As part of the Virtual SAN 6.1 announcements at VMworld 2015, VMware announced two new, eagerly anticipated features. The first of these is VSAN stretched cluster, allowing you to protect your virtual machines across data centers, not just racks. And the second is 2-node VSAN, which will be an excellent solution for remote office/branch office (ROBO) configurations. To allow these configuration to work, a dedicated witness host is required. For those of you already familiar with VSAN, a witness component is used in the event of a split brain to figure out if the virtual machine objects have a quorum.…
As part of the Virtual SAN 6.1 announcements at VMworld 2015, possibly the most eagerly anticipated announcement was the support for a VSAN stretched cluster configuration. Now VSAN can protect your virtual machine across data centers, not just across racks (which was achievable with fault domains introduced in VSAN 6.0). I’ve been hearing requests from customers to support this since the initial VSAN beta, so it is definitely a welcome addition to the supported configurations. The obvious next question is how do I set it up. Well, first of all, you will need to make sure that you have a…
One of the break-out sessions that I presented at VMworld 2015 on Virtual SAN (VSAN) has been recorded and is now available on YouTube. I co-presented “STO4572 Conducting a Successful Virtual SAN Proof of Concept” with Julienne Pham of VMware, who did the initial part of the session. Julienne explains the planning phase, the kinds of things you need to think about, the conversations that need to take place within the organization and especially the IT team, and then what tools you have available to help you deliver the VSAN Proof Of Concept. I come on stage later on to…
Before Virtual SAN was generally available last year, the preceding VSAN beta program was one of the largest beta programs ever to take place at VMware. Today, a new beta program for VSAN was announced for 2015! This week, we’ve already announced a bunch of enhancements in VSAN 6.1 at VMworld 2015, including VSAN stretched cluster for high availability across data centers, a new 2-node VSAN model for remote-office/branch-office (ROBO), new hardware support for Intel NVMe and Diablo Ultra DIMM, and the additional features added to the health check plugin. You can read more about these announcements here. VMware has…
With the announcements just made at VMworld 2015, the embargo on Virtual SAN 6.1 has now been lifted, so we can now discuss publicly some of the new features and functionality. Virtual SAN is VMware’s software-defined solution for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI). For the last number of months, I’ve been heavily involved in preparing for the Virtual SAN 6.1 launch. What follows is a brief description of what I find to be the most interesting and exciting of the upcoming features in Virtual SAN 6.1. Later on, I will follow-up with more in-depth blog posts on the new features and functionality.
Just in time for VMworld 2015, the guys over at Nexenta have given me a heads up on a new promotion that they are doing for Virtual SAN (VSAN) customers. Nexenta are giving away complimentary licenses for their NexentaStor product, which will allow Virtual SAN customers to do file services on top of VSAN.
I mentioned in an earlier post that Cohesity were one of the vendors that I wanted to check out at VMworld 2015. These guys have only literally exited stealth. Just yesterday, I sat in on a webinar from Nick Howell, who I know extremely well from his days in technical marketing over at NetApp. Nick has now joined Cohesity as the role of an evangelist, which I think is a great move on Cohesity’s part. On Nick’s webinar, he introduced us to the vision behind Cohesity’s product, what they hope to fix in a customer’s environment and some teasers regarding…