VMBulletin
Virtualization Engineering

Nov 12
8

Next-Generation Storage Symposium Recap

I got the chance to attend the Next-Generation Storage Symposium in San Jose yesterday that is organized by Tech Field Day and hosted by Steven Foskett. There were a number of vendors that spoke at the event and if I could put a theme on this event it would be centric around flash based storage. I am going to summarize on what each vendor brought to the table at this event in order to give you an overview of what was talked about.

Nexsan - Hybrid storage platform through SAN, NAS and Unified Storage Systems including their NS model that they referenced in their presentation.

Nimbusdata - The presentation revolved around their memory-based protocol storage systems and they discussed how simplistic the platform is and they emphasized a 10yr warranty on their platform.

Permabit - This company focuses on Enterprise Flash Array’s and cache solutions through their Albireo dedupication methods for SSD’s.

Purestorage -This is a pure flash-based storage platform that reads and writes to flash disks fundamentally different to take advantage of performance and sustain longevity.

Solidfire - They are focused on cloud-scale computing and the performance requirements behind it. Their point is that traditional storage platforms are not designed for this level of storage. Solidfire’s presentation focused on taking advantage of unique properties of these solid state drives.

Starboard - This company fell in line with the other presenters in that they have a hybrid storage platform that is focused on delivery at a certain price point. They also make note of cost savings from consolidating and mixing workloads with dynamic storage pooling.

Tegile - This presentation focused on their Hybrid storage system that utilizes spinning disk as well as flash based. They touched on their management capabilities with this technology around VDI as well.

Towards the end of the day, some of the Tech Field Day delegates hosted a number of sessions that had various panelists talk about a number of topics that pertained to the architecture of these next generation storage platforms.

Flash Storage overview – Comments from the moderator and panelists centered on the delivery mechanisms for each company that is focused on solid state as the primary tier for all levels. A strong argument was made from one of the attendees that some of these problems have been addressed at a higher layer and if these technologies have these same issues in mind when products are delivered.

Scaling storage for the future – Comments from the panelists revolved around how large scale environments can effectively be moved to the next level and maintain the service levels that the original deployment was designed to deliver.

Storage for the Virtual Infrastructure – Questions and statements in this panel talked about how these new storage platforms are going to affect how data is accessed and stored. One of the main highlights in this discussion were centered around how the storage layer is aware of the type of I/O that is being passed to it. VMware’s VAAI was called out specifically as well as other API’s that are coming to market.

Nov 12
5

Tech Field Day – Storage Field Day 2 Starts this Week!

Very excited that Storage Field Day 2 is amongst us and this week is shaping up to be a good one!

I will be heading to beautiful San Jose / Silicon Valley this week for Storage Field Day 2 on November 8th and 9th. I will be there with 10 other delegates and you can read more about it on the Tech Field Day page. I am really looking forward to visiting and getting into some deep technical discussions with the following companies that we will be visiting on Thursday and Friday:

• Asigra
• Nexgen Storage
• Nimble Storage
• Nimbus Data
• Nutanix
• Riverbed
• Tintri
• Virsto
• Zerto

One of the great things about Tech Field Day is that these companies have engineers deliver the content and we really get to understand the product from a technical perspective and not just be presented with high level information.

Look for updated posts throughout the week and tune in at the link above for live video streaming from the meetings!

Rick

Oct 12
23

VMware Converter 5.0 and vSphere 5.1 Workaround

Came across this issue the other day when attempting to P2V a system into a vSphere 5.1 cluster. Apparently there is an issue with using VMware converter 5.0.0 (build 470252) and importing either a physical machine or virtual machine to vSphere 5.1. The “issue” is that your converter client will crash!  This is pointed out in VMware Knowledge Base article 2033315.

This happens if you target either an ESXi 5.1 host or vCenter 5.1

I’ve heard people using the 4.3 version of converter to “get around” this problem for now until they update the release, but that involves a few extra steps and you loose the benefit of aligning your vDisks when converting. A few things to remember if you use this workaround.

• Use hardware version 4, 7 or 8 when doing the conversion
• Manually upgrade the virtual machine (once imported) to version 9 with the web client

I am willing to bet that they will be releasing a new converter build soon to fix this issue, but until then this is your workaround.

Rick