Virtuwise

If you’re thinking about getting started with the VMware VCP-Cloud certification and not sure where to begin, The Official Cert Guide for VCP-Cloud from VMware Press is a great place to start. Authors Tom Ralph and Nathan Raper have put together an indispensable resource that easily explains terms and concepts to get you ready for the VCP-Cloud certification.

Moving through the chapters

At the beginning of each chapter is a “Do I Know This Already” quiz that helps you assess whether you can skip the chapter and focus on the exam preparation tasks at the end of the chapter or whether you need to read the entire chapter. I suggest doing the quiz and reading the chapter – there is always a gem that you don’t want to miss. One of the things I appreciate is the many screenshots that are found throughout the book. They help, as you try to do the tasks on your own or just following along in the text.

The end of each chapter is a summary followed by an “Exam Preparation Tasks”, which are a review of the key topics and a set of questions based on the chapter. Answers to all the exam questions can be found at the end of the book along with a glossary of terms.

The book comes with a DVD, what’s on it?

I received the printed book and it came with a DVD, which included the Pearson IT Certification Practice Test Engine, once you install the software you have to activate it. It only runs on windows so, folks with a mac need to fire up Windows VM. I think this is a great addition, as it measures your readiness to write the exam.

Overall, what do you think?

This book is a must if you’re thinking about getting started with the VCP-Cloud certification. The book is easy to read, lots of screenshots and brings you from installation to deployment. Oh, and as the authors suggest early in the book, download the blueprint to ensure your studying the latest topics. Time for me to get studying.

Where can I get more information?

The book can be found at any online bookstore and Pearson. The blueprint and other certification material can be found here on the VMware certification site.

Have you purchased the book or taken the exam? Let me know how you did or how you enjoyed the book on Twitter and thanks for reading.

We have a guest blog post today from Mark Gritter, Tintri co-founder and lead architect.  Tintri is a storage solution designed exclusively for virtual machines. The storage appliance can report on bottlenecks from the guest operating system layer through to the storage layer, and it can identify latency at the virtual machine, or vDisk, at any layer of the infrastructure, making it able to pinpoint the source of performance issues.

We are going to have them out to one of our VMUG events in the new year, so we can get a deep dive on their solution.

How NFS Behavior Changes in a Virtualized Environment

In the recent Infosmack podcast on “Designing for VMware,” I mentioned that use of the Network File System protocol (NFS) in virtualized environments differs from conventional NFS behavior. File-based access typically sees as many metadata operations as data operations. But when NFS is serving virtual disks, read and write operations dominate. This is a good example of how the virtualized environment is a mismatch with conventional storage. It is differences like this one that receive benefits from Tintri’s focus on VM-aware storage.

Using the Tintri VMstore’s autosupport features, I was able to examine NFS operation counts over the course of a day from several systems, both those used internally and from several customers. The read/write mix varies a lot across workloads, but the combination accounts for 99 percent or more of the NFS operations.

All of these examples are authentic load data, not benchmarks. The two internal systems are used for build and continuous integration, as well as developer and desktop VMs. The customer systems contain databases, test and development VMs, Web servers, and other application servers.

In contrast, the NFS server Tintri uses internally for user home directories, archives of test results, and other general-purpose file storage, shows two orders of magnitude difference in the proportion of metadata operations. Our system saw a mix of 14 percent read and 32 percent write, with metadata operations comprising the other 54 percent. Of those metadata operations, the biggest contributors are GETATTR with 36 percent, LOOKUP with 5 percent, and ACCESS with 4 percent. The COMMIT call came next with 3 percent—this function isn’t used at all by the vSphere NFS client.

This difference in behavior is very typical, and is reflected in NFS benchmarks as well. The SPEC SFS benchmark consists of 18 percent read operations and 9 percent to 10 percent write (depending on version). That leaves an even larger 72 percent of NFS calls under the benchmark performing metadata operation. In SPECsfs2008, the load is dominated by the GETATTR and LOOKUP operations (26 percent and 24 percent respectively), with ACCESS (11 percent) and SETATTR (4 percent) the other major metadata contributors.

If we take an average of the five examples in the graph above and compare the operations to both our internal file server and the SPEC SFS Benchmark, there’s a dramatic difference in the balance of operations the storage system needs to handle.

A conventional filer must be prepared to accept this varied operation mix, and perform well on it. Engineering effort spent on all these different code paths may hinder VM performance. For example, a traditional file system might devote substantial system resources to handling file lookup and access control—such as a large in-memory cache, or a dedicated thread pool—which provide no benefit for the VM workload and create unnecessary overhead.

The Tintri VMstore, in contrast, was designed from the ground up to work well in the virtualized environment, where data operations dominate the load.

This post originally appeared on the Toronto VMUG blog that I maintained.

Some great news for VMware and something I would encourage you to share with your IT team if you are still deciding on which virtualization platform to invest in. VMware is positioned in the leaders quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure.

According to the VMware Press Release:

“The market continues to embrace virtualization as a foundation for IT transformation, gaining maximum efficiency from existing resources while establishing a new model for efficient, agile cloud operations,” said Rick Jackson, chief marketing officer, VMware. “We believe our position as a leader reflects VMware’s success in leading the market beyond early-stage server consolidation to establish the globally consistent infrastructure for private and public cloud environments while also creating the new backbone of the modern desktop.”

It’s an exciting time to be part of this data center virtualization movement. I am working hard on moving from bare-metal to virtualized servers. It will take time but the pay offs will be incredible.

How far are you on this journey? Are you still investigating whats right for your business? Let me know on Twitter and thanks for reading.