vCenter Server 5.1.0b Released

This is a follow-up to my previous post on the 5.0U2. At the same time, VMware also released vCenter 5.1.0b. This post will look at the storage items which were addressed in that update, although the issues that are addressed in the storage space are relatively minor compared to the enhancements made in other areas. Note that this update is for vCenter only – there is no ESXi 5.1 update.

vCenter 5.0U2 and ESXi 5.0U2 Released

Hi all, Prior to the holidays, VMware released new versions of vCenter & ESXi on December 20th. There were new releases for both vSphere 5.0 & 5.1. In this post, I want to discuss release 5.0 Update 2. There were a number of notable fixes specific to storage which I wanted to highlight. I will follow-up with a look at storage enhancements in the new 5.1 release in a future post.

NFS Best Practices – Part 3: Interoperability Considerations

Welcome to part 3 of the NFS Best Practices series of posts. While part 1 looked at networking and part 2 looked at configuration options, this next post will look at interoperability with vSphere features. We are primarily interested in features which are in some way related to storage, and NFS storage in particular. While many of my regular readers will be well versed in most of these technologies, I’m hoping there will still be some items of interest. Most of the interoperability features are tried and tested with NFS, but I will try to highlight areas that might be…

vSphere 5.1 Storage Enhancements – Part 7: Storage vMotion

Let’s begin this post with a recap of the Storage vMotion enhancements made in vSphere 5.0. Storage vMotion in vSphere 5.0 enabled the migration of virtual machines with snapshots and also the migration of linked clones. It also introduced a new mirroring architecture which mirrors the changed disk blocks after they have been copied to the destination, i.e. we fork a write to both source and destination using mirror mode. This means migrations can be done in a single copy operation. Mirroring I/O between the source and the destination disks has significant gains when compared to the iterative disk pre-copy…