Search

NetApp RCU 2.1 Avaialble

Friday, 11 September 2009 by Michel Roth

NetApp has announced the avaialability of version 2.1 of their Rapid Cloning Utility, RTU. It packs a lot of new interesting features. While the RCU is not a new product, version 2.1 is loaded with a number of major enhancements. For those unfamiliar with the RCU it is a vCenter plug-in that delivers end-to-end storage provisioning and the creation of deduplicated virtual server and desktop clones by storage arrays running Data ONTAP.

As the cloud becomes a reality; automation, orchestration, and efficiency technologies will become paramount to the success of the deployments. I believe the RCU represents the essence of NetApp engineering efforts, which deliver the capabilities inherent within Data ONTAP and makes them available to VMware administrators.

I would like to highlight that the videos referred to in the post and hosted on YouTube are not what will be on display at VMworld; however, they will provide you a sense of what will be on display.

Integrated Storage Provisioning

The RCU allows VMware administrators automatically provision NFS & VMFS (FC & iSCSI) datastores directly from within the Virtual infrastructure Client. Provisioning can done at multiple levels ranging from the data center, cluster, resource group, or individual ESX/ESXi server. Simply right click to get started…

On the storage array the RCU can create FlexVols, LUNs, can mask the LUNs, secure and export the NFS volumes, set advanced NFS volume configurations, enable dedupe and/or thin provisioning.

One the ESX/ESXi hosts the RCU enables storage connectivity protocols, opens firewall ports, connects to and formats LUNs and/or connects to NFS volumes. If you have deployed over an IP based storage protocol, the RCU will balance datastore connections across all of the available storage network paths.

Provisioning within the RCU is literally a one-stop-shop operation. Now I don’t want to spook storage administrators. There are prerequisites for enabling the RCU. First the storage protocols and storage networking must be enabled and operation along with a storage container defined for the VMware datasets. For the term ’storage container’ I am referring to either a FlexVol with LUNs or an Aggregate with NFS. We have implemented this form of physical resource management based on the feedback of storage administrators.
Integrated Datastore Management

Unlike most LUNs attached to physical servers datastores are far from static volumes and as such the ability to dynamically manage them can make life a lot easier for a VMware admin.

The RCU allows for the enablement, disablement, and reporting of NetApp data deduplication on a datastore by datastore basis. One can also destroy a datastore and its contents. What’s unique with this operation is the RCU actually returns free space back to the storage array, which in turn can immediately be utilized in the form of the provisioning of new datastore or as capacity for the expansion of an existing datastore.

The RCU also allows NFS datastores to dynamically be resized. This functionality includes both increasing and decreasing datastore capacity. Note VMFS datastore can be increase with running data today; however, the process is manual and requires interaction between the storage and VMware admins. The 2.2 release will add support for VMFS datastores.

Integrated VM and Datastore Cloning

Anyone familiar with previous versions of the RCU understands that this tool began as a simple a cloning tool that leverages our FlexClone technology. In fact, if you attended VMworld 2007 you might recall this little demo, which is where it all started.

Today the RCU still creates deduplicated VMs for virtual servers and desktops; however, it is much more integrated in the management of these VMs than ever before. New to v2.1 is the option to simply right click and clone multiple VMs and datastores across an entire data center, cluster, resource group, or individual ESX/ESXi server. This cloning operation also includes the option to balance the deployment across all nodes in the selected deployment option.

The RCU directly imports virtual desktops into VMware View Manager and XenDesktop for further streamlined operations between VMware and desktop administrators.

I’d like to highlight that at present that the ability to manipulate VM specific files via NFS datastores is a bit more advanced than what is available with VMFS datastores. Today the RCU can clone pre-deduplicated, individual VMs on NFS datastore and this process completely eliminates all I/O between the ESX/ESXi nodes and the storage. By contrast, VMFS datastores require the cloning to be accomplished from an ESX host and for VDI deployments this process is repeated until an individual datastore is filled. From there we deduplicate the datastore, and create zero cost FlexClone copies.

While the end results are identical to cloning NFS hosted VMs and datastores, this process does require a few additional minutes to complete and it does not offload the I/O between the ESX/ESXi nodes and the storage array. We will update the RCU to leverage the copy offload functionality that will be available when VMware release the vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) in a near-future version of ESX/ESXi. In addition, the copy offload APIs will allow FlexClone to be the technology behind VMware LinkedClones when running on storage arrays powered by Data ONTAP.

I may be piling on here, but FlexClone is also empowering customers who manage their virtual desktop environments with Quest vWorkspace.

Source: http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualstorageguy/2009/08/vmworld-2009-storage-integration-sneak-peek.html#more and http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualization/2009/09/now-available-netapp-rcu-21.html