DATABASE WORKLOAD CHARACTERISTICS AND THEIR IMPACT ON STORAGE ARCHITECTURE DESIGN – PART 2 - DATA PIPELINES
Welcome to part 2 of the Database workload characteristics series. Databases are considered to be one of the biggest I/O consumers in the virtual infrastructure. Database operations and database design are a study upon themselves, but I thought it might be interested to take a small peak underneath the surface of database design land. I turned to our resident Database expert Bala Narasimhan, PernixData’s director of products to provide some insights about the database designs and their I/O preferences.
DATABASE WORKLOAD CHARACTERISTICS AND THEIR IMPACT ON STORAGE ARCHITECTURE DESIGN - PART 1
Frequently PernixData FVP is used to accelerate databases. Databases are for many a black box solution. Sure we all know they consume resources like there is no tomorrow, but can we make some general statements about database resource consumption from a storage technology perspective? I asked Bala Narasimhan, our director of Products, a couple of questions to get a better understanding about the database operations and how FVP can help to provide the performance the business needs. The reason why I asked Bala about databases is because of his rich background in database technology. After spending some time at HP writing kernel memory management software, he moved to Oracle and was responsible for memory SGA and PGA. One of his proudest achievements was to build the automatic memory management in 10G. He then went on and worked at a startup where he rewrote the open source database, Postgres, to be a scale out, columnar relational databases for data warehousing and analytics. Bala recently recorded a webinar eliminate performance bottlenecks in virtualized Databases. Bala’s twitter account can be found here. As the topic databases is an extensive one, the article is split up into a series of smaller articles, making it more digestible.
IMPROVE PUBLIC SPEAKING BY READING A BOOK?
Although it sounds like an oxymoron I do have the feeling that books about this topic can help you become a better public speaker, or in a matter of fact more skillful in driving home your message. After our talk at VMworld a lot of friends complimented not only on the talk itself but also on the improvements I’ve made when it comes to public speaking. My first public speaking engagement was VMworld 2010 at Vegas, 8 o’clock Monday morning for 1200 people. Talk about a challenge! Since then I have been slowly improving my skills. Last year I’ve done more talks than the previous 3 years before combined. Although Malcolm Gladwell’s 10.000 –hour rule is heavily debated nowadays, I do believe that practice is by far the best way to improve your skill. By itself getting 10.000 hours of public speaking time is rather a challenge and just going through the motions alone will be very inefficient. To maximize efficiency I started to dive into the theory behind public speaking or even more broadly theory about communicating. Over the year I read a decent stack of books but these four stood out the most.
VIRTUAL MACHINES VERSUS CONTAINERS WHO WILL WIN?
Ah round X in the battle between who will win, which technology will prevail and when will the displacement of technology happen. Can we stop with this nonsense, with this everlasting tug-of-war mimicking the characteristics of a schoolyard battle. And I can’t wait to hear these conversations at VMworld. In reality there aren’t that many technologies that completely displaced a prevailing technology. We all remember the birth of the CD and the message of revolutionising music carriers. And in a large way it did, yet still there are many people who prefer to listen to vinyl. Experience the subtle sounds of the medium, giving it more warmth and character. The only solution I can think of that displaced the dominant technology was video disc (DVD & Blue Ray) rendering video tape completely obsolete (VHS/Betamax). There isn’t anybody (well let’s only use the subset Sane people) that prefers a good old VHS tape above a Blue ray tape. The dialog of “Nah let’s leave the blue-ray for what it is, and pop in the VHS tape, cause I like to have that blocky grainy experience" will not happen very often I expect. So in reality most technologies coexist in life. Fast forward to today. Dockers’ popularity put Linux Containers on the map for the majority of the IT population. A lot of people are talking about it and see the merits of leveraging a container instead of using a virtual machine. To me the choice seems to stem from the layer you present and manage your services. If your application is designed to provide high availability and scalability, then a container may be the best fit. If your application doesn’t than place it in a virtual machine and leverage the services provided by the virtual infrastructure. Sure there are many other requirements and constraints to incorporate in your decision tree, but I believe the service availability argument should be one of the first steps. Now the next step is, where do you want to run your container environment? If you are a VMware shop, are you going to invest time and money to expand your IT services with containers or are you going to leverage an online PAAS provider? Introducing an APPS centric solution into an organization that has years of experience in managing Infrastructure centric platforms might require a shift of perspective Just my two cents.
DISABLE VMOTION FOR A SINGLE VM
This question pops up regularly on the VMTN forums and reddit. It’s a viable question but the admins who request this feature usually don’t want Maintenance mode to break or any other feature that helps them to manage large scale environments. When you drill down, you discover that they only want to limit the option of a manual vMotion triggered by an administrator. Instead of configuring complex DRS rules, connect the VM to an unique portgroup or use bus sharing configurations, you just have to add an extra permission to the VM. The key is all about context and permission structures. When executing Maintenance mode the move of a virtual machine is done under a different context (System) then when the VM is manually migrated by the administrator. As vCenter honors the most restrictive rule you can still execute a Maintenance mode operation of a host, while being unable to migrate a specific VM. Here is how you disable vMotion for a single VM via the Webclient: Step 1: Add another Role let’s call it No-vMotion
PLATFORM 9 - TRANSFORM YOUR VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE INTO A PRIVATE CLOUD WITHIN SECONDS
Recently I had the joy of reconnecting with some of my old VMware colleagues to learn that their new startup was coming out of stealth. Today Platform 9 announced their SaaS platform. In short, Platform 9 allows IT organisations to transform their local IT infrastructure into a self-service private cloud. The beauty of this product is that it can be implemented on existing infrastructures. No need to create a new infrastructure to introduce the private cloud within your organisation. Just install the agent on your hypervisor layer, connect with the Platform 9 cloud management platform and you are off into the world of private clouds. The ease of integration is amazing and I believe that Platform 9 will be the accelerator of private cloud adoption. No need to go to AWS, no migration to Azure. You manage your own resources while allowing the customer to provision their own virtual machines or containers. Today Platform 9 supports KVM, but they will support both VMware and docker environments soon. I can dive into the details of Platform 9 but Eric Wright has done a tremendous job of publishing an extensive write-up and I recommend reading his article to learn more about Platform 9 private cloud offering. If you want to meet the team of Platform 9 and hear their vision, visit booth #324 at the solution exchange of VMworld 2014.
LIFE IN THE DATA CENTER - A STORY OF LOVE, BETRAYAL AND VIRTUALIZATION
I’m excited to announce the first ever “collective novel”, in which members of the virtualization community collaborated to create a book with intrigue, mystery, romance, and a whole lot of geeky data center references. The concept of the project is that one person writes a section and then passes it along. The writers don’t know their fellow contributors. They get an unfinished story in their mailbox and are allowed to take the story in whatever direction it needs to go. The only limitation is the author imagination. For me it was a fun and interesting project. Writing a chapter for a novel is a whole different ballgame than writing technical focused content. As I rarely read novels it’s a challenge how to properly describe the situation the protagonist is getting himself into. On top of that I needed to figure out how to extend and expand the story line set by the previous authors but also get the story into a direction I prefer. And to make it more challenging, you do not know what the next author will be writing, therefor your intention for the direction of the storyline may be ignored. All in all a great experience and I hope we can do a second collective novel. I’m already collecting ideas ☺ I would like to thank Jeff Aaron. He came up with the idea and guided the project perfectly. Once again Jon Atterbury did a tremendous job on the formatting and artwork of the book. And of course I would like to thank the authors of taking time out of their busy schedules to contribute to the book. The authors: [caption id=“attachment_4495” align=“alignleft” width=“125”] Jeff Aaron (@jeffreysaaron)[/caption] [caption id=“attachment_4491” align=“alignleft” width=“125”] Josh Atwell (@Josh_Atwell)[/caption] [caption id=“attachment_4490” align=“alignleft” width=“125”] Kendrick Coleman (@KendrickColeman)[/caption] [caption id=“attachment_4488” align=“alignleft” width=“125”] Amy Lewis (@commsNinja)[/caption] [caption id=“attachment_4489” align=“alignleft” width=“125”] Lauren Malhoit (@malhoit)[/caption] [caption id=“attachment_4492” align=“alignleft” width=“125”] Bob Planker (@plankers)[/caption] [caption id=“attachment_4494” align=“alignleft” width=“125”] Satyam Vaghani (@SatyamVaghani)[/caption] [caption id=“attachment_4493” align=“alignleft” width=“125”] Chris Wahl (@ChrisWahl)[/caption]
LET CLOUDPHYSICS HELP RID YOURSELF OF HEARTBLEED
Unfortunately the Open SSL Heartbleed bug (CVE-2014-0224) is present in the ESXi and vCenter 5.5 builds. VMware responded by incorporating a patch to solve the OpenSSL vulnerability in the OpenSSL 1.0.1 library. For more info about the ESXI 5.5 patch read KB 2076665, VMware issued two releases for vCenter 5.5, read KB 2076692. Unfortunately some NFS environments experienced connection loss after applying the ESXi 5.5 patch, VMware responded by releasing patch 2077360 and more recently vCenter update 1b. The coverage on the NFS problems and the amount of ESX and vCenter update releases to fix a bunch of problems may left organizations in the dark whether they patched the Heartbleed vulnerability. Cloudphysics released a free Heartbleed analytic card in their card store that helps identify which hosts in your environment are unprotected. Check out the recent article of Cloudphysics CTO, Irfan Ahmad about their recently released Heartbleed analytic package. I would recommend to run the card and rid yourself of this nasty bug.
HOMELAB - POWER-ON YOUR SUPERMICRO SYSTEM BY SSH'ING INTO IPMI
Just a short article, recently I discovered you can access Supermicro IPMI via SSH and power on the system by using the command: start /system1/pwrmgtsvc1 A nice short command that saves you a lot of time by eliminating the need to log in the webUI and wait until the app responds.
WHICH HA ADMISSION CONTROL POLICY DO YOU USE?
Yesterday Duncan and I where discussing the 5.5 update of the vSphere clustering deepdive book and we were debating which HA admission control policy is the most popular. Last week I asked around on twitter, but hopefully a short poll will give us better insights. Please cast your vote. [socialpoll id=“2195435”]