A closer look at Datrium

Datrium are a new storage company who only recently came out of stealth. They are one of the companies that I really wanted to catch up with at VMworld 2015. They have a lot of well-respected individuals on their team, including Boris Weissman, who was a principal engineer at VMware and Brian Biles of Data Domain fame. They also count of Diane Green, founder of VMware, among their investors. So there is a significant track record in both storage and virtualization at the company.

VSAN 6.0 Part 9 – Proactive Re-balance

This is another nice new feature of Virtual SAN 6.0. It basically is a directive to VSAN to start re-balancing components belonging to virtual machine objects around all the hosts and all the disks in the cluster. Why might you want to do this? Well, it’s very simple. As VMs are deployed on the VSAN datastore, there are algorithms in place to place those components across the cluster in a balanced fashion. But what if a hosts was placed into maintenance mode, and you requested that the data on the host be evacuated prior to entering maintenance mode, and now…

VSAN 6.0 Part 8 – Fault Domains

One of the really nice new features of VSAN 6.0 is fault domains. Previously, there was very little control over where VSAN placed virtual machine components. In order to protect against something like a rack failure, you may have had to use a very high NumberOfFailuresToTolerate value, resulting in multiple copies of the VM data dispersed around the cluster. With VSAN 6.0, this is no longer a concern as hosts participating in the VSAN Cluster can be placed in different failure domains. This means that component placement will take place across failure domains and not just across hosts. Let’s look…

A quick introduction to Rubrik

I first encountered Rubrik at this year’s Partner Exchange (PEX) 2015 in San Francisco. They had some promotional flyers made up labeled “Backup Still Sucks”. I guess a lot of people can relate to that. I had a chat with Julia Lee, who used to be a storage product marketing manager here at VMware, but recently moved to Rubrik. Rubrik’s pitch is that customers are currently stitching together backup software with backup storage in order to backup their virtual infrastructures – there is no seamless integration. Rubrik’s primary aim is backup simplicity – they want to provide a “time machine”…

A closer look at SpringPath

Another hyper-converged storage company has just emerged out of stealth. Last week I had the opportunity to catch up with the team from SpringPath (formerly StorVisor), based in Silicon Valley. The company has a bunch of ex-VMware folks on-board, such as Mallik Mahalingam and Krishna Yadappanavar. Mallik and Krishna were both involved in a number of I/O related initiatives during their time at VMware. Let’s take a closer look at their new hyper-converged storage product.

VSAN Part 31: Object compliance and operational status

In a previous post, I discussed the difference between a component that is marked as ABSENT, and a component that is marked as DEGRADED. In this post, I’m going to take this up a level and talk about objects, and how failures in the cluster can change the status of objects. In VSAN, and object is made up of one or more components, so for instance if you have a VM that you wish to have tolerate a number of failures, or indeed you wish to stripe a VMDK across multiple disks, then you will certainly have multiple components making…

A closer look at Nexenta Connect for VSAN

Whilst at VMworld 2014, I had the opportunity to catch up with the Nexenta team who have been working on a very interesting project with VMware’s Virtual SAN (VSAN). The Nexenta Connect for VSAN product, running on top of VSAN, is designed to provide file services, which allows VSAN to not only store your virtual machines, but also to provide SMB and NFS shares for those virtual machines. I caught up with Michael Letschin and Gijsbert Janssen van Doorn of the Nexenta team to learn more and get a tech preview of the product.