1 Scotland VMware User Group Craig Stewart – VMworld 2010 September 2010

Who am I ? 2 Lead Infrastructure Analyst – Solution Delivery Infrastructure Team Blogger – Twitter Blogger –

3 Topics for today VMworld 2010 Copenhagen / VMworld 2011 Las Vegas Why you should attend Making your case Introduction Who are Martin Currie ? Martin Currie and VMware VMworld 2010 US Our reasons for attending My VMworld Technical Highlights Storage I/O Control VAAI – vStorage API for Array Integration Tech Preview - Storage DRS vShield Endpoint

4 Who are Martin Currie ? Corporate locations * Source: Martin Currie as at 30 th June 2010 Martin Currie Charitable Foundation raised and distributed over £1.6 million to good causes in the first 4 years. Martin Currie is a global investment management business headquartered in Edinburgh Founded in 1881 and to this day still Employee-owned. 258 Employees across the globe We manage £10.5 billion (US$15.7 billion)* in active equity portfolios for clients globally Clients include financial institutions, charities, foundations, pension funds and investment trusts

5 Martin Currie and VMware Virtualisation evolution 2010 Upgraded to vSphere ESX 4.0 & Enterprise Plus Licensing Consolidated segregated environments onto fewer larger servers. Eradicated DAS storage, utilised EMC CLARiiON CX4 array Implemented EMC PowerPath/VE on all hosts Implemented VMware Data Recovery Manager for critical Test and DEV servers 2002 VMware GSX Server introduced 2007 Large business project prompted us to move the VI3 Infrastructure Rapid adoption of virtualisation with VI3 - Within 1 year 100% growth in VM’s 2009 Environment growth a problem, capacity and physical segregation 2005 / 2006 ESX 2.5 introduced to facilitate office move / expanded for testing environments 2008 Virtualise first policy introduced Platespin introduced to provide BCP and DR VM replication

Martin Currie virtualisation continued…... 6 Business Plan objective to look at Cloud Computing technology within 5 years Right now Tier 1 SQL 2008 platform being deployed on to VMware and EMC infrastructure. Tier 1 trading platform being virtualised on to new ESX 4.1 dedicated cluster The Future Migrate to 100% virtualised DR environment. Business Plan objective to reach 90% virtualisation within 3 years EMC Recoverpoint VMware Site Recovery Manager VDI – Citrix XenDesktop / VMware view

Our reasons for attending VMworld Successful visit in both 2007 and 2009 Seen as an educational activity by management Access to VMware and vendor product managers Sessions specific to current environment - ESXi Transition, logical storage and network I/O control Sessions specific to current and future virtualisation projects – SQL 2008 and Exchange 2010 Solution verification – Have we done or are we doing the right thing – SQL 2008 / NUMA Strategic direction of industry and how that fits with our own plans Access to top subject matter experts

Storage I/O Control – SIOC Overview 8 SIOC Enabled on the data store object and monitors datastore latency SIOC kicks in when contention occurs latency threshold exceeds 30ms (default) Storage contention is a concern in our mixed environment SIOC and NIOC closes the resource management gap Host level disk shares have always been available SIOC enables I/O control across multiple hosts Allows you to control VM disk share level as part of datastore and limit VM IOPS

Storage I/O Control – SIOC Default implementation 9

Storage I/O Control – SIOC Actively managed shares 10

11 vStorage API for Array Integration – VAAI Thin Provision Stun Designed for array thin provision scenarios Array reports thin provision state up to ESX hosts VM is stunned / paused instead of crashing Available in vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise Plus licensing Requires supported array firmware / software (block protocols only – FC, ISCSI, FCOE) EMC Celerra / CLARiiON CX4 Flare release 30 EMC VMAX Enginuity 5875 – Q PAR, NetApp, HP, HDS, Dell all committed to VAAI delivery Storage equivalent of Intel-VT, offloading storage tasks from ESX to the array hardware Requires vSphere 4.1 and supported array Hardware Assisted Locking Reduce SCSI reservation contention Lock blocks as opposed to entire LUN Increase VM to datastore density Fast / Full Copy Cloning / Copying / Storage vMotion done inside the array Write Same / Block Zeroing Eliminate redundant / repetitive write commands Eager Thick Zero disks a prime example VAAI V2 from EMC will support NFS and also a 4 th VAAI feature

12 vStorage API for Array Integration – VAAI benefits demonstrated Without VAAI enabled 75GB VM takes 12 mins to Storage vMotion With VAAI enabled 75GB VM takes 8 mins to Storage vMotion Array efficiency improvements Reduce overhead on Storage processor utilisation Impact time of operation is reduced Watch the whole end to end demo

13 Tech Preview – Storage DRS Automated Storage Management at the VMware level Storage version of a cluster - provides effective initial placement for VMs Tech Preview session – Vmware offer a no guarantee disclaimer on this content New abstraction - Datastore Groups - a collective of similar type datastores (RAID, Disk speed, size) Provides out of space avoidance Provides IO Load balancing: Lower overall latency and increase througput

Tech Preview – Storage DRS Automated Storage Management at the VMware level 14 Storage DRS Algorithm can take into account both I/O stats and capacity when calculating placement Set I/O latency and capacity thresholds, Storage DRS will rebalance if exceeded to maintain service level Add a data store to a data store group and it will rebalance itself – much like adding a host to a cluster Storage DRS affinity groups, keep certain VMs together or apart on separate arrays Datastore maintenance mode – auto evacuate a datastore Integrated with DRS, prioritising for better connected ESX hosts for best overall resource balance effect. Balancing does not occur frequently, probably daily or every 2 days VMware storage experts came off second best against SDRS algorithm in testing (beaten on latency) Still in development – no firm commitment to GA

15 vShield EndPoint Offloading AV…. Again! Anti-Virus and Virtual Environments do not mix well VMware vShield Endpoint Security (EPSEC) is a library and set of APIs for hypervisor level introspection Partner Supplied hardened security appliance and vShield Endpoint driver per VM to handle file offload and remediation tasks. EPSEC loadable kernel module (LKM) acts as the bridge between driver and appliance. AV offload reclaiming VM memory and prevent AV storms vShield Manager allows for policy based configuration, integrates with existing AV management tools (vendor specific) Apply updates to appliance only, but apply policies to all VMs on a host. Caveats Only available for vSphere 4.1, VMware View 4.5 Only works with Windows VM’s (at present) Driver still installed on a per VM basis Hypervisor overhead not clear Only monitors file level events – is this enough?

Why should you attend VMworld 2010 / Networking Meeting other customers with different set ups / similar problems Vendor parties – Another chance to meet vendors and customers Education 30 individual Hands on Labs One to one sessions with Knowledge Experts 20:1 Group discussions with Knowledge Experts (Chad Sakacc & Scott Drummond) Breakout Sessions, Labs, Super Sessions, Tech Previews, Vendor specific sessions Solution Design / Verification Verify your current configuration / project design Look at best practice for specific virtualisation projects – Exchange 2010, SQL 2008 Take advantage of experts and the VMware Genius Bar Vendor engagement Solutions Exchange - Access to more than 200 vendors Access to the latest and greatest kit and software releases Access to the top engineers to discuss your issues concerns

Make your case for VMworld 17 Letter to your Boss US and European VMworld draft letters State your case – if you don’t ask you never get ! Review the session catalogue for relevant sessions Include current problems and upcoming projects that may benefit Calculate out the costs – what discounts are available Consider current VMware usage profile Compare cost against your current VMware spend Compare it against the cost of training courses Compare it against the cost of other conferences Does your company have a central air miles account? Do you have a friend you can stay with?

If all else fails? 18 You can always purchase a subscription to view the VMworld sessions online after the event, approximate price $699

Questions 19