Getting started with VCF Part 11 – External Storage

I got an interesting question recently on my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) blog series. An observation was made that all of my posts highlighted vSAN as the storage for both the management domain and the workload domains. The question was whether other types of storage could be used in VCF. While we would always promote vSAN as the primary storage for VCF, the answer is yes, other storage types can be used. But I need to qualify this statement. The management domain always uses vSAN. This is automatically configured during the bring up process of the management domain and provides…

Heads Up! Fibre Channel & vSphere 5.1 Web Client Users

A quick kudos to my colleague William Lam (@lamw) for bringing this to my attention. There is an issue in the new vSphere 5.1 web client when it comes to displaying Fibre Channel World Wide Node Names (WWNN) and World Wide Port Names (WWPN). The WWNN & WWPN are unique identifiers used in the Fibre Channel world. The problem is that the WWPN & WWNN are not rendered correctly in the UI. It is easier to show you an example. Here is a screen shot taken from my own 5.1 environment. Note the WWNN & WWPN – the identifier displayed…

vSphere 5.1 Storage Enhancements – Part 5: Storage Protocols

There are a number of storage protocol enhancements in vSphere 5.1. Boot from Software FCoE vSphere 5.0 introduced a new software Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) adapter. A software FCoE adapter is software code that performs some of the FCoE processing & can be used with a number of NICs that support partial FCoE offload. The software adapter needs to be activated by the vSphere administrator before it can be used, similar to Software iSCSI.