vSphere 5.5 Storage Enhancements Part 4: UNMAP

Continuing on the series of vSphere 5.5 Storage Enhancements, we now come to a feature that is close to many people’s hearts. The vSphere Storage API for Array Integration (VAAI) UNMAP primitive reclaims dead or stranded space on a thinly provisioned VMFS volume, something that we could not do before this primitive came into existence. However, it has a long and somewhat checkered history. Let me share the timeline with you before I get into what improvements we made in vSphere 5.5.

vSphere 5.5 Storage Enhancements Part 2: VMFS Heap

There have been some notable discussions about VMFS heap size and heap consumption over the past year or so. An issue with previous versions of VMFS heap meant that there were concerns when accessing above 30TB of open files from a single ESXi host. VMware released a number of patches to temporarily work around the issue. ESXi 5.0p5 & 5.1U1 introduced a larger heap size to deal with this. However, I’m glad to say that a permanent solution has been included in vSphere 5.5 in the form of dedicated slab for VMFS pointers and a new eviction process. I will…

Come talk about Virtual SAN at upcoming EMEA VMUGs

I am presenting at a number of upcoming VMware User Group (VMUG) conferences over the next month or so. I’ll be basically doing my pitch on Virtual SAN (VSAN) along with some demos on install and configuring. On November 21st, I’ll be presenting at the UK National VMUG (for the 3rd year in a row) at the National Motorcycle Museum in Solihull. More information about the UK National VMUG here, including registration. On December 3rd, I’ll be at the Nordic VMUG in Copenhagen, Denmark. This is being held at the Bella center, where VMworld was held before Barcelona. More information…

A closer look at EMC ViPR

I’ve been presenting at a number of conferences over the past number of weeks/months, both internal and external. While a lot of my sessions have focused around Virtual SAN (VSAN), I got a number of questions around whether or not the new Software Defined Storage product from EMC, ViPR, competes with or complements Virtual SAN. Since ViPR 1.0 is now available (since September), and a new release of ViPR is due out before the end of the year, I thought I’d take a closer look at what ViPR is all about and try to answer that question.

VAAI & VASA for Oracle Storage

A short note to let you know about some interesting news for Oracle/VMware customers. Oracle has just announced that it has  licensed a number of VMware vSphere Storage APIs, including VMware vSphere API for Array Integration (VAAI), VMware vSphere API for Storage Awareness (VASA) and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM). As per the Oracle press release, “Support for these APIs will help simplify VMware customer access to the higher levels of performance and efficiency available with ZFS Storage Appliance and Pillar Axiom storage systems.” Read the full press release from Oracle here.

Hot-Extending Large VMDKs in vSphere 5.5

In my recent post about the new large 64TB VMDKs available in vSphere 5.5, I mentioned that one could not hot-extend a VMDK (i.e. grow the VMDK while the VM is powered on) to the new larger size due to some Guest OS partition formats not being able to handle this change on-the-fly. The question was whether hot-extend was possible if the VMDK was already 2TB or more in size. I didn’t know the answer, so I decided to try a few tests on my environment.