A change to sub-blocks on VMFS-6
Something that I only just recently noticed is that we have made a change to the sub-blocks structure on VMFS-6, compared to VMFS-5. Sub-blocks are small allocations on a VMFS volume, and they are used to back small files. They were introduced as a space-saving measure to prevent using a full file block to back a very small file. To put this simply, when a [...]
VMFS-6 Large and Small File Blocks – what are they?
When vSphere 6.5 released towards the end of 2016, it introduced a brand new version of VMFS, VMFS-6. VMFS probably needs little in the way of introduction at this stage, it [...]
View 7.1 and vSAN 6.6.1 interop – nice fix
Last week, I was rolling out Horizon View v7.1 on my new vSAN 6.6.1 all-flash configuration in the lab. Now, one of the pet peeves a few of us have had with this configuration [...]
Deploying a new HyTrust KMS on vSphere 6.5
Many regular readers will be aware of new encryption features added recently to VMware's portfolio, such as vSAN data-at-reset encryption and vSphere VM encryption in [...]
Some nice new features in vSAN 6.6.1
For those of you who may have missed it, vSphere 6.5U1 was released very recently. This new release of vSphere also brought along a new release of vSAN, version 6.6.1. [...]
See you at VMworld 2017
Like I usually do around this time of year, I wanted to share with you my plans for this year's VMworld in Las Vegas. Hey, you might even like what you read about my sessions [...]
Does enabling encryption on vSAN require on an-disk format change?
vSAN 6.6 shipped earlier this year. It comes with a new on-disk format to support, among other things, data at rest encryption (also known as DARE). This is version 5 of the [...]
My first look at Unikernels on vSphere
Dear reader, if you are like me, you may only be getting to grips with containers and how they compare to the virtual machine approach of running applications. While there has [...]