Using HyTrust to encrypt VMDKs on VSAN

I’ve had an opportunity recently to get some hands-on with HyTrust’s Data Control product to do some data encryption of virtual machine disks in my Virtual SAN 6.0 environment. I won’t deep dive into all of the “bells and whistle” details about HyTrust – my good buddy Rawlinson has already done a tremendous job detailing that in this blog post. Instead I am going to go through a step-by-step example of how to use HyTrust and show how it prevents your virtual machine disk from being snooped. In my case, I am encrypting virtual machine disks from VMs that are…

My VMworld 2015 (#STO4572, #STO6228, #HOL1608) – Updated

Is it just me, or does VMworld seem to come around quicker these days? Anyway, it is great to have a couple of sessions in again this year, and yes – you guessed it, these are VSAN sessions once again. However, since I first posted this article, the content catalog for VMworld 2015 is now live. STO4572 – Successful Virtual SAN Evaluation/Proof-Of-Concepts This is an update on last year’s VSAN Proof-Of-Concept talk. A lot has changed in the last year, and the idea of this session is to fill you in on all the potential gotchas that you might encounter…

The value of Virtual Volumes (VVols)

Regular readers will know that I normally blog about the technical aspects of storage, as opposed to doing opinion pieces. However there have been a number of articles published recently questioning the value of VMware’s Virtual Volumes, commonly referred to as VVols. In general, the pieces I have read ask whether or not VVols (or to be more accurate, per-VM granularity feature of VVols) adds value when NFS is already doing per-VM granularity in the form of files. The point that was missed in these pieces is that VVols is so much more than per-VM granularity. I’ve just come back…

A closer look at Infinio Accelerator 2.0

I took the opportunity last week (while I was over in the Boston area) to catch up with Scott Davis. I’ve known Scott a long time, as he had various roles at VMware over a number of years. Scott is currently CTO at Infinio, a company that has developed an I/O acceleration product for virtual machines. The new version of Infinio Accelerator 2.0 released only a few weeks back, so I decided to reach out to Scott and find out about the enhancements that went into this new version.

vROps Management Pack for Virtual SAN

Virtual SAN already has a number of features and extensions for performance monitoring and real-time diagnostics and troubleshooting. In particular, there is VSAN Observer, which is included as part of the Ruby vSphere Console (RVC). Another new feature is the Health Check Plugin, which was recently launched for VSAN 6.0. However, a lot of our VSAN customers are already using vRealize Operations Manager, and they have asked if this could be extended to VSAN, allowing them us to use a “single pane of glass” for their infrastructure monitoring. That’s just what we have done, and the beta for the vROps…

VIO limitations with VDS networking

Earlier this month, I shared a post about my experiences with deploying VIO, VMware integrated OpenStack. One of the issues I highlighted was the fact that when I tried to create a network, it failed with a very unhelpful error message. The reason the network creation failed was due to a limitation with using a distributed switch (VDS). Instead I had to create what was known as a “provider network”, which is a special step needed for VDS networking. I am in the midst of an OpenStack training, and I’m trying to relate what I am learning on the training…