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 been a lot of buzz around containers, I’ve heard some rumblings around Unikernels, but to be honest, haven’t really been paying too much attention to them. That was until my recent visit to Norway, where I was speaking at the Oslo VMUG. One of the sessions delivered at that VMUG was by Per Buer who is CEO of a company called IncludeOS. IncludeOS are one of a handful of…

Deploying vSAN with Photon Platform v1.2

This is a bit of a long post, but there is a lot to cover. In a previous post, I walked through the deployment of Photon Platform v1.2, which included the Photon Installer, followed by the Photon Controller, Load-Balancer and Lightwave appliances. If you’ve read the previous post, you will have read that Photon Platform v1.2 include the OVAs for these components within the Photon Installer appliance. So no additional download steps are necessary. However, because vSAN is not included, it will have to be downloaded separately from MyVMware. The other very important point is that Photon Platform is not…

Photon Platform revisited – checking out v1.2

Its been a while since I had a chance to look at our Photon Platform product. Version 1.2 launched last month, with a bunch of new features. You can read about those here. I really just wanted to have a look at what changed from a deployment perspective. I’d heard that the whole process has now become more stream-lined, with the Photon Installer OVA being able to deploy the Photon Controller(s), push the necessary agents to the ESXi hosts, deploy the Lightwave authentication appliance as well as the load-balancer appliance that sits in front of the Photon Controllers. And all…

A closer look at the Infinio Cache Accelerator I/O Filter

The folks over at Infinio were kind enough to send me their latest Cache Accelerator I/O Filter so I could set it up in my lab. I must say, this seemed to be the most intuitive of the VAIO plugins (vSphere API for I/O Filters) that I have used to date. In this post, I just want to run run through the deployment of the filter, as opposed to looking at any of the potential performance benefits. If you want an overview of VAIO, have a read of the write-up that I did from VMworld 2014 here. I’ve also looked…

vSphere 6.5 p01 – Important patch for users of Automated UNMAP

VMware has just announced the release of vSphere 6.5 p01 (Patch ESXi-6.5.0-20170304001-standard). While there are a number of different issues addressed in the patch, there is one in particular that I wanted to bring to your attention. Automated UNMAP is a feature that we introduced in vSphere 6.5. This patch contains a fix for some odd behaviour seen with the new Automated UNMAP feature. The issue has only been observed with certain Guest OS, certain filesystems, and a certain block sizes format. KB article 2148987 for the patch describes it as follows: Tools in guest operating system might send unmap…

A closer look at Runecast

Last week, I had the pleasure of catching up with a new startup called Runecast. These guys are doing something that is very close to my heart. As systems become more and more complex, and with fewer people taking on more responsibility, highlighting potential issues, and providing descriptive guidance to resolving an issue is now critical. This is something that is resonating in the world of HCI, hyper-converged infrastructure, where the vSphere administrator may also be the storage administrator, and perhaps the network administrator too. This is where Runecast come in. Using a myriad of resources such as VMware’s Knowledgebase…

Photon Platform v1.1 /Photon Controller v1.1.1 is now GA

I spotted this announcement late on Friday afternoon (March 2nd). What is significant about this announcement is that this is the first ever Photon Platform/Controller release available on vmware.com. Previously you could only get it via Github. So what’s in this release? Well,  first of all there is now a single SKU which provides you with ESXi, NSX-T, vSAN for Photon Platform as well the core Photon Platform Control plane, which comprises Lightwave, Photon OS and Photon Controller. The binaries for Photon Controller have been bumped up to v1.1.1. Regular readers will be aware that I have written a number…