload.

So remember size DOES matter! If you start to get yourself in a position where IOPS are becoming the predominant topic of a sizing discussion, remember my flat friend and get that conversation on track!

Until Next Time
-Brain

VMworld 2013

Hi Friends,

I'm back from VMworld 2013 and I have to say, wow!  It's the busiest I've ever seen it.  We got a TON of foot traffic at the Nimble booth.  If you're still there today be sure to check it out!

We've got a ton of videos and demos and a SmartStack for you to look at and play around with if you want!

Here's a picture of me and my sister Rachel.  Notice the family resemblance?  We're fraternal twins. :-)  If you haven't been to Rachel's blog lately, you're missing out on some cool stuff!  Take a look!

As we were leaving the Moscone Center we saw the coolness of coolnesses.  A BACON truck!

That's all for now.  And if you missed it the first time around, here's my poem,

The Night Before VMworld 

Until Next Time

-Brain

VMware Horizon View - To SESparse or Not to SESparse, Here is The Paper!

Hi Friends,

In my recent blog, VMware Horizon View - To SESparse or Not to SESparse, That is The Question!
I told you a paper explaining our results and testing methodology was on it's way.  You can get it here:

https://connect.nimblestorage.com/docs/DOC-1291


I hope you enjoy reading it!

Until Next Time
-Brain

Cisco UCS 101 - VLAN's made easy

Hi Friends,

If you're like me you know just enough networking to be dangerous.  Sure I can log into a Cisco switch and add new machines to an existing VLAN and other simple things, but create a VLAN?  I'd have to do some Googling to do that!  I've been working with a Cisco UCS and I have to say this thing is VERY cool!  When you're working in a lab environment you'll soon discover you start bumping into your neighbors, accidentally use their DHCP addresses, AD server etc.  You can create new private IP ranges, but since you're on the same VLAN you'll start effecting each others work.

An easy way to segment your work off from your neighbors is to create a VLAN that your servers and storage can be dedicated to.  In a traditional world that involves tracing cables to ports, creating new VLANs on the switch, you know time consuming stuff!  Today I'm going to show you how easy it is to create a VLAN on a Cisco UCS.

1.  Log into your UCS Manager and click on the LAN tab.

2.  Find the Appliances cloud and expand it.  Now remember your UCS will probably look different then mine, so keep that in mind.  Find VLANs, right click on it and select Create VLANs.

3.  Give your new VLAN a name and a number.  You can give a range too, but I'm just doing simple stuff so I just give mine a single number.  Click OK when you're happy.

4.  Guess what?  You just created a VLAN!  Now for all the GUI haters out there I know you could have done this in probably half the time, but I still think it's cool!

So what to do with this new VLAN?  If you already have some virtual NICs in your blades or rack mounts you can apply this new VLAN to one of the vNICs.  If you don't have any free vNICS that can be segmented off, you can create a new vNIC!  How cool is that?!  If I seem excited it's because I am.  When I was a Sys Admin if you wanted to do this it meant actually adding a card to the box!

Let's add this VLAN to an existing vNIC.

5.  Click on the Servers tab at the top of the UCS Manager.

6.  Expand the tree until you find the server and vNIC you want to add the VLAN to.

7.  On the right hand side of the UCS Manager find Modify VLANs and click it.

8.  A window will open with all of your VLANs.  Deselect the VLAN you no longer want to be part of and select the one you do.  Here I deselect hyperv and select test.  Click OK to finish.

There you go, that's it!  That server now has a VLAN separated from everything else unless it's on that same 100 VLAN.

Until Next Time!
-Brain

DHCP Madness! - 0x800f0922 Error

Hi Friends,

I was configuring my DHCP server on Microsoft Windows 2012 and for some reason it stopped working.  When I tried to start it I would get a error that it couldn't be started.  So I thought I'd uninstall the role and reinstall, right?  The uninstall went fine, but when I tried to re-install I would get the following error:

Installation of one or more roles role services or features failed 0x800f0922

Hmm, having NO idea what this error meant I went to my friend Google and started searching.

I found a few instances of some others having this problem, and their solution was to disconnect the network because Windows seems to be trying to get something from the Internet.  I tried this, but still the same error.

I looked around more and found this discussion:

Unable to install DHCP server role on Windows 2012 Server Essential

It had similar answers, but I found one that said to go to C:\windows\system32\dhcp and delete the files within, but leave the directory.  I tried this and it worked!

So if you're having trouble with your DHCP server check out the link and maybe this solution will help!

-Brain

The Brain & Wendel Show #2 - SSD's, Flash and Cache

Hi Friends,

I'm happy to announce the second Podcast from the Brain and Wendel Show! 
 http://ow.ly/o08DH

For those without Apple products, go here to download the files directly.
http://www.mrkieran.com/Podcasts/podcast.xml


Wen and I talk about SSD's, Flash and Cache.

We hope you enjoy it!

-Brain

VMware Horizon View - To SESparse or Not to SESparse, That is The Question!

Hi Friends,

If you've been reading my blog for awhile now you'll know I've talked about SESparse vs. VMFSsparse and if we can believe what's written on the box we could certainly have a winner!  A little overview for those who haven't been long time Glick's Gray Matter readers.  In VMware Horizion View 5.1, VMware introduced a new format called Space Efficient Sparse Virtual Disks.  The problem in the past was that View wrote to disk in 512 byte chunks.  Now if the virtual desktops wrote everything in 512 byte chunks, there would be no problems, but they don't.  Since writes are variable and can be 512b, 4k, 16k, 32k, 64k, etc. we can start to misalign our storage.  Take a look at this diagram.

As you can see I've drawn out how VMFSsparse writes to disks.  Now depending on what boundaries your storage uses this diagram will vary.  Here I'm using a 4K block boundary and all would be cool if only 512b chucks of data were written to it.  In the drawing I've got 1 512b chunk of data written and then 4K.  Since the storage example above has 4K boundaries a piece of our 4K chunk has to be written to another block across another 4K boundary.  Now the problem occurs when I go to read that data.  Since it written across two blocks I have to do double the work on the storage.  This isn't too big of a deal when you just have a few desktops, but multiply this problem by 1000's and you can see this begins to really put extra demands on the storage.

In the past I thought there was an easy way to use or not use SESparse vs. VMFSsparse, but it looks like in 5.2 it's always on if certain environment variables are met.  If anyone from VMware is out there and I'm wrong, please let me know!  According to this article, SESparse can not be turned off from the GUI and must be done on the Horizon View server itself.  http://myvirtualcloud.net/?p=4745 

We ran some tests with SEsparse, with VMFSsparse and with View Storage Accelerator.  Here are our results:

The top line is average IO the desktops ran at steady state, ~8 IOPS, the next two blue lines are two tests running VMFSsparse and the two red lines are SEsparse.  You can see the number of misaligned I/O is about double for VMFSsparse!

If you'd like to learn more, we have a paper coming out shortly that will discuss this in further detail or you can talk to us about it at VMworld, just drop by the Nimble Storage booth and we'd be happy to chat to you about it!

Until Next Time
-Brain

Adventures in Technology - Spam!

Okay, for the legal mumbo-jumbo.  I'm am neither advocating nor condoning violence.  I'm a nice guy and would never hit people on the head with heavy objects and neither should you.  This is just a comic and it shouldn't be a guide on how to act towards people.  But it's kinda funny to watch stick figures abusing each other cause we shouldn't do it in real life!  So with that said, these comics should not be viewed by anyone..

How to Upgrade Your Nimble - It Can't Be That Easy! Can It?

Hi Friends,

Today I'm going to walk you through a process System Administrators avoid like the plague!  No, I'm not talking about a hair cut or a shave, I'm talking about upgrades.  Mention upgrades, patches, etc. and the hair on the back of their necks stand up!  Why?  Because upgrading sucks!  You have to arrange for downtime and NO one wants downtime even during maintenance windows.  The reason?  The power of centralized storage is everything is centralized.  The problem with it is everything is centralized...  When you bring it down, EVERYTHING on it stops.  Disruptive upgrades are a nightmare and that's when things go well!  I won't even get into what happens when things don't go well.

So with that said, I'd like to introduce you to the Nimble Storage upgrade.  Downtime?  NOPE!  Headaches?  NOPE!  Smooth sailing my friends.  There isn't downtime during an upgrade, what there is is a failover from the primary controller to the secondary controller with an ~30 second time.

How can this be?  Watch closely my friends and take in the goodness!

There are a couple of ways to do the upgrade, you can either download the newer Nimble OS from the Nimble Support Site directly from the administration GUI or if you don't have external Internet access you can download the Nimble OS from InfoSight and then upload it into the administration GUI.

Before you do anything, download and take a look at the release notes.  They can be found on InfoSight in the download area.  Pay special attention to the Verified Update Paths.  The last thing you want to do is make a jump that isn't supported.

I'm going to show you how to do an upgrade through an upload, so first I go to InfoSight and click on the Downloads link.

Select the Nimble OS tab, the version you want, here I'm choosing version 1.4.6.0, and click on Software.

Once that file downloads open up your Nimble GUI.  Click on Administration and then Software.  That will take you to the upgrade page.

You can see I'm currently on 1.4.3.  Click on the Upload button and find the update file.

Once you've located the file click on the Upload button.

The upload will begin and you'll be told when it's complete.  Remember this is NOT the upgrade, this is just uploading the new Nimble OS.  So if you don't feel comfortable doing this during business hours you can just upload the Nimble OS and update later.

You can see  here the downloaded Nimble OS is 1.4.6 and it's ready to Update when I am.  To update click on the Update button.

You can see here the update first installs on the secondary controller so if there are any issues, it won't be on your production controller.

Once Controller B has completed the upgrade the failover occurs and the upgrade begins on Controller A.

Once the Nimble OS has been loaded onto both controllers you're done!  You can see below the current version is now 1.4.6.  That's right, no pain, no reboot!

Sheesh, where was this when I was doing upgrades and patches?!  I would have more hair and what I have wouldn't be so gray!

Until Next Time

-Brain

Adventures in Technology - Backup

Okay, for the legal mumbo-jumbo.  I'm am neither advocating nor condoning violence.  I'm a nice guy and would never hit people on the head with heavy objects and neither should you.  This is just a comic and it shouldn't be a guide on how to act towards people.  But it's kinda funny to watch stick figures abusing each other cause we shouldn't do it in real life!  So with that said, these comics should not be viewed by anyone..

Adventures in Technology - I Won, I Won!

You asked for it, okay you didn't, but here it is anyway, Adventures in Technology!

Okay, for the legal mumbo-jumbo.  I'm am neither advocating nor condoning violence.  I'm a nice guy and would never hit people on the head with heavy objects and neither should you.  This is just a comic and it shouldn't be a guide on how to act towards people.  But it's kinda funny to watch stick figures abusing each other cause we shouldn't do it in real life!  So with that said, these comics should not be viewed by anyone..

Adventures In Technology!

Ever wanted to start your own comic strip, but people tell you you can't draw?  Well, I can't draw and I say %7##%^$($&^(*#%$^%#W on them!  Starting today I give you:

Adventures In Technology

Okay, for the legal mumbo-jumbo.  I'm am neither advocating nor condoning violence.  I'm a nice guy and would never hit people on the head with heavy objects and neither should you.  This is just a comic and it shouldn't be a guide on how to act towards people.  But it's kinda funny to watch stick figures abusing each other cause we shouldn't do it in real life!  So with that said, these comics should not be viewed by anyone...

 

Nimble Storage InfoSight - Empowering The Storage Administrator!

Hi Friends,

When I was a System and Storage Administrator, one of the most difficult things was to figure out if my systems were healthy and were they going to be healthy in 6 months.  When you're on-call, the last thing you want is to get a call at 2:30 in the morning that your storage system has run out of disk space.  This is something that is usually easy to fix, but will ruin your night and could halt production! 

There are a lot of great programs out there that will keep an eye on your servers, but what about your storage?  Wouldn't it be nice to have a webpage you could log in from anywhere and check the health and capacity of your storage?  Something that would show you ALL your Nimble Storage arrays?  Wow, I'm starting to sound like those infomercial guys...  Act now and you'll get two bottles for the price of one!  But I digress...

To answer my infomercial alter ego, YES, this page exists and it's available to you through InfoSight.  I've mentioned InfoSight a few times now and showed you some of the features, but I promised to come back and show the features in more detail.  Today I'm going to give you a tour of the Wellness and Capacity tabs.

Let's first take a look at the Wellness tab.  If you've been a System Administrator, you'll notice the information in the Wellness tab looks a lot like information found in syslog.  The nice thing is you don't have to go running around looking for these events, they're right at your finger tips.  Let's take a look at the image below.  From left to right.  The Event Summary shows messages from Urgent, Important to For Review.  Each are color coded, you can click on each to focus on those messages or go down the page to see the actual messages.  You can select Daily Summary Emails to receive information in your email about what you see here.  If you want helpful hints, select the Show hints box and you'll get lots of helpful bubbles that describe what the different features mean on the page.  The Event Details tell you what the Event Summary is alerting on.

Now let's look at the Capacity tab.  Capacity is really cool because it shows how much you're using on the array and provide predictive analysis on when the array will probably be filled.  This is great for future planning!  We've all gotten the emails from our boss that ask us what we need to purchase in the next few quarters.  With the predictive analysis, this makes it MUCH easier to plan for current and future growth.

Take a look where I've highlighted on the chart.  You can select any point and InfoSight will provide you with the information at that time.

I hope this was helpful and if it will help prevent one of those 2:30 in the morning phone calls, than my job is complete!  :-)

Until Next Time
-Brain

Occam's Razor Meet Neil.... Come Back Datastore!

Hi Friends,

I've been working with Nimble snapshots and I restored a previous snapshot of a volume that is a datastore in my ESXi 5.1 environment.  When you restore a snaphot Nimble has you take the volume offline.  It's a good idea so you don't shock the filesystem you're working with, in this case VMFS.

So no problem, I'm expecting my datastore to go offline as well as my virtual machines that are built from it.  I bring the volume back online after the snapshot restore and my datastore just continues to show Inactive...  No amount of refreshing, rescanning and pleading will bring it back!  The weird thing is it's showing active in the detailed storage adapter view.  I have it mounted on another ESXi server and it's showing showing up just fine!  What the heck?!

So I check the /var/log/vmkernel.log and I find, "Device is permanently unavailable".  Oh CRAP what the heck did I do?!  I'm thinking I've got some weird iSCSI duplicate ID's, or something weird.

Then I remember my friend Occam's Razor.  What's that you ask?  Basically all things considered, the simplest explanation is usually the answer.  I remember I was doing some CLI work on this ESXi machine and I check to see if I'm sitting in a directory that is no longer mounted on that machine.  Sure enough that's where I was!  I change directory out of there and guess what?  My datastore came back.  :-)

So what does this teach us?  NEVER use the CLI!   NO, no, just kidding.  If a problem seems totally bizarre and won't resolve itself, usually it's the simplest explanation.

Until Next Time
-Brain

Brain and Wendel are on The Air!

Hi Friends,

I wanted to share some exciting news!  The first episode of the Brain and Wendel show is now available as an Apple Podcast!  In this first episode we discuss storage basics like RAID, why enterprise storage, cache and a bit of virtualization.  You can download the Podcast by going to the Apple Podcast app and searching for Nimble Storage.  5 star reviews are VERY much appreciated!  Wen and I hope you enjoy it!  Be on the lookout for episode two, where we dive head first into cache, flash and SSD's.

Until Next Time
-Brain

The Night Before VMworld

Hi All,

Another Friday, another treat!  With VMworld right around the corner, I thought I'd write a poem for all the hard working folks that make these shows great!

Enjoy!

Twas the night before VMworld and all through Nimble Storage,
Not a TME was freaking, only positive words to encourage.
The hardware was stacked in a rack with care,
In the hopes to impress attendees that showed up there.

Attendees had read all the blogs, Twitter feeds and all sorts of threads,
Now visions of free swag occupied their heads.
The hotels all booked accept the ones that are crap,
where the heck am I?  I better get a map!

Brochures neatly stacked to avoid any clutter,
Hopefully they take all this stuff, thinking of carrying it again makes me shutter.
Demos and presentations all skillfully recorded,
What do you mean the resolution of the demo isn't supported?

The booth looks great, it's got people talking,
People stop to take a look before they start walking.
Thank goodness for comfortable shoes this is going to be painful.
So I'm wearing black tennis shoes, how shameful!

The doors are open, the rush begins,
Feet don't fail me now, hold out limbs!
Where's the schedule, where am I supposed to be?
My back is sore, my feet hurt, please set me free!

My throat is sore, my voice raspy.
Shirt is un-tucked my hair's a mess, I look ghastly!
It's been hours since this things started, I'm beat.
Can you believe it, even I forgot to eat!

It's the last day and I try to stay composed.
Hearing those magical words, "The Show Floor is now closed!"
Another year, another great show!
Congratulations to all, may your profits grow!

SNAFU 2 - XenDesktop on Hyper-V - SCVMM and XenDesktop Torment

Ugh...

Okay, so I finished installing the SCVMM Console, reboot like it tells me to so everything should be good now right?  RIGHT?!

 no...

Well, the good thing is I got past that window from yesterday, but then I get to a new window.

Okay, no problem, everything here makes sense right?  Click Next and...

WHAT?!  The SCVMM address was not formatted correctly?  What the heck does that mean?

The address is just fine, it resolves just fine, it's the fully qualified domain name, it pings.  So I try a few things.  I use the IP, no good, I use the short name, no good, check firewall settings, they're fine.  I search Google and nothing!

So what the heck do you want from me XenDesktop?!

For giggles I try putting my domain in front of my administrator account.  And....

It worked!  Wait...  Why the heck did it work when the error message mentioned a badly formatted address for SCVMM?

Hey, who am I to question positive results?!

Hurray!

Off to install PVS!

Until Next Time
-Brain