Evento VMUG IT – 5 ottobre 2011 – Save the date!

Dopo l’incredibile successo del primo evento di Aprile l’evento VMUG IT torna per la seconda volta a Milano per presentare le novità di vSphere 5 e per rendervi partecipi ad un interessantissimo dibattito sul backup nell’era delle infrastrutture virtualizzate.

Come da prassi per gli eventi del VMUG IT non ci saranno vendor a mostrare le loro slide di prevendita, ma end-users ed esperti del settore che parleranno di scenari veri, implementazioni reali ed esperienze vissute in prima persona.

L’evento è completamente gratuito, pranzo e pause ricreative saranno offerte dagli sponsors.

Tenetevi liberi!!!

Quando:

5 Ottobre 2011, ore 8.00 – 17.30

Dove:

NH Milanofiori Strada 2a, Milanofiori – Loc. Assago 20090 Assago

Tematiche:

vSphere5 / Tavola rotonda sulle soluzioni di Backup per VMware

Come partecipare:

iscrivetevi tramite questo form: http://vmugit201102.eventbrite.com/

Programma della giornata:

• 09:00-09:30 Registrazione + Welcome Coffee
• 09:30-09:45 Benvenuto – Piergiorgio Spagnolatti
• 09:45-10:45 vSphere5: new feature e demo – Andrea Mauro e Fabio Rapposelli
• 10:45-11:15 vSphere5: Licensing – Massimiliano Moschini
• 11:15-11:45 Bla, Bla, Bla, Cloud – Massimo Re Ferrè
• 11:45-12:15 Anteprima Esclusiva: Splunk app per vSphere – Splunk
• 12:15-12:45 Il cuore dell’infrastruttura virtuale: lo storage – Andrea Goldoni
• 12:45-14:00 Lunch in area espositiva
• 14:00-14:10 Introduzione ai backup – Luca Dell’oca
• 14:15-16:30 Tavola rotonda sul backup: Acronis Backup and Recovery, EMC Avamar, Quest vRanger, Symantec Backup Exec, Veeam Backup & Replication
• 16:45 Aperitivo finale

Durante tutta la giornata, saranno presenti nella hall vari vendor presso i quali porre questioni commerciali e tecniche: Acronis, EMC, Quest, Splunk, Symantec, Veeam.

I’m a vExpert!

Is great honor and pleasure for me to announce that I’ve been selected for the vExpert 2011 award.
This is the first time that I participate in the program and I’m humbled to figure amongst the best names in the Virtualization industry, it’s truly a great honor for me.

In 2010 the Italian virtualization community has come to great lengths, everything started with the first Italian vBeers in Copenhagen at the Bryggeriet Apollo where we’ve laid down the first brick, and now, 9 months after, we established the first official Italian VMUG, we already had our first event with more than 100 attendees and we’re already planning the second one for September.

This effort has been recognized by the team at VMware and we can proudly announce that four (!) out of seven people sitting in the VMUGIT steering committee have been designated recipient for the vExpert 2011 award.

By the end of the year I hope to resume working on my CCIE certification and also resume the technical posts on this blog (which has been a bit “slow” lately) that will start to cover more the network side of everything virtualization.

My VCAP-DCD experience

It’s been a long time since my last post here, as you’re probably already aware I’m involved in another blog called Juku, but that’s another story

In the middle of my tight schedule I decided to book the VCAP-DCD exam to upgrade my VCDX up to version 4 and, as is usual for me, I didn’t had the time to study until the day before the exam.

By the way, on Thursday February 17th I set my alarm clock at 4.30am, drove to Bologna and picked up a semi-empty flight to London Gatwick, my exam was scheduled at 10.45am but as usual I arrived early and stopped by the local Starbucks to get my coffee fix (a quad shot americano, just to warm up my brain a little bit) and to review a couple of VMware documents that I was less sure about, at 10.30 I showed up at the Holborn Pearson center, filled the paperwork and started the exam.

Obviously there are countless NDAs on the exam itself, so I’m not going to disclose anything, I will try to explain my feelings toward the exam that in my opinion is a big step in the right direction.

Let’s start with a quick PROs vs. CONs list:

PROs:

- The Visio-like design portion is actually doable, a quantum leap for those who experienced the infamous VCD310.

- Questions span on every design aspect, this is definitely an Exam that you can pass only if you have a real experience in the field, braindumps are worth nothing here.

- The balance between traditional multiple choice, drag&drop and design questions is great, much better when compared to the old Design Exam.

- Scoring is immediate (this is a GREAT plus to me ).

CONs:

- Exam is waaaay too long: sitting for 4 hours straight in an exam room answering questions is alienating in my opinion.

- Some questions are either too simple or too complex, a better balance would be appreciated.

- There’s no calculator available (neither in physical form or on-screen) and there are many questions that require some math skills.

So, besides the cons listed above, this exam is definitely a big step forward in the right direction, and on top of that I had a feeling that the VCAP-DCD blueprint was covered at almost 100%, instead of the older Design Exam blueprint that, in my opinion, was less focused on the VMware side of things (this also means that you need to study everything listed on the blueprint .

Another pain point for many could be the so-called “VMware terminology” in the design questions, like: constraint, assumptions, upstream and downstream dependencies. They’re clearly meaningful words and if you can wrap your head around these concepts it’s fairly easy to understand and answer the questions, but if you’re not accustomed to design using this terminology you should probably attend the VMware Design course that gives a great overview of the “VMware way” of doing designs.

In the end I passed the exam with a decent 413 (out of 500), upgraded my VCDX certification to VCDX4 and got back home at 11.30pm the same day (with a nice bag of macaroons bought at Laduree), not a bad day after all

Technorati Tags: vcdx, vcap, vcap-dcd, vcdx4, vmware

Accelerating VAAI

This post originally appeared on Juku but I find it technical enough to be featured in my personal blog

By now everyone and his dog already made a post about VAAI, I would not bother you with an extensive explanation of what is VAAI and why it’s crucial to Virtualization, I will simply refer to a couple of posts that explain its current implementation in details:

• Duncan Epping
• Bas Raayman
• Chad Sakac

My focus will be on how I envision to accelerate VAAI even more, enhancing its storage side.

To explain my point of view I will do an analogy with a common feature found in storage arrays today: Point-in-Time Copies.

Point-in-time copies (sometimes referred to as Snapshots) are a really valuable feature, they provide a consistent point in time of a specified Data set in order to perform various tasks like: backups, environment duplications and so on.

Traditionally PIT copies were made using a technique called Copy-On-Write which is suitable for a small number of PIT for a single LUN but its performance issues take their toll as soon as their first PIT is created, PIT copies concept was pioneered by IBM with its FlashCopy functionality.

NetApp innovated the approach to PIT copies using a different pointer-based snapshot technique, this almost completely eliminated the performance issue and made possible a massive number of multiple snapshots per single LUN enabling the complete potential of the PIT concept, this post explain how the Compellent Storage Center pointer-based snapshots works in detail, however this is not specific to Compellent, almost all the next-generation storage arrays (like IBM XIV, NetApp FAS, 3Par InServ, Dell Equallogic, HP Lefthand and many others) use the same approach.

So basically we have a great concept (PIT copies) but with most of its potential still locked by its implementation (Copy-on-Write) and then we have an innovator that enable its full potential with a clever implementation and I’m pretty sure that VAAI is still in its “Copy-on-Write” stage of life .

As you already know VAAI is implemented using an extended SCSI command set, Let’s take as example the most sought-after feature: the Hardware Offloaded Copy.
The hardware offload copy in my opinion can be accelerated to 100000x making all the cloning tasks a matter of few seconds, here’s how:

Keep in mind how a pointer-based snapshot works and bear with me with my explanation:

A 16GB VM sitting in a 128GB Datastore is currently accessed by an ESX host.

Then a VAAI-enabled Clone request is issued by the host, the storage array, instead of doing a real block-to-block copy, simply create a “map” of pointers of the cloned VM on another portion of the datastore, locking its space but without issuing a single block copy, this operation should take the same time as a normal snapshot: few seconds.

Then the host start to write to the new cloned VM and the delta differences are stored in the blocks locked by the “map” previously created.

A similar task can be already done today using snapshots, but it becomes cumbersome immediately because every clone needs to reside on its own LUN and datastore, this approach, instead, can be applied “inside” a datastore streamlining the deployments. Just imagine a VDI infrastructure relying on such cloning technique! .

I’m sure that storage vendors will try to integrate and innovate their respective VAAI implementations, I hope this post made you realize how powerful can be the still-evolving VAAI approach.

Technorati Tags: virtualization, VMware, VAAI, storage

VCDX #58

So I finally made it, on Friday night I received an email from Melissa of the VCDX certification team stating:

Congratulations!  You have achieved the VMware Certified Design Expert on VI3 (VCDX3) certification.

Your VCDX number is:  VCDX58

I exploded with a scream of joy, I felt a mix of relieve, excitement and proudness, I really couldn’t believe that I made it.

I already wrote about my Defense experience in a previous post, I have nothing to add to it so I will just thank everybody who supported me through this journey, especially my wife, @esignoretti, @Andrea_Mauro, @drakpz and all the other guys on twitter!

This is truly the most difficult and rewarding achievement in my whole professional life, I wish the best of luck to everyone who will defend at PEX 2011 which will also be the last chance to become a VCDX on VI3.

Technorati Tags: travel, VMware, vcdx, virtualization