Cisco Nexus 1000V

Hello and welcome back to DCV Cloudtech. In today’s blog, we are going to have a look at Cisco Nexus 1000V, the software switch from Cisco that is poised to replace the hypervisor based switches we usually find in Virtualized environments.

So, what is software based switch or software defined networking. SDN’s are like traditional hardware switches performing layer 2 networking functions except that they don’t run on dedicated switch hardware. They run inside a hypervisor like ESX from VMware or Hyper-V from Microsoft. One of the most common examples of SDN is the Distributed virtual switch from VMware.

The basic function of the DVS switch to provide uniform network configuration across all the virtual machines in a ESX cluster in order to facilitate DRS, VMotion.  Now, DVS works fine and has been doing a great job from the time it came into the market, but there are pitfalls associated with them.

1. DVS is a VMware product. Nothing against VMware, but the networking features of a DVS still has some shortfalls when compared to standard Ethernet switches.
2. ESX administrators usually perform DVS configurations.  Now for simple configurations, its fine, but for configurations requiring network level granularity at the VM level requires a deep knowledge of L2 networking. Sadly, most of the ESX administrators don’t have the knowledge and most of the network administrators find it uncomfortable working on a VMware product.

To overcome these pitfalls, Cisco came up with Nexus 100V. Now N1kv is also a DVS switch and performs all of the functions of a VMware DVS switch with added features that are inherent to traditional L2 switches.  So, what makes it special then?

From the picture, we can see that the N1KV also sits inside the hypervisor, but the network administrator does the configuration of the N1KV. This provides a huge advantage from management point of view as virtual machines can now be managed as though they are physical machines and networking policies can be directly applied to virtual machines.

So, how does the network administrator manage the N1KV? He does it through a special management tool called VSM which is again a virtual supervisor module. Now, hang on, what is now a VSM? Basically, what Cisco is doing is they are replicating what was there at the physical switch level to the virtual level. If we had a look at a Cat 6500 switch, it would have 2 supervisor modules managing the line cards. Similarly, Cisco’s VSM is also a supervisor module for managing the N1KV remote line card.

Now, we can look at the technical details in a later blog, but what makes N1KV a buyable solution?

1. Its Free – yes, N1KV is free to all customers who have VMware enterprise plus license installed but without security. The security portion basically consists of VSG and other features, but for customers who have that separately, the N1KV is absolutely free. The N1KV is charged separately for having the security features configured.
2. Easy to configure for network administrators – since, the N1KV also run nexus O/S which all the administrators are familiar with. It might not offer all the features of a Nexus 5K or 7K, but good enough to replace the existing DVS solution.
3. VM level visibility and the ability to run SPAN and ERSPAN sessions for VM traffic there by helping to identify network congestions appearing at the VM level.

From this, we can see that the N1KV is a very good product to have if the entire environment is a virtualized environment. With support extended for both Hyper V and Zen server, this really puts Cisco well ahead in the virtualized Data Center picture.

In my next blog, we will have a look at how the N1KV works, its configuration requirements and also have a sneak peak into VM-FEX technology. Till next time, see you in the cloud.

Cisco UCS – A game changer

Hello everyone, and welcome to DCV CloudTech. In my last blog, we saw about EMC’s latest cloud offering VSPEX, its features and weather it provides any value add to the already cramped cloud services market we have in place. This time, we are going to have a look at Cisco UCS server offering, its features and what the latest release has in store for us. The reason, I am discussing UCS is due to the fact that some of the major cloud in a box offerings available in the market have UCS for its server component.

Unified computing system aka UCS was released around in 2009 by Cisco to compete with the already crowded blade server market which was dominated by HP and IBM. I have to agree that Cisco has done a really good job in pushing UCS through that crowded space and now, it’s on the top three in most countries. What makes UCS special? Let’s discuss some features that immediately come to my mind. We can always take each component and analyse them separately in my other blogs.

1. The first thing what Cisco has done to make UCS blade servers       special, is that they have taken the brain component that controls the blades out of the chassis. Instead of each chassis having its own brain, the brain is now a separate entity which is totally independent of the chassis. This enables us to control multiple chassis at the same time without the need to do any additional configuration. 

2. The connection from the brain to the chassis and blades is now done through IO modules or remote line cards. These remote line cards are controlled directly by the brain which helps to reduce the number of cables running from each server to the brain.

From the picture, it is clearly visible that the amount of cabling has been reduced by around 40%.

    3. Cisco has used FCOE as the main protocol to transfer data and management packets from the blades, till the Fabric Interconnects (the Brain). Now, people might think, what’s great in that? Since, the Fabric Interconnects are separate from the chassis, we can actually connect FCOE capable storage devices, to the FI’s directly and all of the resources on the FCOE storage devices can now be shared by all the chassis controlled by the FI’s. The FI’s are configured as a High Availability pair for improved redundancy. With the latest release of UCS, Cisco has also introduces support for multi-hop FCOE from the FI’s to an upstream FCF switch such as the Nexus 5500. By doing this, Cisco has introduced a solution which incorporates end to end FCOE.

      4. Extended Memory Technology is one more feature that stands out and it’s safe to say that Cisco is the only company that provides this solution in the market today. EMT is a Cisco exclusive technology in which additional memory slots are provided per socket (upto 24 slots per socket). This helps in reducing the cost of memory to a great extent by using smaller DIMM’s when compared to competitors who have 6 or 8 DIMM slots per socket and have to use large DIMM’s thereby resulting in increased cost.

      5. One of the major issues people had with regards to migrating their data centres to new hardware was that do they have to buy blade servers all the time, even if their requirements are small. Cisco made life easier for these people by introducing a rack server variant of their UCS system.  The rack server from Cisco offers the most of the features as that a blade server, but it does not need the Fabric Interconnect to be functional. But, what if I don’t need most of the features? What if I need all the features? The only way to do that  is to make the FI’s talk to the rack servers also. Cisco has been smart enough to understand that and have come up with a solution where the rack servers can be integrated with the FI’s, which is all the while managing the blade servers.

This management is done through special remote line cards call the nexus 2k. The key element and differentiating factor is that UCS Manager (which runs on the FI) creates a SINGLE MANAGEMENT DOMAIN FOR ALL SERVER PLATFORMS whether its blade or rack mounted. It is the only architecture that does that.  It also allows for seamless transtition of servers through stateless computing, allowing bare metal operating systems to be moved from blade to rack mounted server hardware without impacting any performance or software requirements.Again, more of this can be discussed in separate topics.

As we can see, Cisco UCS offers lot of features that are either not fully supported with other vendors or not fully functional. This makes UCS more of a game changer in the server industry. Again, I have discussed only few features and not all, as I want this to be more of a teaser. So until next time, see you in the cloud.

For DCV

K

VSPEX – EMC’s entrance into Reference Architecture

Hello everyone and welcome back to Journey to cloud blog, where we look at the various cloud options available in the market from leading vendors and their advantages and dis-advantages. I know that in my last blog, I did talk about exploring UCS in detail, but that would be more product specific and it would be good, if we explore the options that we have in the market first before getting down into the product details.

In today’s blog, we will try explore EMC’s latest offering (VSPEX). Though the product has been out there in the market for a few months now, it is still to gain momentum compared to the other reference architecture products like FlexPod or Hitachi. So, with that lets try to explore VSPEX.

VSPEX as the product is called (really don’t know why – EMC has a passion for naming its products which ends with an X, VMAX, VNX, Symmetrix) is EMC’s latest offering to cloud based on the reference architecture model.  Now as discussed in my last blog, reference architecture is a set of best practices by which different components that make up the cloud are connected together to get predictable performance.  Apart from that, reference architectures deal more with the support offered in administering the product and also on various levels of orchestration that can be implemented on the product.

VPEX being a reference architecture product is essentially made up of EMC storage. But unlike it big brother the VBlock, it does not have Cisco and VMware tied to it as a bundle nor it contains the monster called VMAX.  The VSPEX offering comes with VNX storage’s various flavors and along with that, various flavors of network, servers and virtualization solutions can be coupled.

The core component of VSPEX is VNX- its EMC’s second flagship storage product after VMAX. VNX is basically a combination of two of EMC’s previous storage offerings, the Clariion and the Celerra. Clariion was SAN storage offering from EMC that served the mid size customers effectively and Celerra was the NAS solution from EMC which used either the Clariion or Symmetrix storage for backend and provided file level access to the end users. But Clariion could never provide file level access by itself and Celerra could never block level access. I think EMC wanted to compete with Netapp at all levels since one Netapp box can provide both file and block level access and they came up with VNX. Now, only the name is different. VNX offers pretty much everything the Clariion and Celerra had to offer in terms of replication, disaster recovery and high availability.

The other components that make up the VSPEX are servers and networks along with Virtualization. Now, this is where EMC has taken a giant step by allowing other vendors/competitors products to integrate itself with VNX. For example, EMC and HP are direct competitors in terms of storage, but the VSPEX model is fully compatible with HP servers. Other than HP, EMC has extended its collaboration to DELL. Now, what about UCS, the main component in Vblock.  EMC is still keeping the relationship intact with Cisco on the server front, so expect to see UCS in some Vspex configurations.

Similar to servers, EMC has also extended its network collaboration to Brocade and other vendors while still continuing its association with Cisco with Nexus switches. But one of the biggest strategic move is the decision to work with Citrix and Hype V along with VMware. Citrix and Hyper V are direct competitors to VMware and VMware as everyone would know it is actually a EMC company. But EMC have gone the smart way for trying to keep their core business separate which is storage and including the other two Virtualization companies was a good move. Now again, this is to compete with Netapp’s Flexpod who have also moved from a VMware centric solution to a Virtualization vendor free solution. This is move is both good and challenging for EMC as with any reference architecture solutions, once you sell the product, you have to support it and supporing HP or Dell along with Citrix can be quite difficult. But from a customer point of view, I don’t have to rely solely on VMware or UCS if my existing Data center is a HP workshop with Hyper V.

Other than these core products, there are quite a few additional products from EMC that add value to VSPEX like Data Domain, which provides backup and recovery solution, RPA which provides multi snapshot recovery.  Overall, VSPEX is a good solution from EMC to compete with Netapp on the Flexpod market, but how good the solution is can only be determined in the days to come.

Take care,

For DCV

K

Cloud Architecture at a glance

Journey to Cloud

DCV Engineering

Hello Everyone, DCV Engineering would like to wish all of you A Big Welcome to a Journey to the Cloud.

DCV Engineering was formed in 2011 as a Cloud and DC services company based in APJC.  In addition to cloud services we offer other solutions such as server, storage and network based services. If you want to know more visit our website at www.DCVEngineering.com.

I know for sure that my boss is not going to be happy with me for putting such a small introduction, but this is a blog site and I am free to do whatever I want :)  Additionally, the purpose of this blog is not to talk about DCV but to talk about Cloud and Cloud solutions. Instead of me telling you what DCV can offer or do, I want the people who read this blog to decide based on what we put into this blog.

So, enough with the introductions and lets get going with what we are going to discuss in this blog. Now I know that lot of people, when they start a blog on cloud, they start directly talking about the different cloud offerings, IAAS, PAAS, XAAS and other offerings. Now, I am going to be very frank here. I am going to be very biased and am going to talk a lot about Cisco and the cloud offerings from Cisco.

Now, why Cisco? Is it because I am a solutions architect and also a trainer who does lots and lots of trainings for Cisco? Or may be due to the fact that I am a Ex-EMC employee who spent the last 7 years of his life doing nothing but working on EMC and Netapp products (I know, EMC employee, Netapp products, can be confusing, but hey, that’s the way I used to work at EMC, working on everything the customer had) and most of the cloud offerings from EMC and NetApp are tied with Cisco. Or is it because Cisco is the market leader in network based solutions and they have a very good server market in a short span of time.

So, to start of the blog, we are going to have a small discussion on the different type of cloud infrastructures available. Now, this is not the IAAS or any offering, but rather, how Cloud data centers are setup. I feel the need to discuss this as I find most people (apart from cloud architects or cloud pre-sales people) don’t have an idea on the different infrastructures available. Once we have discussed that, we will discuss UCS, Nexus, Vmware, Cloud Orchestration solutions and Storage over the course of the next few weeks.

Cloud Infrastructures:

Many people I know want to move into Virtualization and Cloud, but they are not able to decide what is the best way to move forward. For some them, server Virtualization is cloud. Also, people need to know what kind the Cloud infrastructure the vendor is offering them so that they can make sound business decisions.

There are three different type of infrastructures available in the market today:

1.  Stack Architecture – As the name sounds, stack architecture is just that, a stack of components that come from one vendor. A good example is something like open stack or a cloud solution from HP or IBM. Most, if not all of the hardware are from one vendor. Now there are advantages and disadvantages.

Advantage – everything is from one vendor, which means that one throat to choke.

Disadvantage – everything is from one vendor, which means one throat to choke :) The vendor might not have the equivalent of some of the industry innovating technologies from other vendors. And since it’s a stacked architecture, we cannot incorporate other vendors inside the cloud offering. Not so good from customer point of view.

   2.  Mixed vendor: Now in mixed Vendor, we have two type of architecture available. Validated Design vs. Reference Architecture

      a.  The best example I can think of for a converged infrastructure – Validated design is something that 8 out of 10 people have right now – an apple IPhone.  Now, I know most of you people think that an IPhone is stack architecture, but no, it’s not stack architecture. Samsung and other companies make most of the IPhone components for Apple. Apple is just rebranding it and selling it in the market. Similarly we have VBlock which is again a converged infrastructure made by VCE, which in turn uses products from EMC, Cisco and VMware. Again, we have advantages and disadvantages.

Advantage – Guaranteed performance, how many times have you seen an apple IPhone crash? How many applications or apps, than an IPhone can run, without compromising on performance?  Same thing with Vblock, its guaranteed for performance. 

Disadvantage – You cannot run flash in an IPhone, you cannot install applications on IPhone without jail breaking it, and if you do that, there is virtually no support for your phone anymore. In short, your IPhone was designed with a purpose in mind, and we cannot alter it to suit our needs without compromising on support and performance. Sometimes this can be itchy for some people.

           b.  Reference Architecture – The best of both worlds, kind of using a Samsung phone. It still uses components used by leading industry vendors, but its fine tuned so suit the customer’s needs.

Advantage - It’s a set of best practices by which you should connect the different components to achieve requested performance, but unlike a converged infrastructure, the components are not tied to each other. It means that, a customer for some time, can compromise on performance, while running a higher load on storage, and he may buy the additional server and switch later, when he has the money and time. Another advantage when compared to a CI is that, the customer need not buy all the components that make up the cloud initially. He may start with a simple virtualization solution with shared storage and then move towards a RA cloud, when he feels he is ready.

Disadvantage – There is no single point of support in a RA solution. Try calling Samsung and tell him that an app is not working properly; the reply is going to be, please call the app owner. But, its not that bad, considering that, most of the RA partners are interlinked, and they will eventually, find a solution for you, but during that time, you may just have to wait.

Now, I hope that this gave us a good picture on the different type of infrastructures available to us in the market. In my next blog, we will probably try to look at Cisco UCS and its features. Till then, take care.

For DCV

K