Just as a heads up to all people planning to attend the Microsoft Management Summit 2013 (MMS 2013) this blog is to let you know that registrations open on December 3rd 2012.
So, I’d keep an eye out for the MMS 2013 site and register as soon as you get the opportunity. This event has the tendency to sell out fast.
Time flies fast and it’s time to look ahead to 2013. My continuing investment in myself is part of that. Despite a lot of rumors about big changes to MMS (its future, location, timing etc.) things will go forward as they’ve been in the past years. That includes the location. As you probably already heard it’s back in Las Vegas, state of Nevada, USA. So after the, for many people, somewhat disconcerting announcement at MMS 2012 indicating the above mentioned changes, MMS 2013 will once again be held in Las Vegas again. As before it will be focused on the entire System Center Suite. That was confirmed by a mail form the MSS conference team recently and a TechNet blog post
Recently is was announced that the MMS 2013 content survey is now open. So they’re planning for the Microsoft Management Summit 2013 content and they’d like to hear from us. Why? Well, the better they align the content of the conference to our needs, the better it will be as an experience. This means our return on investment will be bigger which is always a good thing. So if you’re going or thinking of going this is the place, MMS 2013 Content Survey, to voice your opinions on what it should look like content wise. You have two more weeks to fill it out and than it’s scheduled to close down.
It’s great to have an event focused on managing, deploying and protecting the infrastructure we’ve spent so much time, effort and money building. This conference is dedicated to exactly that. Smaller in scale but very focused. All together in the same hotel/conference center for 5 long days living in System Center and nothing else. As the world’s top operators in this space are there, the networking opportunities are also excellent. I can still remember the amount of talking and discussing I did with my colleagues in 2012, that was stimulating.
It’s also the place to provide feedback to Microsoft about System Center. Things you like, don’t like, things that are missing etc. I most certainly have some feedback for them.
I’ll most certainly try to attend, that’s for sure. So it’s time to fill out the request form and start cutting through the red tape. Let’s hope the economy doesn’t tank completely and that we can go. The chips might be down right now but let’s not cost cut ourselves out of skills, education, opportunities and a future. Remember, keep moving forward and don’t quit yet, you can always give up later 
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Let’s say you are very happy with your SAN. You just love the snapshots, the thin provisioning, deduplication, automatic storage tiering, replication, ODX and the SMI-S support. Live is good! But you have one annoying issue. For example; to get the really crazy IOPS for your SQL Server 2012 DAG nodes you would have to buy 72 SSDs to add to you tier 1 storage in that SAN. That’s a lot of money I you know the price range of those. But perhaps you don’t even have SSDs in your SAN.To get the required amount of IOPS from your SAN with SAS or NL-SAS disks in second and respectively third level storage tier you would need to buy a ridiculous amount of disks and, let’s face it, waste that capacity. Per IOPS that becomes a very expensive and unrealistic option.
Some SSD only SAN vendors will happily sell you a SAN that address the high IOPS need to help out with that problem. After all that is their niche, their unique selling point, fixing IOPS bottle necks of the big storage vendors where and when needed. This is cheaper solution per IOPS than you standard SAN can deliver but it’s still a lot of money, especially if you need more than a couple of terabytes of storage. Granted they might give you some extra SAN functionality you are used to, but you might not need that.
Yes I know there are people who say that when you have such needs you also have the matching budgets. Maybe, but what if you don’t? Or what if you do but you can put 500.000 € towards another need or goal? Your competitive advantage for pricing your products and winning customers might come form that budget 
Let’s see if we can come up with a home grown solution bases on Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. If we can this might solve your business need, save a ton of money and extend (or even save) the usefulness of you SAN in your environment. The latter is possible because you successfully eliminated the biggest disk IO from you SAN.
So let’s build 3 Hyper-V hosts, non-clustered, each with its own local SAS based storage with commodity SSD drives. You can use either storage pools/spaces with a non-raid SAS HBA or use a RAID SAS HBA with controller based virtual disks for this. If you’ve seen what Microsoft achieved with this during demos you know you can easily get to hundreds of thousands of IOPS. Let’s say you achieve half of what MSFT did in both IOPS and latency. Let’s just put a number on it => that’s about 500.000 IOPS and 5GB/s. Now reduce that for overhead of virtualization, the position of the moon and the fact things turn out a bit less than expected. So let’s settle for 250.000 IOPS and 2.5GB/s. Anybody here who knows what this kind of numbers would cost you with the big storage vendors their SANs? Right, case closed. Don’t just look at the cost, put it into context and look at the value here. What does and can your SAN do and at what cost?
OK we lose some performance due to the virtualization overhead. But let’s face it. We can use SR-IOB to get the very best network performance. We have hundreds of thousands of IOPS. All the cores on the hosts are dedicated to a single virtual machine running a SQL Server DAG node and bar 4Gb of RAM for the OS we can give all the RAM in the hosts to the VM. This one VM to one host mapping delivers a tremendous amount of CPU, Memory, Network and Storage capabilities to your SQL Server. This is because it gets exclusive use of the resources on the host, bar those that the host requires to function properly.
In this scenario it is the DAG that provides high availability to the SQL Server database. So we do not mind loosing shared storage here.
Because we have virtualized the SQL server you can leverage Shared Nothing Live Migration to move the virtual machines with SQL server to the central storage of the SAN without down time if the horsepower is no longer needed. That means that you might migrate another application to those standalone Hyper-V hosts That could be high disk IO intensive application, that is perhaps load balanced in some way so you can have multiple virtual machines mapped to the hosts (1 to 1, many to one). You could even automate this all and use the “Beast” as a dynamic resource based on temporal demands.
In the case of the SQL Server DAG you might opt to keep one DAG member on the SAN so it can be replicated and backed up via snapshot or whatever technology you are leveraging on that storage.
More scenarios are possible. You could build such a beast to be a Scale Out File Server or PCI RAID/Shared SAS if you need shared storage to build a Hyper-V cluster when your apps require it for high availability.
The latter looks a lot like a cluster in a box actually. I don’t think we’ll see a lot iSCSI in cluster in a box scenarios, SAS might be the big winner here up to 4 nodes (without a “SAS switch”, which brings even “bigger” scenarios to live with zoning, high availability, active cables and up to 24Gbps of bandwidth per port).
Using a SOFS means that if you also use SMB 3.0 support with your central SAN you can leverage RDMA for shared nothing live migration, which could help out with potentially very large VHDs of your virtual SQL Servers.
Please note that the big game changer here compared to previous versions of windows is Shared Nothing Live Migration. This means that now you have virtual machine mobility. High performance storage and the right connectivity (10Gbps, Teaming, possibly RDMA if using SMB 3.0 as source and target storage) means we no longer mind that much to have separate storage silos. This opens up new possibilities for alleviating IOPS issues. Just size this example to your scenarios & needs to think about what it can do for you.
Disclaimer: This is white board thinking & design, not a formal solution. But I’d cannot ignore the potential and possibilities. And for the critics. No this doesn’t mean that I’m saying modern SANs don’t have a place anymore. Far from it, they solve a lot of needs in a lot of scenarios, but they do have some (very expensive) pain points.
I see and hear some people shrug at the idea of Shared Nothing Live Migration, dismissing it as marginally useful. Some do state they’ll have it as well but that it’s not that valuable. Well I disagree totally. A lot of the time these remarks are due to a lack of understanding about how several technologies in the Microsoft stack work together. Combine this with tunnel vision and the fear of some vendors and you get a lot of FUD.
I advise you to look beyond the virtualization stack, to the issues that people who are building infrastructure for dynamic, flexible and * cloud data centers are dealing with.
Look, as “architects” we have to design & build for failure. We all know that it’s just a matter of time before things go BOINK. So we build in redundancy, some of this within a silo, some of this is between silos. The two approaches compliment each other. What this gives you is options and everybody who knows me, especially those who work with me has heard my mantras: “Assumptions are the mother of all F* Ups” and “Options, options, options”. Make sure you design & build in options. This way you can maneuver your self out of a bad situation. Don’t ever assume you’re out of options, especially not when you put some in the design on purpose 
. It’s also very useful beyond that because a lot of you might agree with me that silos and fork lift, down time inducing upgrades, migrations, transitions or replacements are expensive and bad. This is where Share Nothing Live Migrations comes into play. You gain mobility over silos. That silo might be a server, a cluster, storage or mixtures of them all.
With Shared Nothing Live Migration we can migrate virtual machines between those silos with nothing more than a network cable.This is huge people. You are no longer trapped in that silo. In this context it provides you with all the options & flexibility mobility gives you. even it the technology itself is not about high availability.
Migrate virtual machines from an old cluster to a new cluster with out any down time
The details are for another post but basically is made possible by the combination of Live Storage Migration and Live Migration.
First the Storage is Live Migrated
After the Live Storage Migration is done the state of the virtual machines is copied and synchronized.
I hear the competition shrug. It isn’t high availability. Well indeed no one who understands the feature ever said it was. It’s virtual machine mobility. Look at the scenarios above and you’ll see that this ability could very well be game changer in how we look at storage & design solutions.
What did we hear on this front: “it will be too slow to be really useful”. Really? Well let’s see:
Before you state that this doesn’t work on Live Migration … as confirmed at TechEd 2012 Europe with Jose Baretto this does work when both the source AND the target is an SMB 3.0 share. This means yet another reason to use SMB 3.0 share for your Hyper-V storage needs! So unlike what Tad at vLimited keeps saying, unhindered by any knowledge, it is a very valuable feature and it can be extremely fast given the right connectivity and storage that can handle the IOPS. And no, the fact that it’s unbuffered doesn’t impact this to much. Test this by using xcopy/robocopy /J with a VHD over your infrastructure.
Even if you’re on a budget and cannot go for the RDMA NICs & SMB 3.0 you have several options to get very decent virtual machine mobility and not be stuck in a silo. And for those who want to leverage this feature to create and agile & mobile virtual environment you have some very nice technologies available to optimize to your needs & budgets.
Virtual Machine mobility and storage mobility are very interesting features that provide for a previously unknown flexibility. Windows Server 2012 makes us rethink our storage approaches (I sure am) and I’m very interested in seeing how this will evolve.