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Running Report May 2020 – Defy Unforeseen Changes and Adapt

Hi everybody,

I am reporting back from the walking dead.

Unfortunately I suffered from a ankle injury on the side of my right foot. This nasty cutback didn’t heal as fast as I expected maybe I escalated too hard on the treadmill.

Luckily I was able to recover but had to drastically reduce my training workload. That’s why I didn’t report for almost three months. I am thrilled that I am back very refreshed and hungry for new personal records.

Continue reading “Running Report May 2020 – Defy Unforeseen Changes and Adapt”
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Marathon Running Report For Icy January

Hi everybody,

this is the monthly report for January 2020 focusing on the areas I was able to improve or gathered new insights.

The purpose of this monthly report is on the one hand to serve as personal diary to reflect and digest and on the other hand to share my experience and motivate others.

Read more
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VMWare vSAN Series – Key Features

In reference to my prior article vSAN – High Available Solution this article will give a glimpse overview of what is possibe with vSAN.

My favorite features:

Easy to install and manage. this kernel based solution requires that you have a vSphere environment already in place. Or you go the greenfield approach.

Scaleability – assign/remove single disks to/from diskgroups – go up to 64 hosts / cluster.

SPBM (Storage Policy Based Management) in place has a rich set of options assigneable to indiviual sets of VMs. Defines a redundancy with up to n+3. Furthermore, on top of it a strechted cluster is possible. A configurable IOPs limit keeps away the noisy neighbor.

In addition, Performance – literally – allflash comes with the smallest license. 

Compression/Deduplication/Encryption is sometimes required and can be activated on vSAN datastore layer.

NVME – the super fast PCIe based technology is supported. Therefore simply use this kind of SSD for Read/Write caching. 

Moreover, utilize x86 standard any vendor server hardware, no complex SAN is required for high availability. Compute, Storage and even Network … all in the box. 

Small=Big – start with an allflash two node direct design. No expensive 10Gbit+ switches have to be attached.

Certainly, integrates in Multicloud and Automation – AWS features the vSphere stack.

In conclusion, this architecture is the answer to various kinds of requirements like availability, performance, manageability, security, recoverability, compliance. However well it depends.

I appreciate your top feature in the comments!

Next:

Subsequently, I will write about the “long walk” again. Attendance Mammutmarsch  Berlin – 25.05.2019, 24h – 100km, confirmed.

After one pass and one fail (Mammutmarsch/Megamarsch Munich) the sails have been  set for another exhausting “why in the hell do I do it again” event xD.

I Wish you all the best!

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VCAP6-DCV Design its a pass

Hi there,

after passing the VCAP Deploy exam, I successfully passed the VCAP Design exam. Thereby I am now VSphere Certified Implementation Expert Data Center Virtualization 6. (VCIX6-DCV)

Furthermore I tinker with the idea of completing the data center track. Which requires a vast expenditure both monetary and time consuming. The requirement is to successfully submit and defend an original design in front of a panel of experts. In Europe this is just possible in Staines, UK.

This process is far more complex than any other exam that exists in the IT universe. Currently there are just 264 VCDX certified people around the world, collectively over all tracks.

https://vcdx.vmware.com/

Along the way I prepare myself for the NCDA – Netapp Certified Data Administrator certification. Due to my participation at Insight 2017 in Berlin last week I know Netapp and Clustered Ontap will keep me occupied over the next years too. Really awesome data fabric features that will shape both private and public clouds.

BR, Nicolas Frey

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VMWare vSAN Series – an overview of a hyper-converged – high available solution

Hello everybody,

got a new topic for you called VMWare vSAN which stands for virtual storage area network. This article will be an introduction in order to get a picture of the matter.

In the next part of this series I plan to write about all the features that come with it. Afterwards the architecture powered by an real life example will be explained. In the end I plan to really dive deep. A best practice series will follow which summarizes my experience and hopefully helps some desperate souls.

A different approach:

So to start, in the old days SAN was a very complex architecture which consists of storage arrays, network switches, fiber channel fabrics, (a redundant array of SAN switches) storage controllers, disk shelves and a lot of cabling. These silos had their own complex management and you needed a bunch of experts to implement the custom solution. In the end all that you got was some (high available) mass storage which you could access via different protocols like CIFS, NFS, iSCSI  and FC over the Ethernet or Fibrechannel over a dedicated storage network. Mostly no quality of service and very expensive. Furthermore it was the era of spinning disks which were power consuming, high latency and error-prone.

Besides the “old” dedicated storage approach another solution was invented. Nowadays you get not only storage but the whole stack. Computing, network and storage – on just a set of conventional servers with local (flash) disks. All components are abstracted and managed by a software. The term – software defined data center or in our case – software defined storage – emerged. This package offers a new idea of an economical, scale-able, low latency, high performance, compact, easy to administrate, maintainable, secure, feature heavy and future-proof solution.

This solution is called hyper-converged infrastructure and familiar software/hardware vendors, which I got a boundary-point with, are: DELL/VMWare, Nutanix and Simplivity.

As mentioned above I will start with the features of vSAN 6.6 in the next blog article so stay tuned.

Best wishes

Nicolas Frey