Author Archives: workinghardinit

A MVP once more in 2015 – happy New Year from a renewed MVP

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Happy New Year people! May 2015 bring you happiness,  good health,  and good jobs/projects/customers with real opportunities for growth & advancement. Don’t forget to step out of the office, away from the consoles once in a while to enjoy the wonderful experiences and majestic views this world has to offer.

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Being an January 1st MVP (my expertise is Hyper-V) means that every year on new years day I might get an e-mail to inform me I have been renewed, or not. Prior to that our MVP lead will contact us to make sure we have updated our community activities and they’ll decide on whether we’re MVP material, or not.  Today I received this e-mail awarding me the MVP award for 2015.

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It remains a special feeling to receive the award.  It’s recognition for what you’ve done and it means that I can enjoy the benefits that come with it: the MVP Global Summit and the interaction with the product groups at Microsoft. The summit is very valuable to me and if I knew the dates I would already book my flights and the hotel right now.

Some people think it makes us fan boys but I can assure you that’s not the case. Microsoft hears the great, the good, the bad and the ugly from us. And yes, they appreciate that as they cannot and do not want to live in an Ivory tower. So they need feedback and we’re a part of the feedback loop. We MVPs are a good mix of customers, consultants, partners & businesses working with their technologies & helping out the community to make the best use of them. Microsoft puts it like this:

“The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award is our way of saying thank you to exceptional, independent community leaders who share their passion, technical expertise, and real-world knowledge of Microsoft products with others.”

The fact that we are independent is an important factor here. It makes us a valuable resource pool of hands on experience to mix in with other feedback channels. As Aidan Finn wrote in his blog post, Feedback Matters Once Again In Microsoft, it does indeed matter. Again? It always did but they listen more and better now Winking smile. They don’t need an "echo chamber" they value opinions, insights and experiences. The MVP award is for the things you’ve done and do. Sure, there is a code of conduct but that doesn’t mean you cannot voice your concerns. "Independent" means that what we say doesn’t have to be sugar coated marketing. Our value is in the fact that we help out the community (their customers, partners and Microsoft itself) in the better use and development of their solutions base on our real world experiences. Microsoft discusses that here.

It opens up doors and creates opportunities, and for that I’m grateful as well. For my employers/customers it means that when you hire me you get access to not just my skills and expertise but to the collective knowledge and experience of a global network of passionate experts that have a proven track record of engagement and are recognized internationally for that. Not too shabby is it Winking smile.

2014 is nearing its end & 2015 is near

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Time to call it quits for this year. So let’s look a back.

Work

One thing to me has always been true, there is no shortage of work to be done, only jobs. Often there is a lack or resources (skills, money), guidance & situational awareness, but never ever of work.

I saw many friends & acquaintances excel, progress and reap the rewards of their hard work. That it was both encouraging and served as a reminder that we all need luck but that it helps to be ready to seize the opportunities given. One of the reasons I have seen people move is that they’re tired of being a resource to be squeezed & seeing their hard work only benefiting some one else’s career. It’s not about making more money, but about enjoying your job. It serves as a reminder to look after yourself, not just financially, remember to have some fun in your work!

My respect for some of the people serving or working in the SME market was also renewed. A lot of them are competent, hard working and are making a difference that goes way beyond what their company’s size would lead you to believe. The reason is simple, in larger organizations thing get way too political. People get bogged down in analysis & paperwork resulting in ever less results at ever increasing costs. in smaller companies, you either deliver or are asked to leave. I helped some of them out through my blog, presentations and experience and I loved being able to do that.

2014 was busy and productive. Technology wise we’ve been able to deliver Windows 2012 R2 to so many workloads and we’ve taking Hyper-V to be all it can be. Working on Windows Server 2008(R2) feels retro to me now and I get a total prehistoric sense when logging on to Windows Server 2003(R2). I did the latter only to get rid of it during some last migration projects (RADIUS, Certificate Authorities, …) where I helped out. What can I say, some people get a warm, fuzzy feeling when they know I’m handling their migrations and infrastructure. It’s been a honor and a privilege to assist them.

Cloud wise identity, SSO, multifactor authentication & load balancing are technologies of interest to make on premises and cloud work in harmony.

The DELL servers, network and storage gear we use has served us well & we optimized the use of it big time. No surprises there, we select our gear with care for a purpose. What does stand out  as a big change is moving to VEEAM as my preferred backup solution. I can only say, we should have done it earlier.

Community & growing

Professionally the interactions and support given and received by my community buddies and the interaction with the IT industry was nothing short of amazing this year. I met many new people in the industry and I was pleasantly surprised by them being so open about the challenges & issues we’re all facing. It helps to talk to people who are way smarter and more experienced than yourself, it helps us grow. I even got to talk to Michael Dell, who took the time to listen and answered more directly and to the point than I have ever experienced before from any manager.

One personal professional high light was joining @virtulalpcguy  (Ben Armstrong) on stage at Tech Ed 2014 North America.

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I’m passionate about technology and it’s ability to deliver value when done right. Sharing how to do this is my way of giving back.

Work, time & cost control kept me away from last (ever?) Tech Ed Europe 2014. The first time ever this century I missed it, bar in 2011 when they didn’t bother organizing one at all. But I presented at ITProceed, attended the Global MVP Summit 2014, presented at the Berlin Technical Summit 2014 and at Experts Live 2014 in Ede. All with great success. The value of engaging in the community cannot be ignored. You gain so much more by sharing than you do by hoarding.

Q4 2014 also brought us the Windows Server vNext preview bits, a couple of weeks after the “threshold” airlift in Redmond and I started my early experiments the day I got hold of it. We have not seen everything yet of what’s coming but I’m looking forward to RTM already based upon what we know.

2015

I expect to see companies continue to struggle with the speed of change. Partially due to the fact the don’t look up and see what’s happening as corporate politics dominate the actions. Partially due to the fact that they follow dogmas instead of reality in sometimes desperate ways to keep a grip on things as they find comfort in following rules & methodologies. This all make them easy victims to sales people with little to show for it in real results.

Ladies & gentlemen, 2014 was a blast. 2015 is in front of us. Technology wise this promises to be a very interesting year. I hope it will be for you as well. With what we’ve learnt so far about the various vNext releases , it’s looking good. A lot of change is upon us and not just technically. We’ll see where we’ll end up in Q4 2015.

To all the guys and galls all over the globe that have moved to better places, well done & well deserved, may 2015 be equally good or even better to you. Thank you for reading and may you all have a wonderful, healthy and successful new year

DELL PowerEdge R730 Improves Boot Times

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The DELL generation 13 servers are blazingly fast and capable servers. That’s has been well documented by now and more and more people are experiencing it themselves. These are my current preferred servers due to the best value in the market for hard core, no nonsense, high performance virtualization with Hyper-V.

They also have better boot/reboot speeds than the previous generations with UEFI.  We noticed this during deployment and testing. So we decided to informally check how much things have improved.

Using the DELL DRAC8 We test the speed form Windows Server restart …

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… over the various boot phases …

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… to the visual appearance of the logon screen

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So now let’s quickly compare this for a DELL PowerEdge R720 and a PowerEdge R730. Bothe with the same amount of memory, cards, controllers etc. None of these servers had VMS running or another workload at the time of restart.

For the R720 this gave us:

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and the results for a Windows initiated server restart on a DELL PowerEdge 730 with EUFI boot is:

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This was reproducible. So we can see that we EUFI boot times have decrease with about 30%. I like that. You might think this is not important but it adds up during trouble shooting or when doing Cluster Aware Updates of a large 16+ node cluster.

Now thing are beginning to look even better as vNext of Windows has this feature call “Soft Restart” which should help us cut down on boot times even more when possible. But that’s for another blog post.

SMB Direct With RoCE in a Mixed Switches Environment

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I’ve been setting up a number of Hyper-V clusters with  Mellanox ConnectX3 Pro dual port 10Gbps Ethernet cards. These Mellanox cards provide a nice amount of queues (128) for DVMQ and also give us RDMA/SMB Direct capabilities for CSV & live migration traffic.

Mixed Switches Environments

Now RoCE and DCB is a learning curve for all of us and not for the faint of heart. DCB configuration is non trivial, certainly not across multiple hops and different switches. Some say it’s to be avoided or can’t be done.

You can only get away with a single pair of (uniform) switches in smaller deployments. On top of that I’m seeing more and more different types of switches being used to optimize value, so it’s not just a lab exercise to do this. Combine this with the fact that DCB is an unavoidable technology in networking, unless it get’s replaced with something better and easier, and you might as well try and learn. So I did.

Well right now I’m successfully seeing RoCE traffic going across cluster nodes spread over different racks in different rows at excellent speeds. The core switches are DELL Force10 S4810 and the rack switches are PowerConnect 8132Fs. By borrowing an approach from spine/leave designs this setup delivers bandwidth where they need it a a price point they can afford. They don’t need more expensive switches for the rack or the core as these do support DCB and give the port count needed at the best price point.  This isn’t supposed to be the top in non blocking network design. Nope but what’s available & affordable today in you hands is better than perfection tomorrow. On top of that this is a functional learning experience for all involved.

We see some pause frames being sent once in a while and this doesn’t impact speed that very much. It does guarantee lossless traffic which is what we need for RoCE. When we live migrate 300GB worth of memory across the nodes in the different racks we get great results. It varies a bit depending on the load the switches & switch ports are under but that’s to be expected.

Now tests have shown us that we can live migrate just as fast with non RDMA 10Gbps as we can with RDMA leveraging “only” Multichannel. So why even bother? The name of the game low latency and preserving CPU cycles for SQL Server or storage traffic over SMB3. Why? We can just buy more CPUs/Cores. Great, easy & fast right? But then with SQL licensing comes into play and it becomes very expensive. Also storage scenarios under heavy load are not where you want to drop packets.

Will this matter in your environment? Great question! It depends on your environment. Sometimes RDMA is needed/warranted, sometimes it isn’t. But the Mellanox cards are price competitive and why not test and learn right? That’s time well spent and prepares you for the future.

But what if it goes wrong … ah well if the nodes fail to connect over RDAM you still have Multichannel and if the DCB stuff turns out not to be what you need or can handle, turn it of and you’ll be good.

RoCE stuff to test: Routing

Some claim it can’t be done reliably. But hey they said that for non uniform switch environments too Winking smile. So will it all fall apart and will we need to standardize on iWarp in the future?  Maybe, but isn’t DCB the technology used for lossless, high performance environments (FCoE but also iSCSI) so why would not iWarp not need it. Sure it works without it quite well. So does iSCSI right, up to a point? I see these comments a lot more form virtualization admins that have a hard time doing DCB (I’m one so I do sympathize) than I see it from hard core network engineers. As I have RoCE cards and they have become routable now with the latest firmware and drivers I’d love to try and see if I can make RoCE v2 or Routable RoCE work over different types of switches but unless some one is going to sponsor the hardware I can’t even start doing that. Anyway, lossless is the name of the game whether it’s iWarp or RoCE. Who know what we’ll be doing in 5 years? 100Gbps iWarp & iSCSI both covered by DCB vNext while FC, FCoE, Infiniband & RoCE have fallen into oblivion? We’ll see.