Many regular readers will be aware of new encryption features added recently to VMware’s portfolio, such as vSAN data-at-reset encryption and vSphere VM encryption in vSphere 6.5. I had to return to a configuration task that I hadn’t done in a while, which was the deployment of a new Key Management Server (KMS) on my vSphere 6.5 / vSAN 6.6.1 setup. I had done this a few times before, but it has been a while and I’d forgotten what exactly I’d needed to do, so I decided to document the steps in this post for future reference. Those of you…
vSAN 6.6 shipped earlier this year. It comes with a new on-disk format to support, among other things, data at rest encryption (also known as DARE). This is version 5 of the on-disk format. I’ve been asked this question a number of times over the past week, so I thought I would quickly write a few words on whether or not enabling encryption on vSAN 6.6 requires an on-disk format change, more commonly referred to as a DFC. Now this post is not going to cover vSAN encryption in any great detail; I just want to answer this one question…
Last month I had the opportunity to attend DockerCon17. One of the break-out sessions that I attended was from a company called Portworx. Portworx provide a solution for stateful docker container storage, which is what caught my interest. There are lots of companies who have already created docker volume plugins for their existing storage solutions, including VMware. However Portworx seem to be approaching this a bit differently, and are providing a layer of abstraction from the underlying host storage. So you might be using cloud (e.g. EBS from AWS), or SAN or NAS or indeed you might only have local…
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,…
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.
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…
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…