QLogic – Execution Throttle Feature Concerns

I had a customer reach out to me recently to discuss VMware’s Storage I/O Control behavior and Adaptive Queuing behavior and how it works with QLogic’s Execution Throttle feature. To be honest, I didn’t have a good understanding of the Execution Throttle mechanism from QLogic so I did a little research to see  if this feature inter-operates with VMware’s own I/O congestion management features.

Storage DRS Default VM Affinity Setting

[Updated] This is a very short post as I only learnt about this recently myself. I thought it was only available in vSphere 5.5 but it appears to be in vSphere 5.1 too. Anyhow Storage DRS now has a new setting that allows you to configure the default VM affinity setting. Historically, VMDKs from the same virtual machine were always kept together on the same datastore by default; you had to set a VMDK anti-affinity rule to keep them apart. Now you can set a default for this option, which can either be to keep VMDKs together on the same…

VSAN Part 13 – Examining the .vswp object

I’ve seen a few question recently around the .vswp file on virtual machines. The .vswp or VM swap is one of the objects that go to make up the set of virtual machine objects on the VSAN datastore, along with the VM Home namespace, VMDKs and snapshot delta. The reason for the question is that people do not see the .vswp file represented in the list of virtual machine objects in the UI. The follow-on question inevitably is then around how do you see the policy and resource consumption of a virtual machine’s .vswp object.

YANRBP – Yet Another New Role Blog Post

First off, I’d like to wish everyone a very happy 2014. I’m starting off 2014 with a new role within VMware. After almost 3 years with the VMware Technical Marketing team, I’ve decided to take up a new challenge. As of January 1st, 2014, I am now a Senior Storage Architect in the Integration Engineering team which is part of VMware R&D. This team is also known as Customer[0]. The new Integration Engineering Storage Architect role allows me to works directly with customers/partner organizations, our field staff and R&D to incubate and field enable the next generation of VMware storage…

A closer look at NetApp clustered Data ONTAP

I’ve been having some interesting discussions with my friends over at NetApp recently. I wanted to learn more about their new clustered Data ONTAP 8.2 features and its new scale-out functionality. In the storage array world, traditional scale-up mechanisms usually involved either replacing disk drives with faster/newer models or replacing old array controllers with newer controllers. In worst case scenarios, fork lift upgrades are required to do a technology refresh of your array. Another approach, scale-out, is fast becoming the accepted way of handling storage requirements going forward. Scale out storage is now big news. With scale-out, you simply add…

vSphere 5.5 Storage Enhancements Part 8 – DSNRO Changes

This is a topic which has been discussed time and time again. It relates to an advanced storage parameter called Disk.SchedNumReqOutstanding, or DSNRO for short. There are a number of postings out there on the topic, without me getting into the details once again. If you wish to learn more about what this parameter does for you, I recommend reading this post on DSNRO from my good pal Duncan Epping. Suffice to say that this parameter is related to virtual machine I/O fairness. In this post, I’ll talk about changes to DSNRO in vSphere 5.5.

VSAN Part 12 – SPBM extensions in RVC

In the Virtual SAN (VSAN) beta refresh, we released a number of new Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) commands to examine the Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) settings. For those of you who have been participating in the beta, you will know that to deploy a virtual machine on VSAN, you create a storage policy for the virtual machine, which may stipulate the number of mirror copies of the virtual machine disk (FailuresToTolerate) or indeed a stripe width for the VMDK. SPBM is the underlying technology which controls this aspect of VSAN. In this post, we can look at some of…