VMware #vForum London and bloggers VSAN/vCHS lunch
Simon Eady
Fairly recently i attended the annual VMware vForum London 2014 at Wembley stadium!
If you have never been to a vForum i would certainly recommend it as it offers the chance to not only attend excellent and pertinent sessions but there is also the opportunity to network and visit the large vendor hall which as ever was a busy place!
Keynote and sessions
The opening keynote by @joebaguley (Joe Baguley) was excellent and as challenging as ever one aspect that stood out to me personally was the question “where are you on your journey?” (see pic/slide below)
Later during the Keynote Joe was joined on stage by
@rikmunro (Richard Munro) to talk about vCHS and also performed a live demonstration of provisioning in vCHS which worked effortlessly.
I then attended a great DR/BC session with @vm_rbarbero (Roberto Barbero) where he outlined and covered the various products and technologies VMware have and offer to tackle business continuity and disaster recovery needs and requirements.
- vSphere HA and App HA
- vSphere FT
- vSphere Data Protection /Advanced
- vSphere replication
- vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM)
- vCenter Infrastructure Navigator
Bloggers lunch vCHS & VSAN
I was fortunate enough to be invited to a blogger lunch to discuss vCHS and VSAN
The other bloggers present were Barry Coombs - @VirtualisedReal, Ed Grigson - @egrigson and Phil Morris - @The_vMonkey
We were joined by Lee Dilworth - @leedilworth, Justin Oliver - @ju551e and Rich Munro - @RikMunro
vCHS
vCHS seemed to the subject everyone wanted to discuss from the outset and the guys fielded queries and questions as well as giving us some great insight to how things are progressing.
What sets vCHS aside is its resource pooling approach, rather than T-Shirt sized approach to end user delivery, essentially you can pick and choose precisely how to scale your VMs within your pool of resources on vCHS.
One of the obvious attractions to vCHS is the plugin for vCenter allowing seamless connectivity and migration of VMs to and from private clouds.
40-45% of the deployments are non production/dev based as it suits that purpose very well.
The vCHS has already been pushed very hard by would be and existing customers where they have deployed highly complex environments.
Oracle has been successfully deployed into vCHS by customers who have never tried to virtualise their oracle instances up until now.
Performance wise vAPPs of 8TB have been cloned in 1.5 hours!
Since its launch there has been a huge take up based on DR/BC projects so that would obviously indicate why DR as a service has recently appeared!
vSphere replication is used to replicate data to vCHS.
vCHS can offer test and failover networks (similar to SRM)
Sadly SRM is not yet supported.
DR as a service gives you 2 full tests a year.
Similar constraints to SRM exist (VMs must be power on, a minimum RPO of 15 minutes etc)
At this stage if you needed a separate Active Directory DC running to compliment your DR as a service environment that would fall outside of your DRaaS costs/pool.
You will need a separate VR VM for SRM and vCHS but in the future a single VR will handle both.
VSAN
VSAN was the single biggest beta VMware ever ran.
Presently they are not aware of any production 32 node VSAN deployments
The vast majority of deployment use cases have been tackling EUC projects.
Sizing tools will be arriving in the next few weeks (a big deal for many I know!)
Many more improvements and features on the way
We then quickly ran out of time, but I want to say again a big thanks to all the guys who gave us their time!
Wembley is a great venue btw!
