How to setup Netapp 8.1.x Cluster with Replication in 25 mins

How to setup Netapp 8.1.x Cluster with Replication in 25 mins 

Pre requisites to setup Netapp 8.1.2 Cluster:

Hypervisor: ESX, VMware Workstation, VMware Player, VMware Fusion

VMware Player is free you can download it from here

Netapp Simulator: You can download it from Netapp.com, before the download you need to register and create an account

Management Software: You can download the On Command System Manager to Configure and Manage your Netapp Simulators

Compute Resources: 

Per simulator:  2vCPU, 1.7GB RAM 260GB, we need two simulators so total compute requirement is  4vCPU, 3.4GB memory, 320GB disk space.

IP address: we need at least 15 ip addresses for the complete setup: list of interfaces to be created

Cluster 1	vServer	Cluster 1 Interfaces        ipaddr
Cluster 1		Cluster Management
Cluster 1		Node Management
Cluster 1	vServer1	vServer data
Cluster 1	vServer1	vServer  Management
Cluster 1	vServer1	CIFS & NFS
Cluster 1	vServer1	iSCSi Lif 1
Cluster 1	vServer1	iSCSi Lif 2
Cluster 2		Cluster Management
Cluster 2		Node Management
Cluster 2	vServer1	vServer data
Cluster 2	vServer1	vServer  Management
Cluster 2	vServer1	CIFS & NFS
Cluster 2	vServer1	iSCSi Lif 1
Cluster 2	vServer1	iSCSi Lif 2
		Inter-Cluster communication

You can setup Netapp 8.1.2 Cluster on ESX, VMware Workstation, VMware Player, VMware Fusion

Netapp 8.1.2 Cluster Setup Part1 

watch at 720p or above to see the text more clear

                              Netapp 8.1.2 Cluster Setup Part2

                    watch at 720p or above to see the text more clear

VMware vCloud Connector 2.5 GA and available to download

VMware vCloud Connector 2.5 GA and available to download

What's vCloud Connector?

• vCloud Connector (vCC) is a key differentiator in vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) as well as a core component of the vCloud Suite.
• vCC helps customers realize the hybrid cloud vision by providing them with a single pane of glass to view, operate and copy VMs/vApps/templates across vSphere/vCD, vCHS & vCloud Service Providers.

What's new in vCC 2.5?

• Offline Data Transfer (ODT) for vCHS

Allows customers to ship large number of VMs/vApps/templates (>TBs) from on-prem vSphere / vCD to vCHS via an external storage device. Customer uses vCC to export VMs/vApps/templates to the device and ships the device to vCHS. vCHS Ops team then uploads the VMs/vApps/templates from the device into the customer vCHS account. Customer can start using these in their vCHS environment.

Note: This feature only support vCHS as a destination.

• UDP Data Transfer (UDT)

For customers who could leverage the UDP protocol instead of HTTP, this feature will significantly improve the transfer performance of vCC and reduce the amount of time it takes to move VMs/vApps/templates between vSphere/vCD, vCHS & vCloud SPs.

• Path Optimization

Uses streaming between the vCC Nodes to dramatically improve the transfer performance of vCC. 

Support

vSphere 5.1, 5.0, 4.x

vCloud Director 5.1, 1.5

vCHS

vCC 2.5 Core Edition 

• Available to all vSphere, vSphere with Operations Management & vCloud Director customers as a free download.
• Includes all the new features such as ODT, UDT & Path Optimization.
• Datacenter Extension & Content Sync NOT INCLUDED.
• Available via vSphere download in the "Drivers & Tools" tab, Click here

vCC 2.0Advanced Edition 

• Available to all vCloud Suite & vCHS customers. 
• Includes all vCC Core features plus Datacenter Extension & Content Sync.
• Activated with a valid vCloud Suite license key or a vCC Key provided with the vCloud Hybrid Service Click here

Want to go VMworld Europe in Barcelona

Join cloudcredibility and complete the tasks assigned to you and your team, these points can be redeemed to nice goodies. To see the entire list of goodies click HERE

The grand prize is a trip to VMworld Europe in Barcelona.

Different Hypervisor designs in Type 1 hypervisor's

Different Hypervisor designs in Type 1 hypervisor's

In the type 1 VMM/hypervisor a.k.a bare metal hypervisor there are two categories of Hypervisor designs.

a. Microkernelized Hypervisor Design

Ex: Microsoft Hyper V

b. Monolithic Hypervisor Design

Ex: VMware vSphere

Microkernelized hypervisor:

Device drivers does not need to be hypervisor aware and they are on the controlling layer. So a wide range of Hardware can run this kind of a Hypervisor and there is less overhead on the hypervisor itself.

At the same time this needs an Operating System to be installed to initialize the hypervisor layer, and any attack or a fault of that controlling layer operating system can affect the whole hypervisor and bring down all the virtual machines.

Monolithic Hypervisor Design:

In this design the device drivers run at the same layer as the VMM/Hypervisor, hence the hardware and I/O devices should be Hypervisor aware in other words device drivers to be developed for the hypervisor so this results only a certain set of certified hardware can only run this kind of a hypervisor.

No operating system is required to fork lift this hypervisor this makes the hypervisor stable, No security patches are needed for components running in the "Controlling Layer."

Now that we have understood about type 1 hypervisor's what is type 2.

A type  2 hypervisor runs as a software on top of an existing Operating system.

Ex: VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion etc.

Limits and Throughput's  of vCloud Network and Security components:

Details of Edge instances used in performance metrics comparison

	Edge (Compact)	Edge (Large)	Edge (X-Large)
vCPU	1	2	2
Memory	256 MB	1 GB	8 GB
Disk	320 MB	320 MB	4.4 GB

 Tested Limits

The following table provides information on the tested soft limits per vCloud Networking and Security Manager:

Note: These soft limits can be exceeded on a per feature basis depending on the resources and the set of features in use.

Limit	vCloud Networking and Security Manager
Number of Edge HA appliances	2,000 Compact / Large Edges or 1,000 X-Large Edges
Number of clusters	8
Number of hosts with Edge in use	256 (8 clusters * 32 hosts)
Number of hosts in inventory	400
Number of virtual machines	15000 total virtual machines, 5000 powered on
Number of networks	5000 VXLANs
Number of firewall rules	100,000
Number of firewall object groups	130,000
Number of DHCP static bindings	25,000
Number of DHCP pools	10,000
Number of static routes	100,000
Number of load balancer pools	3,000
Number of load balancer virtual servers	3,000
Number of members in load balancer pools	30,000

The following table provides information on the tested soft limits per vCloud Networking and Security Edge:

Limit	vCloud Networking and Security Edge
Number of interfaces	10
Number of firewall rules	2,000
Number of NAT rules	2,000
Number of DHCP static bindings	25
Number of DHCP pools	10
Number of static routes	100
Number of load balancer pools	3 (Hard limit: 64)
Number of load balancer virtual servers	3 (Hard limit: 64)
Number of members per load balancer pool	10 (Hard limit: 32)
Concurrent IPSec VPN Tunnels	64
Concurrent SSL VPN Tunnels	25 (Compact), 100 (Large)

 Firewall and VPN Performance Comparison

	Edge (Compact)	Edge (Large)
Firewall Performance (Gbps)	3	9.7
Concurrent Sessions	64,000	1,000,000
New sessions/second	8,000	50,000
IPSec VPN throughput (Gbps) - H/W acceleration via AESNI	0.9	2

 Load Balancer Performance Comparison

	Edge (Large)	Edge (X-Large)
Load balancer throughput – L7 Proxy Mode (Gbps)	2.2	3
Load balancer connections / sec – L7 Proxy Mode	46,000	50,000
Load balancer concurrent connections – L7 Proxy Mode	8,000	60,000
Load balancer throughput – L4 Mode (Gbps)	6	6
Load balancer connections / sec – L4 Mode	50,000	50,000
Load balancer concurrent connections – L4 Mode	600,000	1,000,000

General Availability of vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) 5.1

VMware announced the General Availability of vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) 5.1. 

This is the first release as part of the VMware family since DynamicOps joined the company in July, 2012.  This release comes only five months after the acquisition and five months since the last release (4.5 in July) with five major features. In addition, this release is part of the vCloud Suite Enterprise edition.

 Notable features and integrations in this release include:

 ·         vCloud Director integration

—   Provision vApps to virtual datacenters

—   Support for vCloud Director private or public clouds

 ·         Invocation of vCenter Orchestrator workflows

—   Facilitates Facilitates integration with third party technologies and systems

—   Expands the vCAC automation library

 ·         Multi-machine services

—   Streamlines the provisioning and ongoing management of multiple machines

—   Deliver multiple machines with one operation

—   Manage multiple machines as a single entity

 ·         Ability to reconfigure virtual machines

—   Policy-driven reconfigure approvals

—   Policy-driven threshold enforcement (min, max thresholds)

—   Self-service management of existing machines

—   Add or remove CPU, memory, and storage from an existing virtual machine

 ·         Simplified storage management

—   Define one or more volumes on different storage paths

Congratulations to the Engineering, QE, Documentation, and PMM teams who succeeded in delivering this release in the short period of time after the acquisition.  Thanks for all the help from the program, release, legal, and support/enablement teams.  This was truly a team effort!

 Links to binaries, docs, new product features, pricing and licensing: 

Product page

Eval link

Vault

Download page

Documentation

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