VMware PEX Boot Camp - Reaching the Clouds with NetApp Integrations with VMware vCloud Director

Editor's Notes

• #3: In 1842 Henry Cole published a series of short stories called The Home Treasury.In the collection was a story about a boy who found magic beans that allowed him to journey to a castle in the clouds and then find a goose that laid a golden egg. This goose eventually allowed him to lead a life of luxury. Just like that boy, my name is Jack, and I’m here to show you how to build your beanstalk into the clouds with NetApp and vCloud director.With the introduction of vCloud Director 5.1 a host of new questions have poppped up. I’m here to give you an overview of vcloud director and how it relates to storage and hopefully answer some of those questions for you that deal with how vCloud director and NetApp integrate.What will be coveredPractical understanding of vCloud Director Insight into storage consumption and storage practices in a vCloud solutionUnderstand NetApp integration points with vCloud Director
• #21: A vApp is a container for a VM or multiple VM’s. Inside the vApp separate networking and storage can be used to house the VMs living there. vApps are the base container level of vCD as well as the base resource distribution level. vApp’s can be cloned, made into templates, and redeployed over and over again. Also, an expiration date can be set on vApps. If a vApp is only needed for a specific period of time, this can be set and the vApp will then expire. At that point its resources it has consumed are given back to the OrgVDC that it lives in.
• #22: Much like a castle is the foundation upon which many fairy tale stories are built upon, storage is the foundation upon which successful cloud deployments are built. A solid understanding of how storage is used in vCloud director is needed to understand the integration points we will discuss later.I’m going to cover how vCloud Director uses storage as a resource. I will cover how this resource is consumed and moved around. In doing so I will give you an understanding of overall resource consumption in vCloud Director.
• #29: Deduplication: Moving data [i.e. vmdk's] between volumes will “un-dedupe” that data being moved, and you will have to re-run the original deduplication scan on that new volume in order to re-coop those savings after the move.  While this is not the end of the world, it is a nuissance, and you should be aware of it as a caveat to StorageDRS, or generally moving VMDK’s between datastores.Thin Provisioning.  Nothing really “breaks” with thin provisioning, but you’re allowing an outside construct to control placement of data on what it “thinks” is a 1TB volume that you’ve thinly provisioned, when in actuality there is only 100GB truly available to write to.  What happens when Storage DRS moves something there?   I think most of you know what happens when a thin provisioned LUN exceeds it’s available space.Side note: This is another brilliant feature of NetApp that often goes unnoticed, or untalked about. We have certains settings you can turn on that Autogrow both Volumes as well as the LUNs inside them.Snapshots.  When we snapshot volumes, or the data inside, we store the initial tier of snaps within that same volume.  What happens when you [or some outside construct] begin to move the items inside the volume to another volume?  Those snaps (i.e. Your Backups) become invalid.Overall Statement: Using SDRS ultimately requires a lot of management oversight which complicates an environment.
• #30: When Jack got his first golden egg, life became much easier for him. NetApp’s golden eggs are our integration points with vCD, each designed to make an administrators life easier.
• #32: Accelerated Performance: Intelligent Caching, FlashPools, FlashAccel all increase performance in vCloud DirectorSnapshots: Backup and recovery is key and NetApp Snapshot technologies will form the basis for our backup and recovery offering for vCDUnified Architecture: One storage OS across all our FAS Platforms combined with ease of addition and subtraction from a cluster make this a time and money saving feature.Storage Efficiency: Thin Provisioning, Deduplication, and FlexClones provide the same benefit with vCD as they do with vSphere. vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAA)I: Offloading of important processes from vCenter to the storage makes for increased performance.Continuous Operations: with clustered ontap a cloud environment will stay up even in the event of a hardware failure. The ability to move volumes / datastore between clusters while keeping the same IP addressing and accessibility makes the pain of maintenance a thing of the past.
• #34: vStorageAPIs for Array Integration A set of APIs and commands to offload certain functions to the storage array to : Increase scalability and performance Free server and network resources VAAI is a joint development between VMware and NetAppIn vCloud Director a “linked clone” like functionality called fast provisioning exists.  Its designed for rapid, space efficient provisioning.  Copy offload makes like much easier in that it offloads the cloning to the storage controller and uses FlexClones instead of fast provisioning.One other really cool aspect from VAAI Copy Offload is the ability to offload the vApp Snapshot found in vCloud Director 5.1.  Instead of using a vSphere Snapshot, this functionality is offloaded to the NetApp controller and a NetApp Snapshot is taken.  There are immediate advantages to this offload.  First, the NetApp Snapshot is extremely space efficient.  The NetApp Snapshot is faster as well.  Finally, this SnapShot is treated just like a standard NetApp Snapshot and integrates with NetApp SnapMirror and SnapVault.  Essentially, it behaves and is treated like (and is) a NetApp Snapshot but vCloud Director thinks of it as one of its own Snapshots.
• #35: Current VM cloning and migrations require data to be copied within ESX/ESXi host Copy process consumes host CPU and network bandwidth
• #36: With API VM cloning and migrations are instruction sets from ESX/ESXi hosts Copy process occurs on arrayCopy process is offloaded from host and networkGo to Organization vDC >Properties > Storage tab. In the following window, click the Storage tab. Ensure “Enable Fast Provisioning” is unchecked.Requirements:SAN 7-Mode: vSphere 4.1, Data ONTAP 8.0.1; require version 8.1.0 for improved performance (cloning); Data ONTAP 8.0.1 uses full copy.SAN Cluster-Mode: currently not available.
• #37: Go to Organization vDC >Properties > Storage tab. In the following window, click the Storage tab. Check “Enable Fast Provisioning”.You will also need to install the NetApp NFS VIB on each ESX host. This functionality is automated inside of vCenterRequirements:NFS 7-Mode: vSphere 5, Data ONTAP 8.1.1; require vCloud Director 5.1 and vSphere 5.1 for Fast Provisioning (Linked Clone) Copy-Offload.NFS Cluster-Mode: vSphere 5, Data ONTAP 8.1.0; require vCloud Director 5.1 and vSphere 5.1 for Fast Provisioning (Linked Clone) Copy-Offload.
• #42: Not one-size-fits-one but one-size-fits-allIdentify Organization, vDCs and/or vAppsEnd-to-end mapping of vCD objects to vSphere objectsSave datastore and VM objects and create mapping to NetApp volumes for SnapshotsCreate NetApp SnapshotsRestore vApps back into OrgvDC’sIntegrated with SnapMirror. SnapMirror integrated with SRM with Netapp SRA. SRM now supports vCD. We have a happy world for DR for vCD.
• #46: Goal of slide: Overview of the OnCommand Workflow Automation operator portalKey points:A simple portal for operators to execute workflow; little training is required.Workflows are organized by categories.Workflows prompt for required input parameters when executed.Execute workflows immediately or schedule for later.