Sizer went live with the sprint and some important features to start the year :

Upgrades quoting:

• Now quoting for upgrades scenarios is possible and the quote button for upgrade flow is enabled.
• The nodes are marked as existing or new by sizer (or can also be done manually) and can generate FL quotes for the newly added nodes
• More on Upgrades is coming with Insights integration soon !!

Performance :

• This is a big one and we all should see a significant performance improvement and sizing speed while coming up with the node recommendation.
• Depending on the complexity and size of the workload, over 70% improvement in performance has been observed on an average compared to earlier.
• A change in the technical implementation of sizing mechanism is driving bulk of the improvements.

Reference scenarios:

• Sizer has come up with a concept of Reference scenarios (a tab called ‘reference scenario’ on the dashboard screen).
• These are pre-sized scenarios by experts across workloads (For ex: Files 50TB,250 users, 250TB, 750 users , VDI 300/500 mixed user types etc)
• These reference scenarios serve as a guide/reference purpose only for a similar workload requirement (and not encouraged to clone as is)
• The feature has been widely successful with one of the partners (cdw) and now opening up for everyone

Others:

• Proposals has been updated with the latest Q1 financials/Gartner’s slides and newly added G8 models
• Default input processor set to Gold 5220 for VDI/VDA workloads for matching the real time(lab) performance numbers
• Platforms that went live:

•  NX-1175S-G8
• Dell XC ICX or 15G Phase 2 Platforms
• A30/A100/A16 GPU cards and related vGPU profiles for VDI/VDA

• Storage filter: Added separate filters for All NVMe and NVMe+SSD storage options
• Sizer to consider onboard(LOM) NICs along with external ones

• Profile info: Mx RAM up from 1024 GiB to 2048 GiB

• Optimizing the FSVM resource requirements

• Support for latest version 4.1.4

• Updated with latest HW specs and images for G8 models

• Changes to the dials and the legends(Red, Green dots at the bottom)

• AMD Milan : HPE DX Gen10 Plus v2 models [DX325 & DX385] – manual mode
• Lenovo: IceLake models- HXxx31 , AMD Milan model- HX3376 10SFF
• HPE DX- New GPU rules
• NX: New platforms: NX-8035-G8

October 1st sprint: 

• Added VMWare Horizon Apps support
• Updated numbers with latest OS support (Windows 2019)
• Updated profile info (based on User Type by VDI broker)

• Now Bulk edit also supported for Data Protection
• Both Local and Remote snapshots/DR allowed for bulk edit
• All VMs being edited for DP need to be part of the same cluster

• Rack Awareness – user specified rack count

• Helps to spread the nodes across multiple racks if power limitation/rack at site

• Lenovo HW(HX) quoting from Sizer/FrontLine now available for all regions(worldwide)
• HPE DX Ice Lake platforms: DX380 Gen10 Plus 8SFF & DX380 Gen10 Plus 24SFF (in manual mode for now )

October 2nd sprint:

• Server Virtualization
• Cluster(Raw) sizing
• SQL DB (non business critical)

Sept 1st sprint: 

• Upto 80 cores (dual socket), up from 56 cores in the G7
• Upto 4TB of RAM, up from 3TB in G7
• Upto 184.32 TB of flash capacity

• Upto 64 cores (dual socket), up from 56 cores in the G7
• Upto 2TB of RAM
• Upto 10x 7.68 TB NVMe

• Available for end to end sizing and FL quoting
• NX-1065-G8 on the lower end with more core/cpu options
• NX-3060-G8 and NX-3070-G8 with All flash/NVMe builds
• NX-8055-G8 on the higher end with both Hybrid and All Flash(including NVMe)
• NX-3055G-G8 with the GPUs
• The larger All Flash systems NX-8150-G8 and NX-8170-G8 to follow in few weeks
• Both G7 and G8 would be available for now (and either would come up in recommendations based on workload)

• CVM cores – accounting for physical cores going forward and translating into specInt adjusted cores for the sizing stats
• Solution option – added Prism Ultimate option (both core and node based licensing)

CVM cores – What has changed and Why?

How does Sizer assign CVM cores up until today(Aug 2021)?

Sizer allocates resources to CVM as part of the sizing exercise.  Here, we will be looking at CVM cores specifically.

Sizer allocates CVM cores based on a combination of factors – like workload type ( 4 for Server Virt, 12 for Databases etc) or based on node type (higher CVM cores for NVMe nodes for ex ) or as per guidance on certain features (rules around Async/NearSync etc).

However,  while attributing cores to CVM, Sizer used ‘Effective Cores’ , which means, these were specInt adjusted cores and not actual physical cores available to CVMs.

For ex:

Lete say Sizer allocated 4 cores to CVM.  These are ‘effective cores’ which are specInt adjusted.

As seen in the table below, these many “effective cores” are attributed to CVMs in the sizing stats table.

7 nodes and 4 cores for CVM per node : 7 x 4= 28 cores (effective cores)

Lets say that the node recommended had the CPU – Gold 5220.

So, translaitng the effective cores to physical cores –

28 ‘effective cores’ – is approximately 22.4 physical cores (adjusting for the specInt for Gold 5220)

=22.4/7 = 3.2 physical cores/CVM

So roughly 3 physical cores for CVM – which is on the lower side and can cause performance issues.

As CPUs get better in performance (Ice Lake > CaseCade Lake > Sky Lake), their specInts are higher and thus, it translates to even fewer physical cores.

What has changed?

The CVM cores allocation is now based on the physical cores (and not effective cores). 

So, when Sizer assigns 4 cores, its 4 physical cores (of Gold 5220 in above example) and not effective cores.

Folloiwing up from the previous example: (Refer to image below)

The tooltip shows the total physical cores assigned to CVM : 7 x 4= 28 cores

For the rest of the calculation on the sizing stats, these are convered to effective cores , so , 28 physial cores = 33.5 ‘effective cores’

Note:  Depending on the processor, the effective cores value ( in red here as -33.15) can go as high as 50-60% of the physical cores (for example for high end CasCade Lake refresh or high end Ice Lake processors), further validating the point that CVM would be getting fewer underlying physical cores (and hence the change).

What is the impact to sizing as a result of this change:

The sizings are more robust and aligns the CVM allocation ensuring to remove any CVM performance bottlenecks, while aliging it with foundation recommendations.

With more high end processors having significantly higher specInts ( Cascade Lake refresh and now Ice Lake), the gap between effective cores and physical cores is getting wider. This change will ensure that while UVMs do take advantage of the better processor capabilities, CVM gets the cores it requires for optimal performance and doesn;t lead to latency issues.

Understandably and expectedly, this change,however, would increase the core requirement for the cluster (as against previous sizings). For an existing sizing, this can be observed, more predominantly while cloning, which would apply the new CVM minimums to the cloned scenario leading to increased utilization of the CPU dials.  This , as a tradeoff, for higher CVM allocation for a better, more robust, performance optimal sizing scenario.