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,…
I had another question recently about whether or not the Storage vMotion behaviour of renaming VM files on a VMFS or NFS datastore also worked with Virtual Volumes or VVols? After a quick test, I can state categorically that the answer is yes. I created a VM on a Nimble Storage appliance, presented two unique storage containers (aka virtual volume datastores), deployed a test VM on one of the VVol datastores, and then renamed the VM in the vSphere web client. I then verified that the VM name in the vSphere client was different to the names of its files…
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 Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) presentation slide deck is now available online. This is the presentation that I delivered at a number of VMUG (VMware User Group) meetings this year in Europe, primarily Norway and Poland. SPBM is an integral part of VMware’s software defined storage vision, and is deeply integrated into vSAN, Virtual Volumes (VVols) and VAIO, the vSphere APIs for I/O Filters. Hope you find it useful. 2017 VMUG Storage Policy Based Management from Cormac Hogan
I was doing some work in the lab with Storage Policy Based Management recently. I was using both vSAN and a Virtual Volume array from Nimble Storage. While I was able to create independent policies for both vSAN and VVols, I was curious to see if I could create a policy where I could be offered both datastore types for the initial placement of a VM. For example, if I wanted to ensure my VM was encrypted, could I have a policy which would be compliant with both vSAN datastore and the Virtual Volume datastore, so long as they both…
Last week during a visit to VMware headquarters in Palo Alto, I had the opportunity to catch up with our engineering team who are responsible for developing storage solutions for Docker and Kubernetes running on vSphere. I have written about our Docker volume driver for vSphere and Kubernetes on vSphere already, but it’s been a while since I caught up with the team, and obviously more and more enhancements are being added all the time. I thought it might be useful to share the improvements with you here. There also seems to be some concerns raised about the availability of…
The first email I saw this morning in my inbox was from my good pal, Alan Renouf. Alan is our product line manager for APIs, SDKs, CLIs and Automation Frameworks (congrats on the promotion Alan). Anyway, Alan was announcing the General Availability of VMware vSphere PowerCLI 6.5 Release 1. There are a whole bunch of improvements in this release, and much kudos must go to the PowerCLI team. However from a vSAN perspective, things look really cool. [Update] This version of PowerCLI also works with vSAN 6.2 and 6.0, so there is no need for customers to upgrade to vSAN…