Big news from Pure Storage

There was lots of big news yesterday from our friends over at Pure Storage. First of all, we had an announcement about their Virtual Volume (VVol) implementation going GA. This is very exciting for me, and I look forward to testing it out in our lab. The implementation is a VASA 3.0 implementation, which means support for array based replication (ABR). My good pal Pete Fletcha did a great write-up on the announcement here. And of course, Cody Hosterman of Pure Storage also gives us his low-down on what this VVol implementation means to him. One thing is for sure,…

VMworld 2017 Session on vSphere 6.5 Core Storage now on YouTube

A quick note to let you know that the session that I delivered on day 1 of VMworld 2017 is now available on YouTube. The session is entitled “A Deep Dive into vSphere 6.5 Core Storage Features and Functionality” and I delivered this with Cody Hosterman of Pure Storage. Judging by the feedback, and the number of passing comments I received in the hallways at VMworld over the past 2 days, it seems that this session was very well received indeed. Hope you like it.

Some highlights from VMworld 2016

With Virtual SAN gaining huge momentum, I had a pretty busy VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas, and I didn’t have too much free time this year to immerse myself in the Solutions Exchange. However there were a few folks that I did want to catch up with as I had heard that they have some cool new features added to their product sets. So I made a bee-line to check them out. Let me know if you found anything else interesting. I might have a little more time in VMworld Barcelona to check out the solutions exchange and see what…

Horizon View 7 on VSAN – Policies Revisited

It has been some time since I last looked at Horizon View on Virtual SAN. The last time was when we first released VSAN, back in the 5.5 days. This was with Horizon View 5.3.1, which was the first release that inter-operated with Virtual SAN. At the time, there was some funkiness with policies. View could only use the default policy at the time, and the default policy used to show up as “none” in the UI. The other issue is that you could not change the default policy via the UI, only through CLI commands. Thankfully, things have come…

An overview of the new Virtual SAN 6.2 features

If you were wondering why my blogging has dropped off in recent months, wonder no more. I’ve been fully immersed in the next release of VSAN. Today VMware has just announced the launch of VSAN 6.2, the next version of VMware’s Virtual SAN product. It is almost 2.5 years since we launched the VSAN beta at VMworld 2013, and almost 2 years to the day since we officially GA’ed our first release of VSAN way back in March 2014. A lot has happened since then, with 3 distinct releases in that 2 year period (6.0, 6.1 and now 6.2). For…

Where are they now? Recent changes in the storage space

The storage space has been a very exciting space over recent years. There have been so many new start-ups and new innovations, that it becomes difficult to keep track sometimes. More recently, there has been a lot of news around mergers, acquisitions, shutdowns and IPOs in the storage industry. It got me thinking about a lot of the changes we have seen over the past number of years in the storage market. Just for my own interest, I went back over many of my blogs, and the various conversations I had with people at various VMworld events and VMUG meetings,…

Read locality in VSAN stretched cluster

Many regular readers will know that we do not do read locality in Virtual SAN. For VSAN, it has always been a trade-off of networking vs. storage latency. Let me give you an example. When we deploy a virtual machine with multiple objects (e.g. VMDK), and this VMDK is mirrored across two disks on two different hosts, we read in a round-robin fashion from both copies based on the block offset. Similarly, as the number of failures to tolerate is increased, resulting in additional mirror copies, we continue to read in a round-robin fashion from each copy, again based on…