VAAI-NAS, vCloud Director and Cloning Offload Strangeness

I was in a conversation with one of my pals over at Tintri last week (Fintan), and he observed some strange behaviour when provisioning VMs from a catalog in vCloud Director (vCD). When he disabled Fast Provisioning, he expected that provisioning further VMs from the catalog would still be offloaded via the VAAI-NAS plugin. All the ESXi hosts have the VAAI-NAS plugin from Tintri installed. However,  it seems that the provisioning/cloning operation was not being offloaded to the array, and the ESXi hosts resources were being used for the operation instead. Deployments of VMs from the catalogs were taking minutes…

VAAI-NAS clone behaviour with Windows 2008

I was discussing this issue with a good friend of mine over at Tintri, Fintan Comyns. Fintan was seeing some strange behaviour with the cloning on Windows 2008 R2 Guest OS running in virtual machines using the Tintri VAAI-NAS plugin, and wanted to know if this behaviour was normal or not. Basically what he was seeing was that a clone operation of a virtual machine was not being offloaded. Rather, he was seeing two separate independent snapshots (snapshots that were not in a chain, but both pointing to the base VMDK)  were getting created at the time of the cloning…

New Announcements from Tintri

I met with the guys from Tintri at VMworld 2013 in San Francisco, and they had some nice new products that they were just on the verge of launching. Tintri has already made a number of announcements this year related to replication and availability in their VMstore system. The official new product announcement took place earlier this week (October 8th in fact), just in time for VMworld Europe, so I thought I’d highlight some of the them here.

Tintri 2.0 – Per VM Replication Feature

Last week, I had a chance to catch up with Brady Murray and Rex Walters of Tintri. Mostly this was a transfer of information, but the guys let me know that they are on the verge of announcing a new per-VM replication feature which they first demoed to me when I met Tintri at VMworld last year. This will be the main feature in Tintri’s new 2.0 launch.

Tintri adds new VM-aware features and VAAI Support

During VMworld 2012 in San Francisco, I had a chance to catch up once again with the team from Tintri. My first introduction to Tintri was at last year’s VMworld, where they received runner-up in the ‘Hardware for Virtualization’ category by TechTarget for best of VMworld 2011. Well this year they went one better, and won the Best of VMworld 2012 Gold award in Hardware for Virtualization. And for good reason. Let’s see the enhancements to the Tintri platform over the last 12 months have brought.