A closer look at Cohesity 4.0

Last week, I had a chance to catch up with my pal, Rawlinson Rivera. Rawlinson and I worked closely on a lot of storage related stuff at VMware, but he has since moved on to pastures new, and is currently the CTO for the Global Field over at Cohesity. I’ve written about Cohesity a number of times on this blog. I think the first time I wrote about them was during VMworld 2015, just before the 1.0 product launched, and they were still pitching the idea of secondary storage and how they would take care of things like snaps, clones,…

What’s new in vSAN 6.6?

vSAN 6.6 is finally here. This sixth iteration of vSAN is the quite a significant release for many reasons, as you will read about shortly. In my opinion, this may be the vSAN release with the most amount of new features. Let’s cut straight to the chase and highlight all the features of this next version of vSAN. There is a lot to tell you about. Now might be a good time to grab yourself a cup of coffee.

A closer look at Rubrik Cloud Data Management v3.1

When I started to write this post, I looked back over my notes from previous conversations with the team at Rubrik and realized that my first conversation with them was almost 2 years ago. How time flies! I still remember meeting Rubrik at one of our VMware Partner Exchanges (PEX) in 2015, and getting a demo from Bipul Sinha (Rubrik CEO) and Julia Lee (Product Marketing). I also remember when Chris Wahl moved to Rubrik (almost 18 months ago now), thinking what a great move that was for both Chris and Rubrik. Well, when I caught up with Chris last…

Gathering core dump files when encryption is enabled

One of the key new features of vSphere 6.5 is vSphere VM Encryption, a mechanism to encrypt all virtual machine files. This mechanism not only encrypts the VMDK, but also the metadata files and core dumps associated with a VM. Now, there would not be much point in sending an encrypted core dump file to VMware for analysis, so a mechanism has been put in place to allow these files to be recrypted using a password before sending them to VMware. The password can then be shared with VMware to allow us to examine the core dumps.  This is how…