Vendors I plan to check out at #VMworld 2018

It’s here. VMworld 2018 is underway. I’ve just spent a great week in Nashville, a place I have wanted to visit for the longest time. Now it’s almost time to head to the airport and catch my flight to Las Vegas. As is usual at this time of year, there are a lot of announcements and briefing requests. In this post, I am going to share some of the announcements/briefings that I have been privy to, and share some of the things (mostly in the storage space) that I plan to learn more about over the next few days.

A closer look at VVol snapshot policies on Pure Storage with vSphere 6.7

I am in the very fortunate position of having access to a Pure Storage array, and this has been recently updated to support Virtual Volumes. With my new 6.7 vSphere cluster, I finally found some time to take a closer look at Virtual Volume (VVol) snapshots on the Pure array, something that I have been meaning to do for some time. For those of you who are new to Virtual Volumes (VVols), one of the major advantages is the granularity at which certain operations can now be done. In the past, we were always dealing with data services at the…

Registering the Pure Storage VASA Provider

Hot on the heels on Pure Storage’s recent announcement on Virtual Volume (VVol) support, I wanted to take a closer look at their VVol implementation for myself. Thanks to the support team over at Pure, they were able to very quickly update our lab array to the latest release that has support for VVols. Once this upgrade was complete (which was all done remotely), I wanted to go ahead and register the VASA provider with my vCenter server. You can read more about the role of VASA here. I wanted to step through the process manually, rather than use the…

Changing policies on-the-fly with VVols

Last week, I was presenting at the VMware User Group (VMUG) event in Poland. My topic was SPBM, Storage Policy Based Management. This is the framework for consuming data services, whether these are provided from vSAN, Virtual Volumes or VAIO (IO Filters). You can get the presentation from here. One of the attendees who had implemented Virtual Volumes (aka VVols) asked a very interesting question about changing policies of a VVol based VM on-the-fly. The question is whether a policy change causes a new VVol has to be instantiated, data synced to original VVol and then the original VVol is…

My VMworld 2014 – Barcelona (#STO2996-SPO #TEX1985)

After a great VMworld 2014 in San Francisco, it’s nearly time for the European version which is once again in the beautiful city of Barcelona, Spain.  I thought I’d put together a short post on some of my activities, Hopefully you can join me for some. Introduction to Virtual Volumes –  vBrownBag session (Tuesday, October 14th at 2:15pm – Hang Space) I’m delighted to be joined by Nick Dyer of Nimble Storage for an overview of our forthcoming Virtual Volumes. I’ll be sharing our vision for VVols in the whole Software Define Storage story, and Nick will share with you…

Pure Storage revisited – a chat with Vaughn Stewart

Pure Storage are all over the news at the moment. They just secured another round of funding (225 million to be precise), and are now valued at over 3 billion. You can read more about that here. However, even before this announcement, I had already arranged to have a catch up chat with Pure’s primary evangelist (and a good pal of mine), Vaughn Stewart. I was surprised to see that it had been 18 months since I last did a piece on Pure so I really did want to see what changes they had made in the meantime as there…