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…
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…
Before I get into this post, I do want to highlight that you probably will not do this in any production type environment. The reason why I implemented this, and how this post came about, is because I was helping out with our new edition of the VSAN 6.2. Hands-On-Lab (which should be available imminently by the way). Part of the lab involved demonstrating checksum functionality. Since VSAN has a distributed architecture, there was a requirement to run commands on different hosts. Rather than having lab participants input the password each and every time to run a command on the…
I’ve had an opportunity recently to get some hands-on with HyTrust’s Data Control product to do some data encryption of virtual machine disks in my Virtual SAN 6.0 environment. I won’t deep dive into all of the “bells and whistle” details about HyTrust – my good buddy Rawlinson has already done a tremendous job detailing that in this blog post. Instead I am going to go through a step-by-step example of how to use HyTrust and show how it prevents your virtual machine disk from being snooped. In my case, I am encrypting virtual machine disks from VMs that are…
There are a couple of key concepts to understanding Virtual Volumes (or VVols for short). VVols is one of the key new storage features in vSphere 6.0. You can get an overview of VVols from this post. The first key concept is VASA – vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness. I wrote about the initial release of VASA way back in the vSphere 5.0 launch. VASA has changed significantly to support VVols, with the introduction of version 2.0 in vSphere 6.0, but that is a topic for another day. Another key feature is the concept of a Protocol Endpoint, a logical I/O…