TA3461 – IO DRS: Tech Preview for VM Performance Isolation
This is a very new area of research at VMware. Only about 2 years ago. Since thm is is a Tech Preview it has no roadmap for when it will be available.
The Problem:
Many different workloads hit the same set of disks/arrays/spindles etc. Low priority processes that run ad-hoc or other times will cause higher priority systems to experience an impact. What you want to see is that the low priority VM gets less performance than the higher priority systems. The question is how you can do this?
A solution: Resource Controls
Assigning out shares based on disk performances. Just like CPU/Memory shares of the original ESX days. Higher shares total for a host gets higher priority for that shared VMFS volume.
To configure this you’d go into the VM and set the shares. Fairly straight forward. The setting is shares and then the limiting factor is IOPS. Interesting idea.
First case study covers two separate hosts with the IO DRS turned on running the same workload levels and saw a pretty significant difference in terms of IOPS & Latency measures. With it turned off both VMs ran at 20 ms & 1500 IOPS. With it on the Latency changed to 16 ms and 31 ms and a similar spread for IOPS. Nice..
Case study two is a a more serious one with SQL server running. The shares were 4:1 and the ratios were not that in terms of performance. The thing that they are seeing is that load time matters significantly. Overall thruput is working right and good though the loads make a big difference.
The demo went and showed changing the shares on the fly and the Limit for IOPS and watched the IOMeter machines adjust immediately. When limiting the IOPS the other systems picked up the slack and got more performance.
After showing the demo the presenters asked if anyone in the packed room (and I do mean PACKED) would find a value to this? Everyone immediately raised their hands.
The tech approach is first to detect congestion. If latency is above a threshold and then trigger the IO DRS. If it isn’t borked don’t fix it. IO DRS works by controling the IOs issued per host. The sum of the vms on the host with IO DRS enabled is compared with other hosts to determine share priority. So first the host is picked and then the VMs shares on that host are prioritized and then back to the host discussion. The share control goes against all hosts using that same VMFS volume.
IO slots are filled based on the shares on each host. There are so many IO slots per Host. This is how the IOs are controled for share congestion work.
Two major performance metrics in storage industry. Bandwidth (MB/s) and Throughput (IOPS). Each have their pros and cons. Bandwidth helps workloads with large IO sizes and IOPS is good for lots of sequential workloads. IO DRS controls the array queue among the VMs. Then if a VM has lots of small IOs they can continue to do things and have high IOPS. Conversely if it has large IOs it is doing then it will get high bandwidth and low IOPS using the same share control system.
Case studies and test runs have shown that Device level latency stays the same as workloads change. Some tests have shown that with IO DRS IOPS can go up simply due to the workloads involved. Control of the IOs allows all to work though depending on the workload a VM can accomplish more.
The key understanding is that IO DRS really helps when there is congestion. When things are good and latency is not high enough to trigger the system, the shares are not used. If a high IO share system is not using its slots, they are reassigned to other VMs in the cluster.
The gain overall is the ability to do performance isolation amoung VMs based on Disk IO.
In the future they are looking to tie this into more vStorage APIs and VMotions and Storage VMotions, IOP reservation potentially etc.
Rocking cool and can’t wait for this to come out.
In: VMware · Tagged with: drs, VMware, vmworld
VMworld 2009 – Keynote P5
To expand and handle the next layers of Virtualization is:
vSphere Control:
Appspeed: is the “finger of blame” now. Instead of Network always getting the finger, now AppSpeed can point the finger at someone else.
vApps are the containers of the future for applications be it standalone or multi-tier. The idea is with a vApp is that it has a variety of attributes/metadata such as Availability, RTOs for dR, Max Latency etc. This info travels with the vApp.
VMsafe APIs: This gives control of security and compliance. The nice thing is this is more appropriate data tied to a vApp via the attributes/metadata and the various vendors such as Trend/McAfee/Symantec/RSA etc. Example would be Needs these firewall rules and capabilities.
vCenter ConfigControl: The demo showed that ConfigControl really has
vSphere Choice:
LabManager is the token self service portal today.
VMworld today:
37,248 machines -
if physical –> 25 MegaWatts – 3 football fields of space
with VMware Virtualization – Down to 776 physical servers running 540 Kilowatts
vCloud
Priority is around the internal cloud. Next is working on bringing internal datacenter trust and capabilities to the external clouds. The 3rd innovation is how and what can you do once you have these two pieces and how they interact and connectivity.
Today Site Recovery Manager is the first step into the Connectivity space. When and how and what needs to take place to failover from one datacenter to another one.
Long Distance VMotion: The challenges – Move VMs Memory, Disk consistency/syncing and VM network id/connections.
- Follow the Sun/Moon approaches (moving computing to stay during the night and cheaper issues)
- Disaster Datacenter Avoidance – Hurricane coming. Move the Datacenter somewhere out of the path.
Cisco does this by spanning Layer 2 across both campuses up to 300KM apart.
F5 uses its iSession technology to move things around through a globally based load balancer system.
Interoperability: vCloud API
vSphere Plugins with your hosting provider to maintain the Single Pane of Glass.
Open Standards. The end goal is it will work regardless of where you go or what hypervizor is used. The end goal is to have a good eco system and selection for end clients.
vApps Automation for the app stacks. Spring Source helps go down this path. Much discussion around splitting up Infrastructure, Applications, Platform and separating these to create well defined interaction points.
Spring Source Demo shows some of the process capabilities to control deployment and put some controls around it. Things like CloudFoundry. For those of us the contest is on.. http://www.code2cloud.com for backstage pass to see Foreigner. (Oh wait.. maybe I shouldn’t post that)
Till the next time. I’m off to IO DRS Tech Preview.
In: VMware · Tagged with: keynote, vApps, vCloud, vmworld, vSphere
VMworld 2009 – Keynote P4
vSphere is the basis of all the improvements and technology over the years. Based on Software Mainframe (for those of you over 40), the Cloud (for the under 40 crowd) and decides the best idea is to call it The Giant Computer. The reason this all works is because of VMotion. It is the basis of all that has happened.
The reason for the success of VMotion is Maturity, Breadth, Automated Use.
Maturity of VMotion – Estimates (fun or not) put around 360 million VMotions around the world since VMotion started. About 2 VMotions a second around the world. VMotion is 6 years old. (Wow I feel old)
Breadth of VMotion – Storage & Network VMotioning. Across protocols and soon across Datacenters. High performance computing systems are starting to look at using VMware.
Automation of VMotion – DRS is the initial version that made this work. DRS has been shown to average 96% of a perfect performance environment compared to a manually setup cluster in a perfect world. Future will include IO DRS shares and configuration based on IOPS. DPM allows for power optimization across the datacenter. Or as has been said a Server Defrag capability.
vSphere is still driving ahead.. more next post.
In: VMware · Tagged with: keynote, VMware, vmworld, vSphere
VMworld 2009 – Keynote P3
View also includes the Mobile Technology dicussion. Mobile Technology is longer term working for functionality. Visa Product Development is up on the stage. He sees this space as a huge innovation going forward. Current development is significantly complicated. Easing functionality for development is extremely interesting for Visa.
The Visa demo uses Windows Mobile on a developer version of a phone (kinda big) running an Atom CPU. The presentation shows some alerting from Visa transactions and finding local ATMs. The impressive zing is that the Visa demo application is actually an Android app running on the Atom CPU. Wow.
Next..
In: VMware · Tagged with: keynote, view, VMware
VMworld 2009 – Keynote P2
A major goal of the View initative is to have the same image while providing the best experience possible with WAN, LAN and Direct machine speeds. For WAN/LAN the solution will be PCoIP. The performance numbers are very impressive and no numbers. This protocol has shown some excellent capabilities over WAN connections.
The other piece for local machine usage is Employee Owned machines. Hosted Virtualization is being highly developed. Deals with Intel have gone the next step with Bare Metal Virtualization for Corporate owned machines.
Demo of the Bare Metal Virtualization (type 1 hypervisor). Direct3D works fairly well during the demo. A presentation of OpenGL using the Google Earth demo over PCoIP and over the LAN was very nice. The WAN demo back to Portland simply rocked.
Wyse has an iPhone application to make the iPhone act as a thin client connecting over PCoIP to the same virtual machine ruled. Quick and effectively to scroll around the screen and do what you would normally. Which is appropriate having seen well over 2 out of 10 people having iPhones, more than Blackberrys here.
More to come.. next post…
In: VMware · Tagged with: keynote, view, VMware
VMworld 2009 – Day 2 Keynote – P1
The morning video is pretty neat and a clean match to yesterday’s video. Anyone get this video for replay? Lots of playing with letters flying around and a good theme fitting with the “hello freedom” this year.
This is mainly Steve Herrod’s presentation. 3 major initatives - View, vCloud, vSphere. All driven around business need.
View has over 1,000,000 desktops and 7,000 customers today. The high focus is around better efficiency day to day. This is built over the vSphere system. Over 3 million engineer hours put into vSphere. vSphere has some nice base to work on such as Commonality for management, Security, Availability, Efficiency.
Focusing on View some big points are Provisioning, Image Updating & Policy Enforcement. The key to desktops is breaking them apart into the same separation that has been done on server side. Separate out the Application Stacks from the OS and pulling out Data Store parts.
Big news is the announcement on rtoVirtualProfiles agreement.
More next post…
In: VMware · Tagged with: keynote, vmworld
VMworld 2009 Day 1 Wrap Up
I went to two other sessions and they just weren’t anything I was intersted in so I left early and spent time talking with engineers from various companies about their products. So far I’m not really too wowed by much of the products. This fits into my feelings about the keynote after it was done. Not really wowed at all. No new product announcements, version announcements or even serious tech previews. The one I was all excited to see on the big screen was the PCoIP and they rushed through that.
The vCloud announcement was nice as it is starting to get somewhat defined for the industry. Thanks to Jian Zhen (zhenjl) from VMware for pointing me to the vCloud API. I’ll be reading through that this week. Probably on the flight home knowing me. Seeing the investment by companies like Terremark already for “on demand servers access” is nice and in the ranges of cost feasibility.
Overall the day has been productive and less than exciting.
In: VMware · Tagged with: VMware, vmworld
TA4820 – What keeps a cloud up?
Arrived at the session early and was easy to get in even though I hadn’t registered. The CTO of Stratus Tech started and covered the basics for his presentation. Covering things like his history and what the cloud is. A pretty common “Cloud is whatever folks want” and 80% of IT management agrees that the cloud will be great. He feels that SaaS will have a .com style consolidation any day now.
Much of the legacy technology architectures like Mainframe, client server and n-tier applications are not going away even though everyone claims they are dead. As such the cloud is just moving these legacy systems into a separately managed group. Not necessarily removing them from service.
One of his big points is that Availability is a bit concerning moving to the cloud. Application Platform, Vendor Trust, Mgmt/Platform monitoring & Billing are 4 major areas of concern to make sure you know and have defined in the contracts. Can you trust your business to these when the services are down? VMware offers some of these.
The Stratus CTO’s comments are that you need a cloud environment with Fault-tolerant hardware platforms, 24/7 services for support, Culture of high focus on availability technologies, and 30 years of experience doing work like this. 99.999% hardware uptime accomplished by heavy investments into monitoring and operational simplicity.
Stratus provides and develops lockstep hardware technology to keep things running as they provide hardware tandem architectures. 8 of 10 banks, 10 of 13 pharma, 900 health agencies. This is clock locked systems in sync. MasterCard & Visa use this so things always work. 100% of credit card transactions in Japan are run through their servers. They work on Windows, Linux and now VMware.
This kind of hardware takes you from Basic HA to Better Fault Tolerance to finally Continous Availability. The FAA has identified that Continous Availability is extremely critical. They are looking to upgrade from older versions of the hardware and Stratus’s answer was to move to vSphere with Stratus’s ftServer to get to 24 hour and near 100% uptime.
Virtualization works today for much of the functionality of “cloud” In the near term their will be Private Clouds. Moving to public clouds is still in the air and there is a lot of hype versus reality. Security and availability is a major concern for public clouds.
What keeps clouds up? Products, Services, Experience & People and Culture. It is the whole picture and not just pieces and parts. What is the cost of downtime and is the possibilty of public downtime acceptable? Many pieces of technology are extremely difficult to deal with in this regard to validate uptime and keep your business working.
In: VMware · Tagged with: cloud, session, vmworld
VMworld 2009 – Opening Keynote – Tod Throws the Gaunlet
Today there are 30 Fortune 1000 companies who are not using VMware. The gaunlet has been thrown. Free VMworld passes if you can get them to start using VMware. This was thrown by Tod Nielsen, Chief Operating Officer of VMware.
update (1 Sept 09 10:31PM): The list of 30 is as follows – Thanks to Anthony in the comments:
Allied Waste Industries
Amerco
Annaly Capital Management
AutoNation
Beacon Roofing Supply
Burlington Coat Factory
Calumet Specialty Products
Carpenter Production Services
Dole Food
ExpressJet Holdings
Flowers Foods
Fred’s
Group 1 Automotive
Host Hotels & Resorts
Hudson City Bancorp
Ingles Markets
Interactive Brokers Group
Internatonal Assets Holding
Interstate Bakeries
Kansus City Southern
KB Home
Mueller Industries
Mueller Water Products
Mutual of America Life
Nalco Holding
National Life Group
New Jersey Resources
Patterson-UTI Energy
Ryland Group
Scotts Miracle-gro
Sonoco Products
Thor Industries
In: VMware · Tagged with: keynote, vmworld
VMworld 2009 – Keynote Thoughts
Ok.. Its proven. No-one in the industry can keep up with Scott with blogging. You want a live blog go here.
The Cloud. Business Complexity. Give businesses Flexibility.
The great question is how do you do this? Much of the point is “Simplify so things can happen since it is so complex today.” People understand the current environments where application stacks exist on physical hardware instances and it works. Complex, though it works.
The Cloud that VMware is proposing is a layer between this hard tie of Physical Hardware to the Application Stack. Much of this is not anything new to folks. It is a straight up thought of API development. Take something that lot of different systems/interfaces do and abstract it into an object with well defined interfaces.
By adding in this additional layer IT and business can simplify those interactions. This is an amazing and great piece of simplification that is being offered. Not something to make light of if one has worked in a seriously large IT shop. VMware is the only company I’ve seen to date that has taken a serious analysis of these interfaces between the different technologies and domains involved in supplying services from IT to the business side. This covers all the various pieces of the VMware structure like vSecurity, vStorage, vNetwork, vCompute, vAvailability, vScalability and the other vStuff.
The individualized components that now have well defined (or at least a first run at it) of these interfaces. So the complexity can still exist inside of the box that is defined though others can deal with that component in a nice clean way.
Then too you can start producing some nice flexibility to do auto provisioning and self management. Since you have this API you can control anything that talks to those interaction points. This is why VMware is on the cutting edge and Microsoft & Citrix are still behind.
In: Server Virtualization, VMware · Tagged with: keynote, vmworld