Category Archives: Virtualization

Windows Server 2012 Supports Data Center Bridging (DCB)

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Data Center Bridging (DCB) is a collection of standards-based end-to-end networking technologies that allow Ethernet to act as the unified fabric for multiple types of traffic in the data center. You cannot put a bunch of traffic types / protocols on the same physical pipes if you have no way of guaranteeing that they will each get what they need when they need it based on priority and impact. Even with ludicrous over provisioning you could still run into issues and even if that’s not the case that’s a very expensive option. When you think about iSCSI, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) you can see where the benefits are to be found. We just can keep adding network after network infrastructure for all these applications on a large scale.

  • Integrates with the standard Ethernet networks
  • Prevents congestion in NIC & network by reserving bandwidth for particular traffic types giving better performance for all
  • Windows 2012 provides support & control for DCB and allows to tags packets by traffic type
  • Provides lossless transport for mission critical workloads

You can see why this can be handy in a virtualized world evolving in to * cloud infrastructure. By enabling multiple traffic types to use an Ethernet fabric you can simplify & reduce the  network infrastructure (hardware & cabling).  In some environments this is a big deal. Imagine that a cloud provider does storage traffic over Ethernet on the same hardware infrastructure as the rest of the Ethernet traffic. You can get rid of the isolated storage-specific switches and HBAs reducing complexity, and operational costs. Potentially even equipment costs, I say potentially because I’ve seen the cost of some unified fabric switches and think your mileage may vary depending on the scale and nature of your operations.

Requirements for Data Center Bridging

DCB is based on 4 specifications by the DCB Task Group

  1. Enhanced Transmission Selection (IEEE 802.1Qaz)
  2. Priority Flow Control (IEEE 802.1Qbb)
  3. Datacenter Bridging Exchange protocol
  4. Congestion Notification (IEEE 802.1Qau)

3. & 4. are not strictly required but optional (and beneficial) if I understand things correctly. If you want to dive a little deeper have a look here at the DCB Capability Exchange Protocol Specification and have a chat with your network people on what you want to achieve.

You also need support for DCB in the switches and in the network adaptors. 

Finally don’t forget to run Windows Server 2012 as the operating systems Winking smile. You can find some more information on TechNet  Data Center Bridging (DCB) Overview but it is incomplete. More information is coming!

Understanding what it is and does

So, in the same metaphor of a traffic situation like we used with Data Center TCP  we can illustrate the situation & solution with traffic lanes for emergency services and the like. Instead of having your mission critical traffic stuck in grid lock like the fire department trucks below

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You could assign an reserved lane, QOS, guaranteed minimal bandwidth, for that mission critical service.  Whilst you at it you might do the same for some less critical services that none the less provide a big benefit to the entire situation as well.

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Experts2Experts Virtualization Conference – Vienna May 25th-27th 2012

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I’m attending and speaking at one the of the best  small scale virtualization conferences out there. I’m talking about the Experts2Experts Virtualization Conference (E2EVC) organized by Alex Juschin for many years now. I’ll be speaking at the conference on “Making Sense of  RSS, DMVQ, SR-IOV, RDMA and other advanced networking features”. We’ll see where Windows Server 2012 & the new generation of Hyper-V is at in regards to these technologies, how it stacks up against some other solutions and what looks promising. In other words what we are looking at to use in real live once Windows Server 2012 goes RTM.

I have the good fortune to attend some pretty big, impressive & high quality industry events. These are excellent places for networking and getting up to speed with the latest of the greatest form the big vendors and the ecosystem around it. But they are pretty expensive and large scale, so most people are so crazy busy at those you often miss out on some of the interaction, there is just to much going on.

E2EVC is special and adds a different kind if value that goes beyond its low cost. For one, nobody is trying to sell you anything. All attendees and all speakers are IT Pro’s that design, build, work with and support the technologies that are discussed. Hence the name, Expert 2 Expert. It’s a reality check on what are people really using, trying, evaluating. You’ll see what is really hurting us and what really works.  An event like this isn’t driven by marketing. It’s driven by interests, passion for technology and even more important from a business perspective the solutions they can and do deliver in real live. This proves that you don’t need to charge premium prices to keep the riff raff out. The fact that 2 days of this conference are in a weekend tells you the attendees are going there with intend and purpose.

The guys & gals attending & presenting are top notch. They don’t look  like slick advisers and analysts. It’s all very informal and relaxed. But make no mistake, these people are sharp and at the top of their game. Discussion and interaction is stimulated and lively. The aim is not to breed or create rock star speakers but to get people to share their experiences and knowledge. And here in lies the value. I really commend Alex Juschin for having succeeded in this.

I’m off to Attend MMS 2012 In Las Vegas

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Life is good people. I have to good fortune to work in an interesting industry, doing great projects with modern technologies. On top of that my employer allows me to fully develop my skills . In that respect it makes a serious difference to have a good boss & management that understands the benefits of ongoing education. They look a both the short & long term value of people educating & developing themselves a lot more than at that nagging Excel sheet on the screen. Professional development is not just a cookie cutter 4 day training course once or twice a year but real opportunities to become a better professional if and when you’re willing to put in the effort. They’ve figured out that you cannot just use utmost cost reduction to catapult both your business and employees in to prosperity & wellbeing. You need to keep learning, evolving, networking, … The contacts I make and the education I get by working with and learning along very smart & motived people are priceless. Sure it costs money and effort form everyone involved but it beats doing nothing and saving a few € as a long term strategy for growth & success. On top of that I feel appreciated & valued for my contributions and the efforts I put in.So to the tunes of some eighties rockers I’m off again.

Here I go again on my own, goin’ down the only road I’ve ever known.
Like a drifter I was born to walk alone. An’ I’ve made up my mind, I ain’t wasting no more time. I’m attending MMS 2012

Alone, heck no, many thousands of us will be descending on Las Vegas (Nevada, USA) to attend the summit. This event sells out fast each year. A friend told me to register a.s.a.p. or miss out, so I did as soon as I got the go ahead to attend, securing my spot. So now I’m travelling over LHR to LAS following my buddies & other attendees journey from their respective countries to Las Vegas on line, mostly via Twitter.

If you can’t come, whatever the reason, you can always enjoy a good number of sessions here MMS 2012 goes digital: LIVE streaming and On-Demand for attendees AND non-attendees! 48 hours after the live presentation.

I don’t have to tell you what System Center 2012 means to the IT Pro in the Microsoft ecosystem. Combine that with the RTM of Windows 8 later this year and I just had to go and attend the Microsoft management Summit 2012 in Las Vegas.  It’s more than training. It’s networking and an education.

Apart from the formal agenda & sessions I already a have some meetings lined up with vendors, colleagues from around the globe. We’re making the most of this opportunity to meet face to face with people we other wise only get to talk to on line and often with huge time zone difference.

MMS2012_Server

I’ve you’re going and you read my blog or follow me on twitter. Give us a shout out and perhaps we can have a meet & greet.

To all my geek & nerd friends, colleagues, MEET members, business partners, Microsoft employees & MVPs in route to Vegas & the Summit at The Venetian, I’m looking forward to seeing you all again! But first I have some traveling to do in the next 24 hours, to make my way over there.

Enhanced (Failover) Placement of Virtual Machines on Windows 8 Hyper-V Cluster

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One of the nice features in Windows 8 Hyper-V clustering are the “drain node” capability and the virtual machine priorities. You can see this in action in a video by Aidan Finn here.

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For more details on draining a node see Draining Nodes for Planned Maintenance with Windows Server "8" for a detailed explanation.

Now another very important feature is the fact that the cluster is intelligent enough to determine what node is the best suited as a target during failover or live migration. Not only CPU and memory load of the hosts are taking into consideration but also the resource needs of the VM and the priority you have given those. This entire process is NUMA aware and as such with windows 8 can be evaluated on a per virtual machine basis. This means that you that the cluster will always try to get the best possible placement and thus performance for your virtual machines.

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Now we also have affinity and anti affinity rules. Anti Affinity ensures that the nodes of a virtualized NLB farm will be placed on separate hosts to minimize risk. You don’t want one host to house all the nodes of you NLB farm!

On the other hand sometime you want virtual machines to stick together lets say you have an NLB farm but the virtual machines with the front end and middle tier need  to stay together. In that case you use affinity rules to achieve this. On top of this the anti affinity rules will ensure that the NLB farm virtual machines are on different nodes.

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Do note that when the cluster has to choose to break these rules versus bot being able to run the virtual machines it will choose to keep them running. It knows its priorities! Now if in such a situation there are not enough resource the priority will also come into play and the low priority machine may be shut down to ensure the higher priority ones can be up and running.

As you can imagine there are potentially a lot of factors/permutations at play here and I’m looking into doing some more test of these features and the intelligence in the process to see if we make the same decisions and how to best configure this for maximal performance & availability.